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 and will give two lectures at Historic Huguenot Street. 

This first lecture will discuss “European Worlds” and “The Formation of Colonial Worlds,” tracking the involvement of the Dutch, English, and French in seventeenth-century North America and the issues this activity generated in the Hudson Valley in particular.

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.