Struggle for Survival: The Origins of the Thirteen Colonies - Couverture souple

Keller, Matthew

Couverture souple

ISBN 13 : 9798993142913

Editeur : M&S Press, LLC, The, 2025

Synopsis

In 1607, English settlers landed at Jamestown and history books called it the beginning of America. But the real story starts much earlier — and it belongs to the wrong empire.

Struggle for Survival: The Origins of the Thirteen Colonies traces the full arc of how America's founding colonies came to exist, beginning not with the Pilgrims or the Virginia Company but with the Spanish and Portuguese empires that first divided the Western world between them and the European powers that followed in their wake. Before the first English settler drove a stake into American soil, three empires had already competed, failed, and left their mark on the continent — shaping the political, economic, and geographic conditions that made the thirteen colonies both possible and necessary.

Each colony gets its own chapter. Each chapter tells the story of the people, the money, the religion, and the raw survival instinct that drove ordinary men and women to risk everything on an ocean crossing to build something from nothing in a land that had no intention of welcoming them. Virginia's tobacco gamble. Massachusetts and the religious desperation of the Puritans. The Dutch foothold in New York that England simply took. The Quaker experiment in Pennsylvania. The buffer colony of Georgia, founded not by dreamers but by a general who needed a military barrier between British Carolina and Spanish Florida.

The book begins where the story actually begins — with the Age of Exploration, the navigational technology that made transoceanic voyages possible, the treaties that divided the world between Spain and Portugal, and the economic pressures that sent England, France, and the Netherlands scrambling for whatever was left. It ends with thirteen distinct colonies that somehow, despite every reason not to, became the foundation of a nation.

This is American colonial history as it actually happened — not a myth of Pilgrims and destiny, but a hard, contested, often brutal story of survival, ambition, and accident.

Available in paperback, ebook, and audiobook.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Matthew J. Keller was the kind of kid who watched documentaries instead of cartoons. That preference never left him. Growing up in Chicago, he developed an early obsession not just with what happened in history but with why - why certain empires rose and collapsed, why borders fell where they did, why the world that exists today looks the way it does instead of a dozen other ways it easily could have.He spent his early career in industrial sales before attending Charleston School of Law, graduating in 2010 and practicing in Charleston before opening his own firm. He returned to Chicago in 2014, continued practicing law, and eventually stepped away from the law to return to business. In 2019 he relocated to Atlanta, where he lives with his wife and two children and runs a manufacturing and industrial sales company.The books began with a question his oldest daughter asked about their family's ancestors and an early American colony. The question sparked a research rabbit hole that led to another, and then another. Why did the thirteen colonies become the United States and not something else? The deeper he dug, the further south and further back the answer went - to Spanish expeditions, Caribbean colonies, and a city in Florida that predates Jamestown by 42 years. His trilogy exploring the foundations of American history - from the thirteen colonies to Spanish imperial ambition to Cuba - was the first subject his curiosity demanded he write.Keller believes history should be experienced, not endured. His books are built to bring the past to life as a multifaceted, immersive story - grounded in documented evidence, driven by the people who made decisions under pressure, and honest about the ambition, accident, and violence that shaped the world we inherited. His catalog is available in paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats in English and Spanish, published through The M&S Press, LLC.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: M&S Press, LLC, The
• Date d'édition: 2025
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 13: 9798993142913
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 553
• Éditeur: Keller Matthew
• Coordonnées du fabricant: Manufactured by Amazon on behalf of the author; https://www.amazon.fr/hz/contact-us; ; c/o Amazon Media EU S.à.r.l., 38 Avenue John F. Kennedy; Luxembourg; L-1855; Luxembourg