title: Colonial history of the United States

text: By the mid-18th century, Pennsylvania was basically a middle-class colony with limited deference to the small upper-class. A writer in the "Pennsylvania Journal" summed it up in 1756:


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: The predominant culture of the south was rooted in the settlement of the region by British colonists. In the seventeenth century, most voluntary colonists were of English origins who settled chiefly along the coastal regions of the Eastern seaboard. The majority of early British settlers were indentured servants, who gained freedom after enough work to pay off their passage. The wealthier men who paid their way received land grants known as headrights, to encourage settlement.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: The French and Spanish established colonies in Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. The Spanish colonized Florida in the 16th century, with their communities reaching a peak in the late 17th century. In the British and French colonies, most colonists arrived after 1700. They cleared land, built houses and outbuildings, and worked on the large plantations that dominated export agriculture. Many were involved in the labor-intensive cultivation of tobacco, the first cash crop of Virginia. With a decrease in the number of British willing to go to the colonies in the eighteenth century, planters began importing more enslaved Africans, who became the predominant labor force on the plantations. Tobacco exhausted the soil quickly, requiring new fields to be cleared on a regular basis. Old fields were used as pasture and for crops such as corn and wheat, or allowed to grow into woodlots.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Rice cultivation in South Carolina became another major commodity crop. Some historians have argued that slaves from the lowlands of western Africa, where rice was a basic crop, provided key skills, knowledge and technology for irrigation and construction of earthworks to support rice cultivation. The early methods and tools used in South Carolina were congruent with those in Africa. British colonists would have had little or no familiarity with the complex process of growing rice in fields flooded by irrigation works.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: In the mid- to late-18th century, large groups of Scots and Ulster-Scots (later called the Scots-Irish) immigrated and settled in the back country of Appalachia and the Piedmont. They were the largest group of colonists from the British Isles before the American Revolution. In a census taken in 2000 of Americans and their self-reported ancestries, areas where people reported 'American' ancestry were the places where, historically, many Scottish, Scotch-Irish and English Borderer Protestants settled in America: the interior as well as some of the coastal areas of the South, and especially the Appalachian region. The population with some Scots and Scots-Irish ancestry may number 47 million, as most people have multiple heritages, some of which they may not know.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: The early colonists, especially the Scots-Irish in the back-country, engaged in warfare, trade, and cultural exchanges. Those living in the backcountry were more likely to join with Creek Indians, Cherokee, and Choctaws and other regional native groups.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: The oldest university in the South, The College of William & Mary, was founded in 1693 in Virginia; it pioneered in the teaching of political economy and educated future U.S. Presidents Jefferson, Monroe and Tyler, all from Virginia. Indeed, the entire region dominated politics in the First Party System era: for example, four of the first five presidents— Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe — were from Virginia. The two oldest public universities are also in the South: the University of North Carolina (1795) and the University of Georgia (1785).


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: The colonial South included the plantation colonies of the Chesapeake region (Virginia, Maryland, and, by some classifications, Delaware) and the lower South (Carolina, which eventually split into North and South Carolina; and Georgia).


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: The top five percent or so of the white population of Virginia and Maryland in the mid-18th century were planters who possessed growing wealth and increasing political power and social prestige. They controlled the local Anglican church, choosing ministers and handling church property and disbursing local charity. They sought election to the House of Burgesses or appointment as justice of the peace.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: About 60 percent of white Virginians were part of a broad middle class that owned substantial farms. By the second generation, death rates from malaria and other local diseases had declined so much that a stable family structure was possible.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: The bottom third owned no land and verged on poverty. Many were recent arrivals, recently released from indentured servitude. In some districts near present-day Washington DC, 70 percent of the land was owned by a handful of families, and three-fourths of the whites had no land at all. Large numbers of Irish and German Protestants had settled in the frontier districts, often moving down from Pennsylvania. Tobacco was not important here; farmers focused on hemp, grain, cattle, and horses. Entrepreneurs had begun to mine and melt the local iron ores.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Sports occupied a great deal of attention at every social level, starting at the top. In England, hunting was sharply restricted to landowners and enforced by armed gamekeepers. In America, game was more than plentiful. Everyone could and did hunt, including servants and slaves. Poor men with good rifle skills won praise; rich gentlemen who were off target won ridicule. In 1691, governor Sir Francis Nicholson organized competitions for the "better sort of Virginians onely who are Batchelors," and he offered prizes "to be shot for, wrestled, played at backswords, & Run for by Horse and foott."


