Preparatory reading for Mason & Dixon

[Robert Mahnke]

This is an interesting question.  I didn't read anything in particular
before I read M&D, so I don't think there's any background reading
required.  But there's no fun in that answer.

Apropos of that period of American history, very few Americans get much
history about the century and a half before the Revolution.  My son took
American History in the eighth grade a few years ago, and his textbook
skipped from the founding of the Jamestown (Virginia) and Plymouth
(Massachusetts) colonies in 1607 and 1620 pretty much to the Revolution
without only a short digression about the founding of Manhattan by the
Dutch.  This approach is pretty typical.

If you want to read a good history of that period, two I can recommend are
Bernard Bailyn's The Barbarous Years, which covers 1600 to 1675, and Daniel
Richter's Before The Revolution.  I particularly liked the latter, which
(IIRC) emphasized the extent to which what happened in the American
colonies was very much affected by transatlantic trade and political
developments in Europe.

The other obvious book to read as background is Benjamin Franklin's
autobiography
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Autobiography_of_Benjamin_Franklin>.
And if you're going to read that, or even if you aren't, you should read
Jill Lepore's Book Of Ages, about Franklin's sister and the limits of
history.

On Mon, Nov 21, 2016 at 1:06 PM, Alexei du Périer <alexei.duperier at gmail.com
> wrote:

> Hello chaps,
>
> I am planning on reading *Mason & Dixon* soon and would like to know
> whether there are any books I ought to read before starting in order to be
> familiar with the historical context/figures discussed etc.
>
> I have never studied American history so don't know much about pre-1776
> stuff.
>
> Cheers.
>
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