New Canaan Library's video: New Canaan Library Presents: Eastward of Good Hope: Early America in a Dangerous World

Join us for on Thursday, May 26th at 7:00 PM EST. Freed from restrictions of British mercantilism in the years following the War of Independence, Yankee merchants embarked on numerous voyages of commerce and discovery into distant seas. In his talk, Professor Dane Morrison sheds light on the way early Americans, by way of these voyages, perceived the world beyond their shores. Through the news from the East, carried in mariners’ reports, ship logs, journals, and correspondence, Americans at home imagined the world as a map of dangerous and deranged places. This was a world that was profoundly disordered, hobbled by tyranny and oppression or steeped in chaos and anarchy, often deadly, always uncertain, unpredictable, and unstable, yet amenable to American influence. Morrison reconsiders American ideas about the world through three questions: How did British Americans imagine the world before independence allowed them to travel “Eastward of Good Hope”? What were the signal encounters that filled the public sphere in their early years of global encounter? And finally, how did Americans’ contacts with other peoples inflect their ideas about the world and their place in it? Dane A. Morrison | Hopkins PressDane A. Morrison is a professor of early American history at Salem State University. He is the author of A Praying People: Massachusett Acculturation and the Failure of the Puritan Mission, 1600–1690 and True Yankees: The South Seas and the Discovery of American Identity and the coeditor of Salem: Place, Myth and Memory and the World History Encyclopedia, volumes 11–13: The Age of Global Contact. He is currently writing a book, with his wife, Dr. Kimberly Alexander, on the Kinsman family in China.