Identity and Behavior, Early American and Academic

Abstract

As Jack Greene has noted in a recent essay, the field of early American history is being swept by a search for synthesis. Three large volumes by David Fischer, D. W. Meinig, and Bernard Bailyn have presented broad interpretations of North American colonial development in the context of an Atlantic world.' Alongside these, Greene appropriately sets his own Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (1988), a work slimmer in size but as large in content. These books draw together the threads of numerous specialized studies, particularly in the field of social history, to present syntheses built around such themes as migration, regional development, the interplay of core and periphery, and the transmission of European folkways. Greene's perception of this quest, and his leadership of it, exemplify his acute sensitivity to the currents of historical study. No other modern scholar of early America has done more to define our notions of the field's development and future directions. Generations of graduate students have cut their critical teeth on his historiographical surveys of its scholarship. Countless conference participants have witnessed their work woven together by his talent for classification and connection. Audiences worldwide have heard his presentations. The sixteen essays brought together in Imperatives, Behaviors, and Identities are only a portion of his writings in the last thirty years, a corpus including three books, nearly a score of edited volumes, and innumerable papers and reviews. But they aptly illustrate his distinctive characteristics as academic and educator. Nearly all were written for public presentation, with seven-by Greene's reckoning-accounting for forty-two separate presentations in locales ranging from Japan to Portugal and Oslo to Peru. All sixteen display the breadth of his reading, his exceptional capacity to digest and order material, and the fruitful synergy-amply acknowledged-derived from working with the members of his renowned graduate seminar at Johns