Karen Ordahl Kupperman is an American historian who specializes in colonial history in the Atlantic world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She was born in North Dakota, but moved often during her childhood. She studied History at the University of Missouri, after which she obtained a prestigious Woodrow Wilson fellowship and attended Harvard University, graduating with a MA in 1962. She later attended the University of Cambridge to earn her PhD.
Honestly, I hated this book, but that's because it was assigned reading for history. The documents were dry, and very rarely were any of the essays actually good. Though it was informative, I've already forgotten almost everything I learned.
This book is probably intended for A.P. and undergraduate students, but it's good for a review as a graduate student, especially if you want to read mainly primary sources instead of a non-fiction telling. Short excerpts of recent academic history books provide some historical context, but editor Karen Kupperman keeps the spotlight on the primary accounts.
Read for class HY228. I really enjoyed the chapters on the Salem Witch Trials and Slavery. The documents were interesting and the book really left it up to interpretation. I enjoyed the essays in each chapter but some of them went on a little too long. Overall good if you're a history nerd.