First California Annual Meeting and Luncheon

The Jamestown Project
By Karen Ordahl Kupperman
Silver Professor of History, New York University

When: Saturday January 9, 2010

Luncheon Costs $30
Where: Fairbanks Ranch Country Club, 15150 San Dieguito Road, Rancho Santa Fe, CA 92067 (map below)

Honored Guest: Carter Branham Snow Furr, Esq., Norfolk, Virginia
Governor of the Jamestowne Society

Please reserve by December 15, 2009 by sending your guest list and check to our treasurer:
Scott Krutilek
14442 Shawnee Street
Moorpark, CA 93022
Phone: 805-532-1041

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We are honored to have as our January speaker one of the most esteemed scholars on Jamestown and early English settlement in North America, NYU Professor Kupperman. Several First California Company members heard her speak at the Huntington Library’s conference honoring Jamestown’s 400th anniversary. They agreed that she was a very stimulating, accessible speaker who left her audience with new information and a broader perspective. One said she is the best ever heard on Jamestown. Dr. Kupperman has won many prestigious fellowships, memberships, and awards, including the American Historical Association Prize in Atlantic History in 2000 and the AHA’s award for the best book in American history in 1995.
Details and reservation instructions for this exceptional luncheon and talk will be posted on the website in November.

Kupperman’s thesis can be found in her introduction to The Jamestown Project.
"Through a decade’s trial and error, Jamestown’s ordinary settlers and their backers in England figured out what it would take to make an English colony work. This was an enormous accomplishment achieved in a very short period of time, a breakthrough that none of the other contemporaneous ventures was able to make. The ingredients for success – widespread ownership of land, control of taxation for public obligations through a representative assemble, the institution of a normal society through the inclusion of women, and development of a product that could be marketed profitably to sustain the economy – were beginning to be put in place by 1618 and were in full operation in 1620, when the next successful colony, Plymouth, was planted. Jamestown was not just the earliest English colony to survive; its true priority lies in its inventing the archetype of English colonization. All other successful English colonies followed the Jamestown model." --Creation Myths, The Jamestown Project, by Karen Ordahl Kupperman.

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Praise for this book includes the following:

Karen Kupperman, professor of history and founder of NYU’s Atlantic history Program, is at the forefront of a field she helped shape, a new approach to history that looks at the interplay of Europe, North America, the Caribbean, and Africa as a flow of historical forces.
-- Silverdialogues, NYU

Kupperman is the preeminent contemporary scholar of English exploration and colonization.
-Alan Taylor, New Republic

The Jamestown Project is the culmination of nearly everything that Karen Kupperman has written in the last three decades. She makes a compelling case that early Virginia, despite its false starts and appalling mortality, taught the English what successful colonization required. A rare combination of exhaustive research, original ideas, and graceful writing.
--John Murrin, Princeton University

If anyone is equipped to say something really new about Jamestown at its four hundredth anniversary, it is Karen Kupperman, with her deep knowledge of early modern colonial ventures of all sorts. This marvelous book teaches us why our usual way of thinking about Jamestown as the "first English colony" is utterly wrong--and why, nonetheless, Jamestown invented patterns that every other English colony would follow.
--Daniel K. Richter, author of Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America

The Jamestown Project is a major book of wide-ranging erudition that invites readers into a world very different from ours and reveals that England colonized North America in a different context than our old school books presented. English explorers, pirates, clergymen, rich investors and government officials living on the edge of Europe and in the shadows of great empires--Spanish, Portuguese and Ottoman--planted a small colony on the edge of a distant continent as an early chess move in the bold game of empire building...For many reasons, The Jamestown Project belongs on the bookshelf of every serious student of the English origins of the American people.
--Brent Tarter, Richmond Times-Dispatch

With extraordinary skill, Karen Ordahl Kupperman corrects the record by placing the settlement into its proper context as one among a number of early modern English ventures.
– Peter C. Mancall, author, Hakluyt’s Promise

Driving Directions to the Fairbanks Ranch Country Club:

From I-5, East on Via de la Valle for one mile, south on El Camino Real for 1/2 mile, east on San Dieguito Road for one mile. Look on right for life-sized bronze statue of horse and rider at front gate.

From I-15, west on Via Rancho Parkway, south on Del Dios Highway, left on Via del la Valle, left on El Camino Real for 1/2 mile, east on San Dieguito Road for one mile.. Look on right for life-sized bronze statue of horse and rider at front gate.

15150 San Dieguito Rd Rancho Santa Fe, CA 92091

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