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Horse racing was the main event. The typical farmer did not own a horse in the first place, and racing was a matter for gentlemen only, but ordinary farmers were spectators and gamblers. Selected slaves often became skilled horse trainers. Horse racing was especially important for knitting together the gentry. The race was a major public event designed to demonstrate to the world the superior social status of the gentry through expensive breeding, training, boasting, and gambling, and especially winning the races themselves. Historian Timothy Breen explains that horse racing and high-stakes gambling were essential to maintaining the status of the gentry. When they publicly bet a large sum on their favorite horse, it told the world that competitiveness, individualism, and materialism were the core elements of gentry values.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Historian Edmund Morgan (1975) argues that Virginians in the 1650s and for the next two centuries turned to slavery and a racial divide as an alternative to class conflict. "Racism made it possible for white Virginians to develop a devotion to the equality that English republicans had declared to be the soul of liberty." That is, white men became politically much more equal than was possible without a population of low-status slaves.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: By 1700, the Virginia population reached 70,000 and continued to grow rapidly from a high birth rate, low death rate, importation of slaves from the Caribbean, and immigration from Britain, Germany, and Pennsylvania. The climate was mild; the farm lands were cheap and fertile.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: The Province of Carolina was the first attempted English settlement south of Virginia. It was a private venture, financed by a group of English Lords Proprietors who obtained a Royal Charter to the Carolinas in 1663, hoping that a new colony in the south would become profitable like Jamestown. Carolina was not settled until 1670, and even then the first attempt failed because there was no incentive for emigration to that area. Eventually, however, the Lords combined their remaining capital and financed a settlement mission to the area led by Sir John Colleton. The expedition located fertile and defensible ground at what became Charleston, originally Charles Town for Charles II of England. The original settlers in South Carolina established a lucrative trade in food for the slave plantations in the Caribbean. The settlers came mainly from the English colony of Barbados and brought enslaved Africans with them. Barbados was a wealthy sugarcane plantation island, one of the early English colonies to use large numbers of Africans in plantation-style agriculture. The cultivation of rice was introduced during the 1690s and became an important export crop.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: At first, South Carolina was politically divided. Its ethnic makeup included the original settlers (a group of rich, slave-owning English settlers from the island of Barbados) and Huguenots, a French-speaking community of Protestants. Nearly continuous frontier warfare during the era of King William's War and Queen Anne's War drove economic and political wedges between merchants and planters. The disaster of the 1715 Yamasee War threatened the colony's viability and set off a decade of political turmoil. By 1729, the proprietary government had collapsed, and the Proprietors sold both colonies back to the British crown.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: North Carolina had the smallest upper-class. The richest 10 percent owned about 40 percent of all land, compared to 50 to 60 percent in neighboring Virginia and South Carolina. There were no cities of any size and very few towns, so there was scarcely an urban middle class at all. Heavily rural North Carolina was dominated by subsistence farmers with small operations. In addition, one-fourth of the whites had no land at all.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: British Member of Parliament James Oglethorpe established the Georgia Colony in 1733 as a solution to two problems. At that time, tension was high between Spain and Great Britain, and the British feared that Spanish Florida was threatening the British Carolinas. Oglethorpe decided to establish a colony in the contested border region of Georgia and to populate it with debtors who would otherwise have been imprisoned according to standard British practice. This plan would both rid Great Britain of its undesirable elements and provide her with a base from which to attack Florida. The first colonists arrived in 1733.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Georgia was established on strict moralistic principles. Slavery was officially forbidden, as were alcohol and other forms of immorality. However, the reality of the colony was far different. The colonists rejected a moralistic lifestyle and complained that their colony could not compete economically with the Carolina rice plantations. Georgia initially failed to prosper, but the restrictions were eventually lifted, slavery was allowed, and it became as prosperous as the Carolinas. The colony of Georgia never had an established religion; it consisted of people of various faiths.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Spain ceded Florida to Great Britain in 1763, which established the colonies of East and West Florida. The Floridas remained loyal to Great Britain during the American Revolution. They were returned to Spain in 1783 in exchange for the Bahamas, at which time most of the British left. The Spanish then neglected the Floridas; few Spaniards lived there when the US bought the area in 1819.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Efforts began as early as the 1640s toward a common defense of the colonies, principally against shared threats from Indians, the French, and the Dutch. The Puritan colonies of New England formed a confederation to coordinate military and judicial matters. From the 1670s, several royal governors attempted to find means of coordinating defensive and offensive military matters, notably Sir Edmund Andros (who governed New York, New England, and Virginia at various times) and Francis Nicholson (governed Maryland, Virginia, Nova Scotia, and Carolina). After King Phillips War, Andros successfully negotiated the Covenant Chain, a series of Indian treaties that brought relative calm to the frontiers of the middle colonies for many years.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: The northern colonies experienced numerous assaults from the Wabanaki Confederacy and the French from Acadia during the four French and Indian Wars, particularly present-day Maine and New Hampshire, as well as Father Rale's War and Father Le Loutre's War.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: One event that reminded colonists of their shared identity as British subjects was the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748) in Europe. This conflict spilled over into the colonies, where it was known as "King George's War". The major battles took place in Europe, but American colonial troops fought the French and their Indian allies in New York, New England, and Nova Scotia with the Siege of Louisbourg (1745).


