I have taught full time at SUNY-New Paltz since the Fall term of 1994 I am interested primarily in the creation and development of early American societies and the expansion of early modern European trading and colonization interests, as well as the history of the Americas and the British Isles between circa 1450 and 1815 in general. Thus, I customarily teach United States History to 1865 (HIS221) as I am doing this term and will do so again in the Fall term of 2016. I am also teaching a Seminar in History (HIS492/2) on Colonial British America this Spring. Next Fall, in addition to US History to 1865, I will offer Colonial America (HIS321) and a graduate class on the American Revolution (HIS523). For further information on my courses, please contact me via e-mail.
All of my upper-division courses incorporate, with appropriate degrees of emphasis, material that deals with interaction between peoples, as well as political and social history and the consequences of those interactions between the mid-fifteenth century and the mid-nineteenth century. I received my PhD in History from the University of Rochester (NY) in 1992 and am qualified to teach the entirety of United States History (in addition to the ‘to 1865’ part of the U.S. History survey, I offer a first-year preceptorial, American Heroes, HIS151), the history of American Indians (I teach Indians of New York State, HIS308), the history plantation societies in the Americas (I teach History of the United States South to 1897, HIS326), and the history of early modern Britain and Ireland (I teach History of England 2, HIS357).
My research, which naturally dovetails with my teaching, investigates the formation of the English Empire (British after the Union of England and Scotland in 1707). I try to comprehend this subject in a the widest appropriate sense rather than from an ‘American’ or ‘imperial’ perspective. I am also very much interested in the character of colonial American societies and their connections with the wider world (I teach Age of Discovery, 1415-1780, HIS470), in early modern Europe, in the expansion of European interests after 1400 and the effects thereof, and in historiography (especially that of the United States).
My latest book, Advancing Empire: English Interests and Overseas Expansion, 1613-1688, will be published by Cambridge University Press in July of this year. For further information, please visit https://www.amazon.com/Advancing-Empire-Interests-Expansion-1613-1688/dp/1107545056/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1496960793&sr=8-1&keywords=advancing+empire or http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/history/colonial-american-history/advancing-empire-english-interests-and-overseas-expansion-16131688?format=PB.
This larger investigation generated an article on the English takeover of New Netherland and the renaming of that Dutch colony as New York (1664-1674) appeared in the December issue (vol. 87, no. 4) of The New England Quarterly, http://www.mitpressjournals.org/neq.
I am also editing a volume of essays on the seventeenth-century Caribbean that is under contract with the University of South Carolina Press that will appear in May 2018. Twelve historians including myself) from Denmark, Italy, England, Jamaica, the Netherlands, and the United States have contributed essays on areas ranging from St-Domingue (modern Haiti) to Suriname to Jamaica to St Croix as the basis for a comparative examination of European activity and cultural interaction in the ‘Torrid Zone’.
I have published two other books and co-edited three others. The most recent of these, Fear and the Shaping of Early American Societies, is actually the work of my colleague, Dr Lauric Henneton, of the University of St Quentin in France, but he insisted on giving me credit after I gave him a little editorial assistance (I did contribute an essay): http://www.brill.com/products/book/fear-and-shaping-early-american-societies.
I was a full co-editor of The Worlds of the Seventeenth-Century Hudson Valley (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014) with Dr Jaap Jacobs of the University of St Andrews in Scotland, a leading authority on New Netherland, http://www.sunypress.edu/p-5855-the-worlds-of-the-seventeenth-c.aspx. In addition to my essay on ‘The Seventeenth-Century English Empire’, this volume includes two contributions by Dr Jacobs–one on the Dutch Republic and another on the colony the Dutch founded in this area–as well as essays on American Indian societies by Paul Otto and Jon Parmenter and other prominent scholars. These essays originated as papers that the contributors presented to a conference that we held at New Paltz for teachers and other interested participants that included participatory sessions on primary sources and other teaching materials on the colonization of the Hudson Valley in 2009.
My first book, Conceiving Carolina: Proprietors, Planters, and Plots, 1662-1729 (New York and Houndmills, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), offers the first systematic treatment of the early history of South Carolina in over a century. Based on extensive archival work in Great Britain and in South Carolina, as well as on the printed primary sources from the period, my investigation determined, inter alia, that the degree of West Indian socio-political influence on Carolina, has been exaggerated and, correspondingly, a Caribbean-style society did not develop naturally or inevitably on this part of the North American mainland. Rather, colonial South Carolina experienced relatively typical political behavior for its time and place. For further information, https://www.amazon.com/Conceiving-Carolina-Proprietors-Planters-1662-1729/dp/1349528366.
My interest in early South Carolina led me to a closer study of the history of slavery in the Atlantic World. While conducting research at the Bodliean Library (University of Oxford) during my sabbatical in the Spring of 2004, I found the text of one of the province’s early statutes on slavery that had been missing for some three centuries. My transcription of this document, accompanied by my analysis of its significance, ‘The 1701 “Act for the Better Ordering of Slaves”: Reconsidering the History of Slavery in Proprietary South Carolina’, appeared in the April 2007 issue of the William and Mary Quarterly. http://www.wm.edu/oieahc/wmq/index.htm.
The Carolina project also led to a more wide-ranging project entailing a collection of essays which I co-edited, with Professor Bertrand Van Ruymbeke of Université de Paris VIII-St Denis—Constructing Early Modern Empires: Proprietary Ventures in the Atlantic World, 1500-1750—which was published in March 2007 with Brill: http://www.brill.com/constructing-early-modern-empires. This volume reassesses the phenomenon of proprietorships—and, by extension, the transplantation of ‘Old World’ values and practices to the ‘New World’—in the Dutch, English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish Empires. It takes a comparative approach and provide analyses of colonial development from Quebec/New France to Brasil and from the English West Indies to the Illinois country. The contributors come from England and the Netherlands, as well as from this country and from France.
While finishing my book on South Carolina, I started a second book project that investigates the history of the English Empire between the resumption of English exploration of the North American coast in 1602 and the death of Oliver Cromwell in 1658. I moved backward chronologically about a half-century from my Carolina work to begin an examination into the organization, motives, and activities of the Virginia Companies of London and Plymouth (both chartered by King James I in 1606) and the world in which these concerns and their contemporary entities were conceived and developed which was the basis for my second monograph, The English Empire in America, 1602-1658: Beyond Jamestown (London: Pickerning & Chatto, 2009), http://www.pickeringchatto.com.
I also serve as co-Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Early American History, now in its seventh year of publication, and of the book series, The American Colonies, 1500-1830, both published by Brill: http://www.brill.com/journal-early-american-history and http://www.brill.com/publications/early-american-history-series. The journal appears three times per year and publishes articles, forums, and book reviews.