New Jersey and the English Colonization of North America (The New Jersey Historical Series, Volume 3)

xiii, 114 pp. Volume 3 in The New Jersey Historical Series. "New Jersey's early history is not an easy story to tell. Some of the difficulty comes from the inescapable complexity belonging to certain parts of the story. Some of it is attributable to the state of the record, which at critical points is remarkably incomplete and at other points badly tangled. Still another source of the difficulty, and possibly the most serious, is the exceptional dependence of New Jersey's history upon developments outside the colony's own limits. New Jersey's history must be read as an integral part of the larger story of the middle colonies - those which in the second half of the seventeenth century provided a link between the earlier English settlements on the Chesapeake and in New England and so gave shape to our common history. Perhaps we can better understand New Jersey's beginnings simply by trying to tell the story in full context. What follows is basically an interpretive essay intended primarily to place New Jersey's story in the broad setting of England's developing interest in North America. [From the Preface]"