The Worlds of the Seventeenth-Century Hudson Valley, newly published by SUNY Press, includes eleven essays from historians of American Indians and of early modern European colonization that consider seventeenth-century European settlement and the cultural interaction that ensued from a variety of perspectives and within the wider contexts of American and European histories.  The volume considers four themes: “European Worlds,” “American Worlds,” “The Formation of Colonial Worlds,” and “The Formation of Atlantic Worlds.”

L. H. Roper, Professor of History at SUNY New Paltz, is one of the co-editors of this volume. This is the second lecture in a series of two lectures by Roper.

This lecture will consider “American Worlds” and “The Formation of Atlantic Worlds,” discussing the character of the indigenous societies of the seventeenth-century Hudson Valley, their interactions with Europeans, and the effects of those interactions on both Native and European societies.

Roper is the author of Conceiving Carolina: Proprietors, Planters, and Plots, 1662-1729 (New York and Houndmills, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and The English Empire in America, 1602-1658: Beyond Jamestown (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009), as well as the co-editor (with Bertrand Van Ruymbeke) of Constructing Early Modern Empires: Proprietary Ventures in the Atlantic World, 1500-1750 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007) and (with Jaap Jacobs) The Worlds of the Seventeenth-Century Hudson Valley (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014). He has also written a number of articles and essays on early American history, including “The Fall of New Netherland and Seventeenth-Century: Anglo-American Imperial Formation”, which is forthcoming in The New England Quarterly.