Book review: Why we left: untold stories and songs of America's first immigrants

Abstract

North America in the seventeenth century was far from a "land of opportunity" to early Anglo-American peasant migrants, or so Joanna Brooks argues in Why We left: Untold Stories and Songs of America's First Immigrants. The working-class immigrants who arrived in this period faced a plantation labor culture profoundly different from the agricultural production practices common in England.