W oodrow Wilson named the first volume of his History of the United States "The Swarming of the English." We might go further and compare the colonization and expansion in the New World to a fissioning process in which individual atoms are torn loose from a former pattern of coherence and fused into new and strange patterns. The United States, indeed, is still in the process of fusion following the earlier fission process. It has not yet reached the stability that comes to some nations in histor

Another booklet in this series contains a selected bibliography of works on seventeenth-century Virginia. The interested student should consult that booklet for a more detailed listing of works used in preparing this account of Virginia in the period 1625-1660. The best secondary account of Virginia in the period covered by this booklet is Wesley Frank Craven, The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1607-1689 (Baton Rouge, 1949). Craven skilfully combines research in Virginia local his