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: At the Albany Congress of 1754, Benjamin Franklin proposed that the colonies be united by a Grand Council overseeing a common policy for defense, expansion, and Indian affairs. The plan was thwarted by colonial legislatures and King George II, but it was an early indication that the British colonies of North America were headed towards unification.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: The French and Indian War (1754–1763) was the American extension of the general European conflict known as the Seven Years' War. Previous colonial wars in North America had started in Europe and then spread to the colonies, but the French and Indian War is notable for having started in North America and spread to Europe. One of the primary causes of the war was increasing competition between Britain and France, especially in the Great Lakes and Ohio valley.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: The French and Indian War took on a new significance for the British North American colonists when William Pitt the Elder decided that major military resources needed to be devoted to North America to win the war against France. For the first time, the continent became one of the main theaters of what could be termed a "world war". During the war, the position of the British colonies as part of the British Empire was made truly apparent, as British military and civilian officials took on an increased presence in the lives of Americans.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: The war also increased a sense of American unity in other ways. It caused men to travel across the continent who might otherwise have never left their own colony, fighting alongside men from decidedly different backgrounds who were nonetheless still "American". Throughout the course of the war, British officers trained American ones for battle, most notably George Washington, which benefitted the American cause during the Revolution. Also, colonial legislatures and officials had to cooperate intensively, for the first time, in pursuit of the continent-wide military effort. The relations between the British military establishment and the colonists were not always positive, setting the stage for later distrust and dislike of British troops.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: In the Treaty of Paris (1763), France formally ceded to Britain the eastern part of its vast North American empire, having secretly given to Spain the territory of Louisiana west of the Mississippi River the previous year. Before the war, Britain held the thirteen American colonies, most of present-day Nova Scotia, and most of the Hudson Bay watershed. Following the war, Britain gained all French territory east of the Mississippi River, including Quebec, the Great Lakes, and the Ohio River valley. Britain also gained Spanish Florida, from which it formed the colonies of East and West Florida. In removing a major foreign threat to the thirteen colonies, the war also largely removed the colonists' need of colonial protection.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: The British and colonists triumphed jointly over a common foe. The colonists' loyalty to the mother country was stronger than ever before. However, disunity was beginning to form. British Prime Minister William Pitt the Elder had decided to wage the war in the colonies with the use of troops from the colonies and tax funds from Britain itself. This was a successful wartime strategy but, after the war was over, each side believed that it had borne a greater burden than the other. The British elite, the most heavily taxed of any in Europe, pointed out angrily that the colonists paid little to the royal coffers. The colonists replied that their sons had fought and died in a war that served European interests more than their own. This dispute was a link in the chain of events that soon brought about the American Revolution.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: The colonies were very different from one another but they were still a part of the British Empire in more than just name. Demographically, the majority of the colonists traced their roots to the British Isles and many of them still had family ties with Great Britain. Socially, the colonial elite of Boston, New York, Charleston, and Philadelphia saw their identity as British. Many had never lived in Britain in over a few generations, yet they imitated British styles of dress, dance, and etiquette. This social upper echelon built its mansions in the Georgian style, copied the furniture designs of Thomas Chippendale, and participated in the intellectual currents of Europe, such as the Enlightenment. The seaport cities of colonial America were truly British cities in the eyes of many inhabitants.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Many of the political structures of the colonies drew upon the republicanism expressed by opposition leaders in Britain, most notably the Commonwealth men and the Whig traditions. Many Americans at the time saw the colonies' systems of governance as modeled after the British constitution of the time, with the king corresponding to the governor, the House of Commons to the colonial assembly, and the House of Lords to the governor's council. The codes of law of the colonies were often drawn directly from English law; indeed, English common law survives not only in Canada, but also throughout the United States. Eventually, it was a dispute over the meaning of some of these political ideals (especially political representation) and republicanism that led to the American Revolution.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Another point on which the colonies found themselves more similar than different was the booming import of British goods. The British economy had begun to grow rapidly at the end of the 17th century and, by the mid-18th century, small factories in Britain were producing much more than the nation could consume. Britain found a market for their goods in the British colonies of North America, increasing her exports to that region by 360% between 1740 and 1770. British merchants offered credit to their customers; this allowed Americans to buy a large amount of British goods. From Nova Scotia to Georgia, all British subjects bought similar products, creating and anglicizing a sort of common identity.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: In recent years, historians have enlarged their perspective to cover the entire Atlantic world in a subfield now known as Atlantic history. Of special interest are such themes as international migration, trade, colonization, comparative military and governmental institutions, the transmission of religions and missionary work, and the slave trade. It was the Age of the Enlightenment, and ideas flowed back and forth across the Atlantic, with Philadelphian Benjamin Franklin playing a major role.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Francois Furstenberg (2008) offers a different perspective on the historical period. He suggests that warfare was critical among the major imperial players: Britain, the American colonies, Spain, France, and the First Nations (Indians). They fought a series of conflicts from 1754 to 1815 that Furstenberg calls a "Long War for the West" over control of the region.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Women played a role in the emergence of the capitalist economy in the Atlantic world. The types of local commercial exchange in which they participated independently were well integrated with the trade networks between colonial merchants throughout the Atlantic region, especially markets in dairy and produce commodities. For example, local women merchants were important suppliers of foodstuffs to transatlantic shipping concerns.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: In the colonial era, Americans insisted on their rights as Englishmen to have their own legislature raise all taxes. The British Parliament, however, asserted in 1765 that it held supreme authority to lay taxes, and a series of American protests began that led directly to the American Revolution. The first wave of protests attacked the Stamp Act of 1765, and marked the first time that Americans met together from each of the 13 colonies and planned a common front against British taxation. The Boston Tea Party of 1773 dumped British tea into Boston Harbor because it contained a hidden tax that Americans refused to pay. The British responded by trying to crush traditional liberties in Massachusetts, leading to the American revolution starting in 1775.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: The idea of independence steadily became more widespread, after being first proposed and advocated by a number of public figures and commentators throughout the Colonies. One of the most prominent voices on behalf of independence was Thomas Paine in his pamphlet "Common Sense" published in 1776. Another group that called for independence was the Sons of Liberty, which had been founded in 1765 in Boston by Samuel Adams and which was now becoming even more strident and numerous.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: The Parliament began a series of taxes and punishments which met more and more resistance: First Quartering Act (1765); Declaratory Act (1766); Townshend Revenue Act (1767); and Tea Act (1773). In response to the Boston Tea Party, Parliament passed the Intolerable Acts: Second Quartering Act (1774); Quebec Act (1774); Massachusetts Government Act (1774); Administration of Justice Act (1774); Boston Port Act (1774); Prohibitory Act (1775). By this point, the 13 colonies had organized themselves into the Continental Congress and begun setting up independent governments and drilling their militia in preparation for war.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: The idea that nature and humans are separate entities can be traced back to European colonial views. To European settlers, land was an inherited right and was to be used to profit. While native groups saw their relationship with the land in a more holistic view, they were eventually subjected to European property systems. Colonists from Europe saw the American landscape as wild, savage, dark, a waste, and thus needed to be tamed in order for it to be safe and habitable. One cleared and settled, these areas were depicted as “Eden itself.” Yet the native peoples of those lands saw “wilderness” as that when the connection between humans and nature is broken. For native communities, human intervention was a part of their ecological practices.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Within European culture, land was an inherited right for each family’s firstborn and every other child would need to find another way to claim land. European expansion would be motivated by this desire to claim land, but other factors were for religion (eg. Crusades) and discovery (eg. voyages). In addition to the desire for expansion, Europeans also had the resources for external growth. They had ships, maps, and knowledge—a complex of politics, economy, and military tactics that they believed were superior for ruling. These helped to possess and rule the people and lands they came in contact with. One large element of this was their strong belief in private property. Land was a commodity, and as such, anyone who did not use it to turn a profit, could have it taken from them. John Locke was one responsible for these ideals. Yet the commodities didn’t end with the acquisition of land. Profit became the main driver for all resources that would follow (including slavery). The cultural divide that existed between Europeans and the native groups they colonized allowed the Europeans to capitalize on both the local and global trade. So whether the ruling of these other lands and peoples was direct or indirect, the diffusion of European ideals and practices spread to nearly every country on the globe. Imperialism and globalization were also at play in creating a ruling dominion for the European nation, but it did not come without challenges. Aside from the cultural difference in relationships with land, language was a common barrier. One example being that tribal groups did not have a definition for colonization or civilization.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: In the British colonies, the three forms of government were provincial (royal colony), proprietary, and charter. These governments were all subordinate to the King of England, with no explicit relationship with the British Parliament. Beginning late in the 17th century, the administration of all British colonies was overseen by the Board of Trade in London. Each colony had a paid colonial agent in London to represent its interests.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: New Hampshire, New York, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and eventually Massachusetts were crown colonies. The provincial colony was governed by commissions created at the pleasure of the king. A governor and (in some provinces) his council were appointed by the crown. The governor was invested with general executive powers and authorized to call a locally elected assembly. The governor's council would sit as an upper house when the assembly was in session, in addition to its role in advising the governor. Assemblies were made up of representatives elected by the freeholders and planters (landowners) of the province. The governor had the power of absolute veto and could prorogue (i.e., delay) and dissolve the assembly. The assembly's role was to make all local laws and ordinances, ensuring that they were not inconsistent with the laws of England. In practice, this did not always occur, since many of the provincial assemblies sought to expand their powers and limit those of the governor and crown. Laws could be examined by the British Privy Council or Board of Trade, which also held veto power of legislation.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Pennsylvania (which included Delaware), New Jersey, and Maryland were proprietary colonies. They were governed much as royal colonies except that lord proprietors, rather than the king, appointed the governor. They were set up after the Restoration of 1660 and typically enjoyed greater civil and religious liberty.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Massachusetts, Providence Plantation, Rhode Island, Warwick, and Connecticut were charter colonies. The Massachusetts charter was revoked in 1684 and was replaced by a provincial charter that was issued in 1691. Charter governments were political corporations created by letters patent, giving the grantees control of the land and the powers of legislative government. The charters provided a fundamental constitution and divided powers among legislative, executive, and judicial functions, with those powers being vested in officials.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: The primary political cultures of the United States had their origins in the colonial period. Most theories of political culture identify New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the South as having formed separate and distinct political cultures.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: As Bonomi shows, the most distinctive feature of colonial society was the vibrant political culture, which attracted the most talented and ambitious young men into politics. First, suffrage was the most generous in the world, with every man allowed to vote who owned a certain amount of property. Fewer than one-percent of British men could vote, whereas a majority of American freemen were eligible. The roots of democracy were present, although deference was typically shown to social elites in colonial elections.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Second, a very wide range of public and private business was decided by elected bodies in the colonies, especially the assemblies and county governments in each colony. They handled land grants, commercial subsidies, and taxation, as well as oversight of roads, poor relief, taverns, and schools. Americans sued each other at a very high rate, with binding decisions made not by a great lord but by local judges and juries. This promoted the rapid expansion of the legal profession, so that the intense involvement of lawyers in politics became an American characteristic by the 1770s.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Third, the American colonies were exceptional in the world because of the representation of many different interest groups in political decision-making. The American political culture was open to economic, social, religious, ethnic, and geographical interests, with merchants, landlords, petty farmers, artisans, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Quakers, Germans, Scotch Irish, Yankees, Yorkers, and many other identifiable groups taking part. Elected representatives learned to listen to these interests because 90% of the men in the lower houses lived in their districts, unlike England where it was common to have an absentee member of Parliament. All of this was very unlike Europe, where aristocratic families and the established church were in control.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Finally and most dramatically, the Americans were fascinated by and increasingly adopted the political values of Republicanism which stressed equal rights, the need for virtuous citizens, and the evils of corruption, luxury, and aristocracy. Republicanism provided the framework for colonial resistance to British schemes of taxation after 1763, which escalated into the Revolution.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: None of the colonies had stable political parties of the sort that formed in the 1790s, but each had shifting factions that vied for power, especially in the perennial battles between the appointed governor and the elected assembly. There were often "country" and "court" factions, representing those opposed to the governor's agenda and those in favor of it, respectively. Massachusetts had particularly low requirements for voting eligibility and strong rural representation in its assembly from its 1691 charter; consequently, it also had a strong populist faction that represented the province's lower classes.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Up and down the colonies, non-English ethnic groups had clusters of settlements. The most numerous were the Scotch Irish and the Germans. Each group assimilated into the dominant English, Protestant, commercial, and political culture, albeit with local variations. They tended to vote in blocs, and politicians negotiated with group leaders for votes. They generally retained their historic languages and cultural traditions, even as they merged into the developing American culture.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Ethnocultural factors were most visible in Pennsylvania. During 1756–1776, the Quakers were the largest faction in the legislature, but they were losing their dominance to the growing Presbyterian faction based on Scotch-Irish votes, supported by Germans.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Mortality was very high for new arrivals, and high for children in the colonial era. Malaria was deadly to many new arrivals in the Southern colonies. For an example of newly arrived able-bodied young men, over one-fourth of the Anglican missionaries died within five years of their arrival in the Carolinas.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Mortality was high for infants and small children, especially from diphtheria, yellow fever, and malaria. Most sick people turned to local healers and used folk remedies. Others relied upon the minister-physicians, barber-surgeons, apothecaries, midwives, and ministers; a few used colonial physicians trained either in Britain or an apprenticeship in the colonies. There was little government control, regulation of medical care, or attention to public health. Colonial physicians introduced modern medicine to the cities in the 18th century, following the models in England and Scotland, and made some advances in vaccination, pathology, anatomy, and pharmacology.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: The first religious services held in colonial America were Anglican services held in Jamestown according to the "Book of Common Prayer". The practice of the religion of the Church of England in Jamestown predates that of the Pilgrim settlers who came on the "Mayflower" in 1620, whose Separatist faith motivated their move from Europe. The Spanish set up a network of Catholic missions in California, but they had all closed decades before 1848 when California became a state. There were a few important French Catholic churches and institutions in New Orleans.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Most of the settlers came from Protestant backgrounds in England and Western Europe, with a small proportion of Catholics (chiefly in Maryland) and a few Jews in port cities. The English and the Germans brought along multiple Protestant denominations. Several colonies had an "established" church, which meant that local tax money went to the denomination. Freedom of religion became a basic American principle, and numerous new movements emerged, many of which became established denominations in their own right. The Puritans of New England kept in close touch with non-conformists in England, as did the Quakers and the Methodists.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Church membership statistics by denomination are unreliable and scarce from the colonial period, but Anglicans were not in the majority by the time of the American Revolutionary War and probably did not comprise even 30 percent of the population in the Southern Colonies (Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia) where the Church of England was the established church. There were approximately 2,900 churches in the Thirteen Colonies by the time of the Revolutionary War, of which 82 to 84 percent were affiliated with non-Anglican


