State regulation of economic activity is not a new concept for students in a survey course in U.S. history. State regulation in the manner of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mercantilism may require careful explanation. Students need to understand not merely mercantilism's goals but its means of achievement and its wide acceptance as a reasonable and appropriate system within which to live. What are mercantilism's origins? How did mercantilism develop? Why was it abandoned? How does it differ from capitalism? From socialism? See Edwin J. Perkins, The Economy of Colonial America (second edition; 1988), John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607-1789 (revised edition; 1991), and selected chapters in Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman, editors, The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, volume I, The Colonial Era (1996). Useful, more general works include Clarence L. Ver Steeg, The Formative Years, 1607-1763 (1964), and Jack P. Greene, compiler, The American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century, 1689-1763 (1969).

The beginner in history often has trouble understanding the modes of thought of people in other times, other places, and other societies. The society of the eighteenth century was different enough from our own for such ahistoricism to be a problem. The world view of the Enlightenment deserves elaboration. The conception of the universe and of the forces within it as Enlightenment thinkers saw them will help students understand the works of individual intellectual leaders. See Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (1976); Henry Steele Commager, The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment (1977); Ernest Cassara, The Enlightenment in America (1988); and Peter C. Hoffer, editor, An American Enlightenment: Selected Articles on Colonial Intellectual History (1987).

The Great Awakening of midcentury will seem contradictory to students who have been contemplating the rationalism of Enlightenment thought. An explanation of the Great Awakening, of New Lights and Old Lights, and of Deism as another religious philosophy will be appropriate and useful. See Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America (1986); Charles A. Barker, American Convictions: Cycles of Public Thought, 1600-1850 (1970); Edwin S. Gaustad, The Great Awakening in New England (1957); and Charles H. Maxson, The Great Awakening in the Middle Colonies (1920).

American English is the language presently spoken in the United States, but by the eighteenth century, English speakers were only one portion of the immigrants coming to the English mainland colonies. Who else migrated to America? Why were the nonslave immigrants willing to make such a drastic change in their lives? Where did the immigrants go? How were they received? What work did they do? Histories of the colonial period such as Curtis P. Nettels, The Roots of American Civilization: A History of American Colonial Life (second edition; 1963), are much concerned with immigration. See also Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (1986), and Marcus Lee Hansen, The Atlantic Migration, 1607-1860: A History of the Continuing Settlement of the United States (1940). See also Peter C. Hoffer, editor, The Peopling of a World: Selected Articles on Immigration and Settlement Patterns in British North America (1987). For individual groups see Daniel Mannix, Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (1962); R. J. Dickson, Ulster Emigration to Colonial America, 1718-1775 (1966); and Albert B. Faust, The German Element in the United States (1927).

Most information that Americans encounter about Native Americans deals with what encroaching Europeans did to the Indians, as distinct from what they tried to do for themselves in response. You may wish to provide some corrective to this skewed point of view. Consult Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815 (1992).