Richard S. Dunn – författare

For 350 years Governor John Winthrop's journal has been recognized as the central source for the history of Massachusetts in the 1630s and 1640s. Winthrop reported events--especially religious and political events--more fully and more candidly than any other contemporary observer.The governor's journal has been edited and published three times since 1790, but these editions are long outmoded. Richard Dunn and Laetitia Yeandle have now prepared a long-awaited scholarly edition, complete with introduction, notes, and appendices. This full-scale, unabridged edition uses the manuscript volumes of the first and third notebooks (both carefully preserved at the Massachusetts Historical Society), retaining their spelling and punctuation, and James Savage's transcription of the middle notebook (accidentally destroyed in 1825).Winthrop's narrative began as a journal and evolved into a history. As a dedicated Puritan convert, Winthrop decided to emigrate to America in 1630 with members of the Massachusetts Bay Company, who had chosen him as their governor. Just before sailing, he began a day-to-day account of his voyage. He continued his journal when he reached Massachusetts, at first making brief and irregular entries, followed by more frequent writing sessions and contemporaneous reporting, and finally, from 1643 onward, engaging in only irregular writing sessions and retrospective reporting. Naturally he found little good to say about such outright adversaries as Thomas Morton, Roger Williams, and Anne Hutchinson. Yet he was also adept at thrusting barbs at most of the other prominent players: John Endecott, Henry Vane, and Richard Saltonstall, among others.Winthrop built lasting significance into the seemingly small-scale actions of a few thousand colonists in early New England, which is why his journal will remain an important historical source.

The journal of Governor John Winthrop, one of the key documents of early New England history, records the first two crucial decades of the Bay Colony. Writing in a precise expository style, Winthrop details the myriad religious and political problems of the new settlement. The modernized abridgment incorporates about 40 percent of the text and includes a copy of Winthrop’s sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity.” This abridged edition, complete with introduction and annotations, also modernizes the governor’s spelling and punctuation.

Forty years ago, after publication of his pathbreaking book Sugar and Slaves, Richard Dunn began an intensive investigation of two thousand slaves living on two plantations, one in North America and one in the Caribbean. Digging deeply into the archives, he has reconstructed the individual lives and collective experiences of three generations of slaves on the Mesopotamia sugar estate in Jamaica and the Mount Airy plantation in tidewater Virginia, to understand the starkly different forms slavery could take. Dunn’s stunning achievement is a rich and compelling history of bondage in two very different Atlantic world settings.From the mid-eighteenth century to emancipation in 1834, life in Mesopotamia was shaped and stunted by deadly work regimens, rampant disease, and dependence on the slave trade for new laborers. At Mount Airy, where the population continually expanded until emancipation in 1865, the “surplus” slaves were sold or moved to distant work sites, and families were routinely broken up. Over two hundred of these Virginia slaves were sent eight hundred miles to the Cotton South.In the genealogies that Dunn has painstakingly assembled, we can trace a Mesopotamia fieldhand through every stage of her bondage, and contrast her harsh treatment with the fortunes of her rebellious mulatto son and clever quadroon granddaughter. We track a Mount Airy craftworker through a stormy life of interracial sex, escape, and family breakup. The details of individuals’ lives enable us to grasp the full experience of both slave communities as they labored and loved, and ultimately became free.

When Governor John Winthrop established the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, he commenced a tradition of public service in which his family would participate for almost a century. His son, John, Jr., and his grandsons, Fitz John and Wait Still, were deeply involved in the colonial government of New England, although their motives were increasingly mixed with private interest. Mr. Dunn's portrayal of this important and interesting family illuminates the two most fundamental themes in early New England history: the gradual secularization of the New England conscience, and the continuous struggle to preserve local customs and privileges within an increasingly centralized English imperial system. Originally published in 1962. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions.The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

When Governor John Winthrop established the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, he commenced a tradition of public service in which his family would participate for almost a century. His son, John, Jr., and his grandsons, Fitz John and Wait Still, were deeply involved in the colonial government of New England, although their motives were increasingly mixed with private interest. Mr. Dunn's portrayal of this important and interesting family illuminates the two most fundamental themes in early New England history: the gradual secularization of the New England conscience, and the continuous struggle to preserve local customs and privileges within an increasingly centralized English imperial system. Originally published in 1962. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions.The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

First published by UNC Press in 1972, Sugar and Slaves presents a vivid portrait of English life in the Caribbean more than three centuries ago. Using a host of contemporary primary sources, Richard Dunn traces the development of plantation slave society in the region. He examines sugar production techniques, the vicious character of the slave trade, the problems of adapting English ways to the tropics, and the appalling mortality rates for both blacks and whites that made these colonies the richest, but in human terms the least successful, in English America.

This first volume, spanning the first thirty-five years of William Penn's life, from 1644 to 1679, documents his activities as a young Quaker activist.

This volume, covering the years 1680 to 1684, documents the founding of Pennsylvania.

A collection of 20 essays, by a distinguished panel of specialists in British and American history, that explores the complex political, economic, intellectual, religious, and social environment in which William Penn lived and worked.

Volume III covers Penn's return to England, his appeal to James II to support religious toleration, his struggle to reestablish his position in England and to manage his colony in America, and his return to Pennsylvania in 1699.