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Protestant denominations, with 76 to 77 percent specifically affiliated with British Dissenter denominations (Congregational, Presbyterian, Baptist, or Quaker) or continental Calvinists (Dutch Reformed or German Reformed), 5 to 8 percent being Lutheran; there was also a population of approximately 10,000 Methodists. 14 to 16 percent remained Anglican but were declining in number, and the remaining 2 percent of the churches were Catholic.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Three of the New England Colonies had established churches prior to the Revolutionary War, all Congregational (Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and New Hampshire), while the Middle Colonies (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware) and the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations had no established churches. Local taxes paid the salary of the clergy in the established churches, and the parish had civic responsibilities such as poor relief and promoting education. The local gentry controlled the budget, rather than the clergy. Anglicans in America were under the authority of the Bishop of London, who sent out missionaries and ordained men from the Colonies to minister in American parishes.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Historians debate how influential Christianity was in the era of the American Revolution. Many of the founding fathers were active in a local church; some of them had Deist sentiments, such as Jefferson, Franklin, and Washington. Catholics were few outside of Maryland; however, they joined the Patriot cause during the Revolution. Leaders such as George Washington strongly endorsed tolerance for them and indeed for all denominations.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: The First Great Awakening was the nation's first major religious revival, occurring in the middle of the 18th century, and it injected new vigor into Christian faith. It was a wave of religious enthusiasm among Protestants that swept the colonies in the 1730s and 1740s, leaving a permanent impact on American religion. Jonathan Edwards was a key leader and a powerful intellectual in colonial America. George Whitefield came over from England and made many converts.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: The Great Awakening emphasized the traditional Reformed virtues of Godly preaching, rudimentary liturgy, and a deep awareness of personal sin and redemption by Christ Jesus, spurred on by powerful preaching that deeply affected listeners. Pulling away from ritual and ceremony, the Great Awakening made religion personal to the average person.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: The Awakening had a major impact in reshaping the Congregational, Presbyterian, Dutch Reformed, and German Reformed denominations, and it strengthened the small Baptist and Methodist denominations. It brought Christianity to the slaves and was a powerful event in New England that challenged established authority. It incited rancor and division between the new revivalists and the old traditionalists who insisted on ritual and liturgy. The Awakening had little impact on Anglicans and Quakers.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: The First Great Awakening focused on people who were already church members, unlike the Second Great Awakening that began around 1800 and reached out to the unchurched. It changed their rituals, their piety, and their self-awareness. The new style of sermons and the way that people practiced their faith breathed new life into religion in America. People became passionately and emotionally involved in their religion, rather than passively listening to intellectual discourse in a detached manner. Ministers who used this new style of preaching were generally called "new lights", while the traditional-styled preachers were called "old lights".


