This document provides an overview of the topics covered in a chapter on colonial society and culture in America, including: immigration patterns and population growth; indentured servitude and the rise of slavery; economic, social, and family differences between the North and South; religious movements like the Great Awakening; the spread of Enlightenment ideas; and debates around the origins of slavery and witchcraft trials. The chapter examines these themes through sections on population, economies, social patterns, religion, education, law and politics.

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Society and Culture in
Provincial America
Alan Brinkley, The Unfinished Nation, 8th Edition

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The Colonial Population
– Immigration and natural increase
• Indentured Servitude
– Social problems of indentured servitude
– Growing reliance on slavery

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The Colonial Population (Continued)
• Birth and Death
– Factors in population growth
• Differences in the South
– Toward a balanced sex ratio
• Medicine in the Colonies
– Midwifery
– “Humoralism”

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Life in the American Colonies
This colored engraving shows the domestic life of Americans during the
eighteenth century. Depicted are family members at work in their cozy
surroundings. The industriousness they show was a virtue of the era.
© Bettmann/Corbis

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The Colonial Population (Continued, 2)
• Women and Families in the Colonies
– Early marriages
– New England and Chesapeake families compared

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The Colonial Population (Continued, 3)
• The Beginnings of Slavery in English America
– The slave trade
• The “middle passage”
– Surging slave population
– Emergence of a race-based system
– Slave codes

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The Colonial Population (Continued, 4)
• Changing Sources of European Immigration
– Huguenot refugees
– Scotch-Irish

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Immigrant Groups in Colonial America, 1760
Even though the entire Atlantic seaboard of what is now the United States had become a series
of British colonies by 1760, the population consisted of people from many nations.

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The Colonial Economies
• The Southern Economy
– Boom-and-bust tobacco economy
– The South’s cash-crop economy

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The Colonial Economies (Continued)
• Northern Economic and Technological Life
– Colonial artisans and entrepreneurs
– Saugus Ironworks

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The Colonial Economies (Continued, 2)
• The Extent and Limits of Technology
– Persistent colonial poverty
– Myth of colonial self-sufficiency
• The Rise of Colonial Commerce
– Obstacles to trade
– The triangular trade
– An emerging merchant class

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The Triangular Trade
The Atlantic trade was not a simple exchange between America and Europe, but a complex network
of exchanges involving the Caribbean, Africa, and the Mediterranean. Not shown but also important
to colonial commerce was a large coastal trade among the various regions of British North America.

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The Colonial Economies (Continued, 3)
• The Rise of Consumerism
– Reasons for growing consumerism
– Advertising and agents of urban merchants
– Class differences and consumerism
– New social ideals of refinement

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Patterns of Society
– Social mobility
• Masters and Slaves on the Plantation
– Realities of plantation life
– Slave communities
– Stono Rebellion

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African Population as a Proportion of
Total Population, ca. 1775
This map illustrates the parts of the colonies in which slaves made up a large proportion of the population—
in some areas, a majority. The slave population in this period was smallest in the western regions of the
southern colonies and in the area north of the Chesapeake, although there remained a significant African
population in parts of New Jersey and New York (some slave, some free).

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Patterns of Society (Continued)
• The Puritan Community
– Puritan democracy
– Close-knit communities
– Communal strains and tensions
– Salem witch trials

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The New England Town: Sudbury, Massachusetts,
Seventeenth Century
Just as the plantation was a characteristic social form in the southern colonies, the town was
the most common social unit in New England. This map shows the organization of Sudbury,
Massachusetts, a town just west of Boston, in its early years in the seventeenth century.

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Patterns of Society (Continued, 2)
• Cities
– Colonial cities
– Taverns and coffeehouses
• Inequality
– Economic stratification
– The cities and the countryside

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Awakenings and Enlightenments
• The Pattern of Religions
– Numerous sects
– Rights of Catholics
– Rights of Jews
– Declining piety

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Awakenings and Enlightenments
(Continued)
• The Great Awakening
– Wesleys, Whitefield, and Edwards
– “New Lights” and “Old Lights”
• The Enlightenment
– “Natural law”

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Awakenings and Enlightenments
(Continued, 2)
• Literacy and Technology
– Almanacs
– First newspaper

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Awakenings and Enlightenments
(Continued, 3)
• Education
– Public schools
– First colleges
• The Spread of Science
– Growing interest
– Scientific societies
– Cotton Mather and vaccines

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Awakenings and Enlightenments
(Continued, 4)
• Concepts of Law and Politics
– John Peter Zenger
– Powerful colonial legislatures

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Colonial Punishment
American communities prescribed a wide range of punishments for misconduct and crime.
Among the more common punishments were public humiliations—placing offenders in stocks,
forcing them to wear badges of shame, or, as in this woodcut, binding them into a “ducking
stool” and immersing them in water.
© Fotosearch/Getty Images

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Consider the Source
• Gottlieb Mittelberger,
The Passage of Indentured Servants (1750)

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Debating the Past
• The Origins of Slavery
• The Witchcraft Trials

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The Unfinished Nation, 8th Edition
Next: Chapter 4
The Empire in Transition