The First Americans Author:Wertenbaker, Thomas J Tracing the development of seventeenth-century Englishmen who became the "first Americans," Mr. Wertenbaker describes and interprets the Northern and Southern colonists and points out their early similarities, which later yielded to conflicts that reflected geographic and climatic differences. The eighty-three years bgefore 1690 were a period o... more »f community beginnings, one after another, along the coastal plain. This a a history, then, of growth and change-in land and labor, in politics and government, in the church and religion, in medicine and law, and in social relations, recreation, architecture, and intellectual life. By 1690 a great work had been accomplished that would have astonished the most sanguine prophet of the age of Hakluyt: a sum of wealth had been created and a civilization blocked out. Whatever its ultimate origins, it could be recognized as distinctively American.« less