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: People began to study the Bible at home, which effectively decentralized the means of informing the public on religious manners and was akin to the individualistic trends present in Europe during the Protestant Reformation.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: The experiences of women varied greatly from colony to colony during the colonial era. In New England, the Puritan settlers brought their strong religious values with them to the New World, which dictated that a woman be submissive to her husband and dedicate herself to rearing God-fearing children to the best of her ability.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: There were ethnic differences in the treatment of women. Among Puritan settlers in New England, wives almost never worked in the fields with their husbands. In German communities in Pennsylvania, however, many women worked in fields and stables. German and Dutch immigrants granted women more control over property, which was not permitted in the local English law. Unlike English colonial wives, German and Dutch wives owned their own clothes and other items and were also given the ability to write wills disposing of the property brought into the marriage.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Work for women included running establishments based on their culinary skills. The first restaurant in the colonies belonged to Goody Armitage in Massachusetts in 1643. While leisure activity for women of the time included playing the clavier, harpsichord, clavichord and the organ. Women (as well as men) danced in balls especially after 1700. These dances had a strict social code with mistakes in choreography scrutinized and a loss of prestige would follow with excessive dance errors.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: By the mid-18th century, the values of the American Enlightenment became established and weakened the view that husbands were natural "rulers" over their wives. There was a new sense of shared marriage. Legally, husbands took control of wives' property when marrying. Divorce was almost impossible until the late 18th century.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: About 305,326 slaves were transported to America, or less than 2% of the 12 million slaves taken from Africa. The great majority went to sugarcane-growing colonies in the Caribbean and to Brazil, where life expectancy was short and the numbers had to be continually replenished. Life expectancy was much greater in the American colonies because of better food, less disease, lighter work loads, and better medical care, so the population grew rapidly, reaching 4 million by the 1860 Census. From 1770 until 1860, the birth rate of American slaves was much greater than for the population of any nation in Europe, and was nearly twice as rapid as that of England.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: The conditions the Caribbean and Brazilian enslaved populations endured in the early colonial years prompted many attempts at fleeing plantation work. Successfully escaped slaves often fled to "maroon communities<nowiki>"</nowiki> which were populated with former slaves along with local Native Americans that helped shelter the recently escaped. Subsequent treaties with Maroon communities suggest that these communities were a burden on South American and Caribbean plantations. While the inhumane working conditions coupled with slave revolts in the Caribbean Islands and Brazilian plantations called for the increased imports of African slaves, in the colonies many plantation owners recognized their ability to maintain a generation of slaves for the economic benefit of allowing natural reproduction to increase the population. This led to the following generations of the enslaved population to be American born.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Historian Carl Bridenbaugh examined in depth five key cities: Boston (population 16,000 in 1760), Newport Rhode Island (population 7500), New York City (population 18,000), Philadelphia (population 23,000), and Charles Town (Charlestown, South Carolina), (population 8000). He argues they grew from small villages to take major leadership roles in promoting trade, land speculation, immigration, and prosperity, and in disseminating the ideas of the Enlightenment, and new methods in medicine and technology. Furthermore, they sponsored a consumer taste for English amenities, developed a distinctly American educational system, and began systems for care of people in need.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: The colonists were not remarkable by European standards, but they did display certain distinctly American characteristics, according to Bridenbaugh. There was no aristocracy or established church, there was no long tradition of powerful guilds. The colonial governments were much less powerful and intrusive than corresponding national governments in Europe. They experimented with new methods to raise revenue, build infrastructure, and solve urban problems. They were more democratic than European cities, in that a large fraction of the men could vote, and class lines were more fluid. Contrasted to Europe, printers (especially as newspaper editors) had a much larger role in shaping public opinion, and lawyers moved easily back and forth between politics and their profession. Bridenbaugh argues that by the mid-18th century, the middle-class businessmen, professionals, and skilled artisans dominated the cities. He characterizes them as "sensible, shrewd, frugal, ostentatiously moral, generally honest," public spirited, and upwardly mobile, and argues their economic strivings led to "democratic yearnings" for political power.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: There were few cities in the entire South, and Charleston (Charles Town) and New Orleans were the most important before the Civil War. The colony of South Carolina was settled mainly by planters from the overpopulated British sugar island colony of Barbados, who brought large numbers of African slaves from that island.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: In New England, the Puritans created self-governing communities of religious congregations of farmers (or yeomen) and their families. High-level politicians gave out plots of land to settlers (or proprietors) who then divided the land amongst themselves. Large portions were usually given to men of higher social standing, but every man who wasn't indentured or criminally bonded had enough land to support a family. Every male citizen had a voice in the town meeting. The town meeting levied taxes, built roads, and elected officials who managed town affairs. The towns did not have courts; that was a function of the county, whose officials were appointed by the state government.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: The Congregational church which the Puritans founded was not automatically joined by all New England residents because of Puritan beliefs that God singled out specific people for salvation. Instead, membership was limited to those who could convincingly "test" before members of the church that they had been saved. They were known as "the elect" or "Saints."


