Butler's first chapter shows the decline of Indian populations due to disease, the dramatic decline in the proportion of English colonists and the tragedy of the slave trade, and the largest forced human migration in history, which brought more Africans than Europeans to England's mainland colonies from 1700 to 1770. The account of slavery highlights its brutality and stresses that Americans did not inherit but created the modern system of human and legal interrelationships. He contends that …showed first 75 words of 1075 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1075 total…a sentence/paragraph construction standpoint, and demonstrates the ability to organize his material so that you don't get lost and know where you are going. I found the book relatively easy to read and understand. Americans today think of the colonial period, if at all, as a time remote from modern America, in which society was unimaginably different from ours, when actually it wasn't. This book does a great job of letting you know that.