05-09-07

Media Release

‘Another Perspective on Jamestown’ Final Lecture in American Culture & Politics Series

CORVALLIS, Ore. – The 400th anniversary of Jamestown will be the subject of the final lecture in the Oregon State University American Culture & Politics Speaker Series. The lecture by Alison Games, “America’s Global Origins: Another Perspective on Jamestown,” begins at 4 p.m. on Thursday, May 24, in the Memorial Union Journey Room.

Games, a distinguished professor of history at Georgetown University, will explore the global origins of the colony of Jamestown. This year is the 400th anniversary of the English settlement at Jamestown, a colony that has long been heralded for launching many American “firsts,” from the nation’s first representative government to the more dubious distinction of the first use of enslaved labor.

In this respect, Jamestown’s history has been inextricably linked to the history of the United States, and those who are orchestrating the colony’s commemoration refer to the event as “America’s 400th Anniversary.”

Drawing on contemporary accounts and images, Games explains how the history of one tiny colony in North America was connected to and affected by places as far away as South America, Spain, India and the Ottoman Empire. Jamestown – like the United States of which it became a part – had global origins.

Games is the author of “Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World” (1999), winner of the Theodore Saloutos Prize in Immigration and Ethnic History. She has written extensively on different aspects of Atlantic history and early American history, and her articles have appeared in journals such as Slavery and Abolition, Itinerario, the American Historical Review, and the William and Mary Quarterly.

Games is completing work on a book tentatively titled “The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560-1660”, to be published by Oxford University Press.

For information about the series go to http://oregonstate.edu/cla/history/lectures/acp/speakers_06_07.php