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: On October 19, 1652, the Massachusetts General Court decreed that "for the prevention of clipping of all such pieces of money as shall be coined with-in this jurisdiction, it is ordered by this Courte and the authorite thereof, that henceforth all pieces of money coined shall have a double ring on either side, with this inscription, Massachusetts, and a tree in the center on one side, and New England and the yeare of our Lord on the other side. "These coins were the famous "tree" pieces. There were Willow Tree Shillings, Oak Tree Shillings, and Pine Tree Shillings" minted by John Hull and Robert Sanderson in the "Hull Mint" on Summer Street in Boston, Massachusetts. "The Pine Tree was the last to be coined, and today there are specimens in existence, which is probably why all of these early coins are referred to as Pine Tree shillings."   The "Hull Mint" was forced to close in 1683.   In 1684 the charter of Massachusetts was revoked by the king Charles II.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: A majority of New England residents were small farmers. A man had complete power over the property within these small farm families.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: When married, an English woman gave up her maiden name. The role of wives was to raise and nurture healthy children and support their husbands. Most women carried out these duties. During the 18th century, couples usually married between the ages of 20–24, and 6–8 children were typical of a family, with three on average surviving to adulthood. Farm women provided most of the materials needed by the rest of the family by spinning yarn from wool and knitting sweaters and stockings, making candles and soap from ashes, and churning milk into butter.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Most New England parents tried to help their sons establish farms of their own. When sons married, fathers gave them gifts of land, livestock, or farming equipment; daughters received household goods, farm animals, or cash. Arranged marriages were very unusual; normally, children chose their own spouses from within a circle of suitable acquaintances who shared their race, religion, and social standing. Parents retained veto power over their children's marriages.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: New England farming families generally lived in wooden houses because of the abundance of trees. A typical New England farmhouse was one-and-a-half stories tall and had a strong frame (usually made of large square timbers) that was covered by wooden clapboard siding. A large chimney stood in the middle of the house that provided cooking facilities and warmth during the winter. One side of the ground floor contained a hall, a general-purpose room where the family worked and ate meals. Adjacent to the hall was the parlor, a room used to entertain guests that contained the family's best furnishings and the parents' bed. Children slept in a loft above, while the kitchen was either part of the hall or was located in a shed along the back of the house. Colonial families were large, and these small dwellings had much activity and there was little privacy.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: By the middle of the 18th century, New England's population had grown dramatically, going from about 100,000 people in 1700 to 250,000 in 1725 and 375,000 in 1750 thanks to high birth rates and relatively high overall life expectancy. (A 15-year-old boy in 1700 could expect to live to about 63.) Colonists in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island continued to subdivide their land between farmers; the farms became too small to support single families, and this threatened the New England ideal of a society of independent yeoman farmers.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Some farmers obtained land grants to create farms in undeveloped land in Massachusetts and Connecticut or bought plots of land from speculators in New Hampshire and what later became Vermont. Other farmers became agricultural innovators. They planted nutritious English grass such as red clover and timothy-grass, which provided more feed for livestock, and potatoes, which provided a high production rate that was an advantage for small farms. Families increased their productivity by exchanging goods and labor with each other. They lent livestock and grazing land to one another and worked together to spin yarn, sew quilts, and shuck corn. Migration, agricultural innovation, and economic cooperation were creative measures that preserved New England's yeoman society until the 19th century.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: By the mid-18th century in New England, shipbuilding was a staple, particularly as the North American wilderness offered a seemingly endless supply of timber. (By comparison, Europe's forests had been depleted, and most timber had to be purchased from Scandinavia). The British crown often turned to the inexpensive yet strongly built American ships. There was a shipyard at the mouth of almost every river in New England.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: By 1750, a variety of artisans, shopkeepers, and merchants provided services to the growing farming population. Blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and furniture makers set up shops in rural villages. There they built and repaired goods needed by farm families. Stores were set up by traders selling English manufactures such as cloth, iron utensils, and window glass, as well as West Indian products such as sugar and molasses. The storekeepers of these shops sold their imported goods in exchange for crops and other local products, including roof shingles, potash, and barrel staves. These local goods were shipped to towns and cities all along the Atlantic Coast. Enterprising men set up stables and taverns along wagon roads to serve this transportation system.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: These products were delivered to port towns such as Boston and Salem in Massachusetts, New Haven in Connecticut, and Newport and Providence in Rhode Island. Merchants then exported them to the West Indies, where they were traded for molasses, sugar, gold coins, and bills of exchange (credit slips). They carried the West Indian products to New England factories, where the raw sugar was turned into granulated sugar and the molasses distilled into rum. The gold and credit slips were sent to England where they were exchanged for manufactures, which were shipped back to the colonies and sold along with the sugar and rum to farmers.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Other New England merchants took advantage of the rich fishing areas along the Atlantic Coast and financed a large fishing fleet, transporting its catch of mackerel and cod to the West Indies and Europe. Some merchants exploited the vast amounts of timber along the coasts and rivers of northern New England. They funded sawmills that supplied cheap wood for houses and shipbuilding. Hundreds of New England shipwrights built oceangoing ships, which they sold to British and American merchants.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Many merchants became very wealthy by providing their goods to the agricultural population, and ended up dominating the society of sea port cities. Unlike yeoman farmhouses, these merchants lived in elegant -story houses designed in the new Georgian style, imitating the lifestyle of the upper class of England. These Georgian houses had symmetrical façades with equal numbers of windows on both sides of the central door. The interior consisted of a passageway down the middle of the house with specialized rooms off the sides, such as a library, dining room, formal parlor, and master bedroom. Unlike the multi-purpose space of the yeoman houses, each of these rooms served a separate purpose. These houses contained bedrooms on the second floor that provided privacy to parents and children.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Education was primarily the responsibility of families, but numerous religious groups established tax-supported elementary schools, especially the Puritans in New England, so that their children could read the Bible. Nearly all the religious denominations set up their own schools and colleges to train ministers. Each city and most towns had private academies for the children of affluent families.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: <nowiki> </nowiki>John Hull "the earliest scholar who can now be named of Philemon Pormort, whose school, the only one in Boston, the first school of public instruction in Massachusetts ", Boston Latin School.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: The practical sciences were of great interest to colonial Americans, who were engaged in the process of taming and settling a wild frontier country. The mainstream of intellectual activity in the colonies was on technological and engineering developments rather than more abstract topics such as politics or metaphysics. American scientific activity was pursued by such people as:


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: The arts in colonial America were not as successful as the sciences. Literature in the European sense was nearly nonexistent, with histories being far more noteworthy. These included "The History and present State of Virginia" (1705) by Robert Beverly and "History of the Dividing Line" (1728–29) by William Byrd, which was not published until a century later. Instead, the newspaper was the principal form of reading material in the colonies. Printing was expensive, and most publications focused on purely practical matters, such as major news, advertisements, and business reports. Almanacs were very popular, also, Benjamin Franklin's "Poor Richard's Almanack" being the most famous. Literary magazines appeared at mid-century, but few were profitable and most went out of business after only a few years. American publications never approached the intellectual quality of European writers, but they were much more widespread and achieved a greater readership than anything produced by Voltaire, Locke, or Rousseau.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: New Englanders wrote journals, pamphlets, books, and especially sermons—more than all of the other colonies combined. Boston minister Cotton Mather published "Magnalia Christi Americana" (The Great Works of Christ in America, 1702), while revivalist Jonathan Edwards wrote his philosophical work "A Careful and Strict Enquiry Into...Notions of...Freedom of Will..." (1754). Most music had a religious theme, as well, and was mainly the singing of Psalms. Because of New England's deep religious beliefs, artistic works that were insufficiently religious or too "worldly" were banned, especially the theater. The leading theologian and philosopher of the colonial era was Jonathan Edwards of Massachusetts, an interpreter of Calvinism and the leader of the First Great Awakening.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Art and drama were somewhat more successful than literature. Benjamin West was a noteworthy painter of historical subjects, and two first-rate portrait painters emerged in John Copley and Gilbert Stuart, yet all three men spent much of their lives in London. Theater was more developed in the Southern colonies, especially South Carolina, but nowhere did stage works attain the level of Europe. Puritans in New England and Quakers in Pennsylvania opposed theatrical performances as immoral and ungodly.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Elementary education was widespread in New England. Early Puritan settlers believed that it was necessary to study the Bible, so children were taught to read at an early age. It was also required that each town pay for a primary school. About 10 percent enjoyed secondary schooling and funded grammar schools in larger towns. Most boys learned skills from their fathers on the farm or as apprentices to artisans. Few girls attended formal schools, but most were able to get some education at home or at so-called "Dame schools" where women taught basic reading and writing skills in their own houses. By 1750, nearly 90% of New England's women and almost all of its men could read and write.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Puritans founded Harvard College in 1636 and Yale College in 1701. Later, Baptists founded Rhode Island College (now Brown University) in 1764 and Congregationalists established Dartmouth College in 1769. Virginia founded the College of William and Mary in 1693; it was primarily Anglican. The colleges were designed for aspiring ministers, lawyers, or doctors. There were no departments or majors, as every student shared the same curriculum, which focused on Latin and Greek, mathematics, and history, philosophy, logic, ethics, rhetoric, oratory, and a little basic science. There were no sports or fraternities and few extracurricular activities apart from literary societies. There were no separate seminaries, law schools, or divinity schools. The first medical schools were founded late in the colonial era in Philadelphia and New York.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Some emigrants who came to Colonial America were in search of religious freedom. London did not make the Church of England official in the colonies—it never sent a bishop—so religious practice became diverse.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: The "Great Awakening" was a major religious revival movement that took place in most colonies in the 1730s and 1740s. The movement began with Jonathan Edwards, a Massachusetts preacher who sought to return to the Pilgrims' Calvinist roots and to reawaken the "Fear of God." English preacher George Whitefield and other itinerant preachers continued the movement, traveling throughout the colonies and preaching in a dramatic and emotional style. Followers of Edwards and other preachers called themselves the "New Lights", as contrasted with the "Old Lights" who disapproved of their movement. To promote their viewpoints, the two sides established academies and colleges, including Princeton and Williams College. The Great Awakening has been called the first truly American event.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: A similar pietistic revival movement took place among some German and Dutch settlers, leading to more divisions. By the 1770s, the Baptists were growing rapidly both in the north (where they founded Brown University) and in the South (where they challenged the previously unquestioned moral authority of the Anglican establishment).


