Why We Left: Untold Stories and Songs of America's First Immigrants

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Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Brave Men Run
1. No Land of Opportunity: Folk Ballads and the Story of Why We Left
2. Murder the Brother Who Killed the Tree: Fratricide and the Story of Deforestation
3. Two Sisters and a Beaver Hat: Desire and the Story of Colonial Commodity Culture
4. To Sink It in the Lonesome Sea: Betrayal and the Story of Indentured Servitude
5. Seduction of the House Carpenter's Wife: Abandonment and the Story of Colonial
Migration
Epilogue: Ballad of the Laboring Poor
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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About

Joanna Brooks’s ancestors were among the earliest waves of emigrants to leave England for North America. They lived hardscrabble lives for generations, eking out subsistence in one place after another as they moved forever westward in search of a new life. Why, Brooks wondered, did her people and countless other poor English subjects abandon their homeland to settle for such unremitting hardship? The question leads her on a journey into a largely obscured dimension of American history.

With her family’s background as a point of departure, Brooks brings to light the harsh realities behind seventeenth- and eighteenth-century working-class English emigration—and dismantles the long-cherished idea that these immigrants were drawn to America as a land of opportunity. American folk ballads provide a wealth of clues to the catastrophic contexts that propelled early English emigration to the Americas. Brooks follows these songs back across the Atlantic to find histories of economic displacement, environmental destruction, and social betrayal at the heart of the early Anglo-American migrant experience. The folk ballad “Edward,” for instance, reveals the role of deforestation in the dislocation and emigration of early Anglo-American peasant immigrants. “Two Sisters” discloses the profound social destabilization unleashed by the advent of luxury goods in England. “The Golden Vanity” shows how common men and women viewed their own disposable position in England’s imperial project. And “The House Carpenter’s Wife” offers insights into the impact of economic instability and the colonial enterprise on women.

From these ballads, tragic and heartrending, Brooks uncovers an archaeology of the worldviews of America’s earliest immigrants, presenting a new and haunting historical perspective on the ancestors we thought we knew.

Reviews

A remarkable achievement, Why We Left is a story of the grim costs of modernity that left remnants in cultural artifacts - a fascinating journey through unique and creative readings into the lives of the early Anglo-American poor, indentured servitude, the Atlantic world, balladry, and the personal upheavals wrought by the earliest pushes of European colonialism

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