Uniformity Of The Colonies Essay

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When the colonies were started, all anyone knew was European culture. The colonists took this culture, one that lacked structure and was very specific to where they had come from, and transformed it into something that, while not completely unlike that of Europe, was something completely molded to fit their lifestyle and needs. When the colonists arrived they were all from cultures that were similar in their foundation but were potentially wildly different in other ways. Their ability to change their varying cultures to fit the needs of the colonies as a whole was the primary reason that they all joined together into a single powerful and prosperous nation.
While the colonists came from places all across Europe, most of them were from London. …show more content…

This is not all though, in the colonies, the language became very uniform. It became so uniform that it was almost identical across all of the colonies and all of the social classes. “The linguistic uniformity of America is geographic… and social.” (Boorstin 272) This happened both out of necessity, and as a result of the lifestyle of the colonists. In the colonies people moved around a lot, this meant that both they spread their particular dialect this caused a melding of all of the varying dialects of English from England. As they moved they also had to be able to communicate with people Wherever they went. This resulted in a very stable and uniform form of English that developed in the colonies, much more uniform than anything that could be found in England at the time. This form of English picked up a surprisingly small number of words from the …show more content…

In the colonies, books were plentiful and well liked. Because of this booksellers were numerous and often wealthy men. Religious books were most common with over half of the books imported being religious, which makes sense given the fact that many of the settlers left England to get away from the strict religious rules. Despite how much the colonists loved books, there were a surprisingly small number of books published, or even printed there. This is due to a couple of factors, first most of the paper in the colonies was of poor quality that was not fit for being made into books, and second the supply of type was very limited in the colonies and was almost exclusively well used, second-hand type that had been discarded by printers in England. These two factors caused an interesting dynamic in the colonies. If a book could be imported from England they would import it instead of making worse, more costly copies in the colonies. They saved the use of printing presses for things which could not be imported, for example, “Colonial printers did not produce a complete Bible in English until 1782 but by 1663 they had already issued over a thousand copies of John Eliot’s famous translation of the Bible 1’into the Indian tongue.’” (Boorstin 324) The printers also made lots of Government documents as those could in no way be imported, but the publications

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