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Unlike New England, the Mid-Atlantic region gained much of its population from new immigration and, by 1750, the combined populations of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania had reached nearly 300,000 people. By 1750, about 60,000 Irish and 50,000 Germans came to live in British North America, many of them settling in the Mid-Atlantic Region. William Penn founded the colony of Pennsylvania in 1682, and attracted an influx of British Quakers with his policies of religious liberty and freehold ownership. ("Freehold" meant owning land free and clear, with the right to resell it to anyone.) The first major influx of settlers were the Scotch Irish who headed to the frontier. Many Germans came to escape the religious conflicts and declining economic opportunities in Germany and Switzerland.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Thousands of poor German farmers, chiefly from the Palatine region of Germany, migrated to upstate districts after 1700. They kept to themselves, married their own, spoke German, attended Lutheran churches, and retained their own customs and foods. They emphasized farm ownership. Some mastered English to become conversant with local legal and business opportunities. They ignored the Indians and tolerated slavery (although few were rich enough to own a slave).


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Much of the architecture of the Middle Colonies reflects the diversity of its people. In Albany and New York City, a majority of the buildings were Dutch style with brick exteriors and high gables at each end, while many Dutch churches were octagonal. German and Welsh settlers in Pennsylvania used cut stone to build their houses, following the way of their homeland and completely ignoring the plethora of timber in the area. An example of this would be Germantown, Pennsylvania where 80 percent of the buildings in the town were made entirely of stone. On the other hand, settlers from Ireland took advantage of America's ample supply of timber and constructed sturdy log cabins.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Ethnic cultures also affected styles of furniture. Rural Quakers preferred simple designs in furnishings such as tables, chairs, and chests, and shunned elaborate decorations. However, some urban Quakers had much more elaborate furniture. The city of Philadelphia became a major center of furniture-making because of its massive wealth from Quaker and British merchants. Philadelphian cabinet makers built elegant desks and highboys. German artisans created intricately carved designs on their chests and other furniture, with painted scenes of flowers and birds. German potters also crafted a large array of jugs, pots, and plates of both elegant and traditional design.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: By the time of the Revolutionary War, approximately 85 percent of white Americans were of English, Irish, Welsh, or Scottish descent. Approximately 8.8 percent of whites were of German ancestry, and 3.5 percent were of Dutch origin.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Ethnicity made a difference in agricultural practice. As an example, German farmers generally preferred oxen rather than horses to pull their plows and Scots-Irish made a farming economy based on hogs and corn. Eventually, cows were brought with the horses. They were more useful than horses for many reasons. Almost all the farms had cows on their land. In Ireland, people farmed intensively, working small pieces of land trying to get the largest possible production rate from their crops. In the American colonies, settlers from northern Ireland focused on mixed farming. Using this technique, they grew corn for human consumption and as feed for hogs and other livestock. Many improvement-minded farmers of all different backgrounds began using new agricultural practices to raise their output. During the 1750s, these agricultural innovators replaced the hand sickles and scythes used to harvest hay, wheat, and barley with the cradle scythe, a tool with wooden fingers that arranged the stalks of grain for easy collection. This tool was able to triple the amount of work done by farmers in one day. Farmers also began fertilizing their fields with dung and lime and rotating their crops to keep the soil fertile. By 1700, Philadelphia was exporting 350,000 bushels of wheat and 18,000 tons of flour annually. The Southern colonies in particular relied on cash crops such as tobacco and cotton. South Carolina produced rice and indigo. North Carolina was somewhat less involved in the plantation economy, but because a major producer of naval stores. Virginia and Maryland came to be almost totally dependent on tobacco, which would ultimately prove fatal at the end of the 18th century thanks to exhausted soil and collapsing prices, but for most of the century, the soil remained good and a single-crop economy profitable.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Before 1720, most colonists in the mid-Atlantic region worked with small-scale farming and paid for imported manufactures by supplying the West Indies with corn and flour. In New York, a fur-pelt export trade to Europe flourished adding additional wealth to the region. After 1720, mid-Atlantic farming stimulated with the international demand for wheat. A massive population explosion in Europe brought wheat prices up. By 1770, a bushel of wheat cost twice as much as it did in 1720. Farmers also expanded their production of flax seed and corn since flax was a high demand in the Irish linen industry and a demand for corn existed in the West Indies. Thus, by mid-century, most colonial farming was a commercial venture, although subsistence agriculture continued to exist in New England and the middle colonies. Some immigrants who just arrived purchased farms and shared in this export wealth, but many poor German and Irish immigrants were forced to work as agricultural wage laborers. Merchants and artisans also hired these homeless workers for a domestic system for the manufacture of cloth and other goods. Merchants often bought wool and flax from farmers and employed newly arrived immigrants, who had been textile workers in Ireland and Germany, to work in their homes spinning the materials into yarn and cloth. Large farmers and merchants became wealthy, while farmers with smaller farms and artisans only made enough for subsistence. The Mid-Atlantic region, by 1750, was divided by both ethnic background and wealth.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Seaports that expanded from the wheat trade had more social classes than anywhere else in the Middle Colonies. By 1773, the population of Philadelphia had reached 40,000, New York 25,000, and Baltimore 6,000. Merchants dominated seaport society, and about 40 merchants controlled half of Philadelphia's trade. Wealthy merchants in Philadelphia and New York, like their counterparts in New England, built elegant Georgian-style mansions such as those in Fairmount Park.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Shopkeepers, artisans, shipwrights, butchers, coopers, seamstresses, cobblers, bakers, carpenters, masons, and many other specialized crafts made up the middle class of seaport society. Wives and husbands often worked as a team and taught their children their skills to pass it on through the family. Many of these artisans and traders made enough money to create a modest life. Laborers stood at the bottom of seaport society. These poor people worked on the docks unloading inbound vessels and loading outbound vessels with wheat, corn, and flax seed. Many of these were African American; some were free, while others were enslaved. In 1750, blacks made up about 10 percent of the population of New York and Philadelphia. Hundreds of seamen worked as sailors on merchant ships, some of whom were African American.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: The Southern colonies were mainly dominated by the wealthy planters in Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina. They owned increasingly large plantations that were worked by African slaves. Of the 650,000 inhabitants of the South in 1750, about 250,000 or 40 percent, were slaves. The plantations grew tobacco, indigo and rice for export, and raised most of their own food supplies. In addition, many small subsistence farms were family owned and operated by yeoman. Most white men owned some land, and therefore could vote.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Historians have paid special attention to the role of women, family, and gender in the colonial South since the social history revolution in the 1970s.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Very few women were present in the early Chesapeake colonies. In 1650, estimates put Maryland's total population near six hundred, with fewer than two hundred women present. Much of the population consisted of young, single, white indentured servants and, as such, the colonies lacked social cohesiveness, to a large degree. African women entered the colony as early as 1619, although their status remains a historical debate—free, slave, or indentured servant.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: In the 17th century, high mortality rates for newcomers and a very high ratio of men to women made family life either impossible or unstable for most colonists. These factors made families and communities fundamentally different from their counterparts in Europe and New England in the Virginia-Maryland region before 1700, along with dispersed settlements and a reluctance to live in villages, together with a growing immigration of white indentured servants and black slaves. These extreme conditions both demeaned and empowered women.


