Apart from the national observance of the bicentennial of
American independence, there is ample justification in the era of
the 1970s for a modern history of each of the original thirteen
colonies. For many of them, there exists no single-volume
narrative published in the present century and, for some, none
written since those undertaken by contemporaries in the eigh-
teenth century. The standard multivolume histories of the
colonial periodb -- those of Herbert L. Osgood, Charles M.
Andrews, and Lawrence H. Gipson -- are too comprehensive to
provide adequate treatment of individual colonies, too political
and institutional in emphasis to deal adequately with social,
economic, and cultural developments, and too intercolonial and
Anglo-American in focus to permit intensive examination of a
single colony's distinctive evolution. The most recent of these
comprehensive accounts, that of Gipson, was begun as far back as
1936; since then a considerable body of new scholarship has been
produced.

The present series, A History of the American Colonies, of which
Colonial Pennsylvania is a part, seeks to synthesize the new research,
to treat social, economic, and cultural as well as political
developments, and to delineate the broad outlines of each
colony's history during the years before independence. No
uniformity of organization has been imposed on the authors,
although each volume attempts to give some attention to every
aspect of the colony's historical development. Each author is a
specialist in his own field and has shaped his material to the
configuration of the colony about which he writes. While the
Revolutionary Era is the terminal point of each volume, the
authors have not read the history of the colony backward, as
mere preludes to the inevitable movement toward independence
and statehood.

Despite their local orientation, the individual volumes, taken
together, will provide a collective account that should help us
understand the broad foundation on which the future history of
the colonies in the new nation was to rest and, at the same time,
help clarify that still not completely explained melodrama of
1776 which saw, in John Adams's words, thirteen clocks some-
what amazingly strike as one. In larger perspective, A History of

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