title: Colonial history of the United States

text: Women were often vulnerable to exploitation and abuse, especially teenage girls who were indentured servants and lacking male protectors. On the other hand, young women had much more freedom in choosing spouses, without parental oversight, and the shortage of eligible women enabled them to use marriage as an avenue to upward mobility. The high death rates meant that Chesapeake wives generally became widows who inherited property; many widows increased their property by remarrying as soon as possible. The population began to stabilize around 1700, with a 1704 census listing 30,437 white people present with 7,163 of those being women. Women married younger, remained wed longer, bore more children, and lost influence within the family polity.


title: Asana

text: An asana is a body posture, originally and still a general term for a sitting meditation pose, and later extended in hatha yoga and modern yoga as exercise, to any type of position, adding reclining, standing, inverted, twisting, and balancing poses. The "Yoga Sutras of Patanjali" define "asana" as "[a position that] is steady and comfortable". Patanjali mentions the ability to sit for extended periods as one of the eight limbs of his system. Asanas are also called yoga poses or yoga postures in English.


title: Asana

text: The 10th or 11th century "Goraksha Sataka" and the 15th century "Hatha Yoga Pradipika" identify 84 asanas; the 17th century "Hatha Ratnavali" provides a different list of 84 asanas, describing some of them. In the 20th century, Indian nationalism favoured physical culture in response to colonialism. In that environment, pioneers such as Yogendra, Kuvalayananda, and Krishnamacharya taught a new system of asanas (incorporating systems of exercise as well as traditional hatha yoga). Among Krishnamacharya's pupils were influential Indian yoga teachers including Pattabhi Jois, founder of Ashtanga vinyasa yoga, and B.K.S. Iyengar, founder of Iyengar yoga. Together they described hundreds more asanas, revived the popularity of yoga, and brought it to the Western world. Many more asanas have been devised since Iyengar's 1966 "Light on Yoga" which described some 200 asanas. Hundreds more were illustrated by Dharma Mittra.


title: Asana

text: Asanas were claimed to provide both spiritual and physical benefits in medieval hatha yoga texts. More recently, studies have provided evidence that they improve flexibility, strength, and balance; to reduce stress and conditions related to it; and specifically to alleviate some diseases such as asthma and diabetes.


title: Asana

text: Asanas have appeared in culture for many centuries. Religious Indian art depicts figures of the Buddha, Jain tirthankaras, and Shiva in lotus position and other meditation seats, and in the "royal ease" position, lalitasana. With the popularity of yoga as exercise, asanas feature commonly in novels and films, and sometimes also in advertising.


title: Asana

text: The central figure in the Pashupati seal from the Indus Valley civilization of was identified by Sir John Marshall in 1931 as a prototype of the god Shiva, recognised by being three-faced; in a yoga position as the Mahayogin, the god of yoga; having four animals as Pashupati, the Lord of Beasts; with deer beneath the throne, as in medieval depictions of Shiva; having a three-part headdress recalling Shiva's trident; and possibly being ithyphallic, again like Shiva. If correct, this would be the oldest record of an asana. However, with no proof anywhere of an Indus Valley origin for Shiva, with multiple competing interpretations of the Pashupati seal and no obvious way of deciding between these, there is no reliable evidence that it is actually a yoga pose that is depicted in the seal.


title: Asana

text: Asanas originated in India. In his "Yoga Sutras", Patanjali (c. 2nd to 4th century CE) describes asana practice as the third of the eight limbs (Sanskrit: अष्टाङ्ग, "aṣṭāṅga", from अष्ट् "aṣṭ", eight, and अङ्ग "aṅga", limb) of classical, or raja yoga.


title: Asana

text: The word asana, in use in English since the 19th century, is from "āsana" "sitting down" (from आस् "ās" "to sit down"), a sitting posture, a meditation seat.


title: Asana

text: The eight limbs are, in order, the yamas (codes of social conduct), niyamas (self-observances), asanas (postures), pranayama (breath work), pratyahara (sense withdrawal or non-attachment), dharana (concentration), dhyana (meditation), and samadhi (realization of the true Self or Atman, and unity with Brahman, ultimate reality).


title: Asana

text: Asanas, along with the breathing exercises of pranayama, are the physical movements of hatha yoga and of modern yoga. Patanjali describes asanas as a "steady and comfortable posture", referring to the seated postures used for pranayama and for meditation, where meditation is the path to samadhi, transpersonal self-realization.


title: Asana

text: The "Yoga Sutras" do not mention a single asana by name, merely specifying the characteristics of a good asana:


title: Asana

text: The "Sutras" are embedded in the "Bhasya" commentary, which scholars suggest may also be by Patanjali; it names 12 seated meditation asanas including Padmasana, Virasana, Bhadrasana, and Svastikasana.


title: Asana

text: The 10th–11th century "Vimanarcanakalpa" is the first manuscript to describe a non-seated asana, in the form of Mayurasana (peacock) – a balancing pose. Such poses appear, according to the scholar James Mallinson, to have been created outside Shaivism, the home of the Nath yoga tradition, and to have been associated with asceticism; they were later adopted by the Nath yogins.


title: Asana

text: The "Goraksha Sataka" (10–11th century), or "Goraksha Paddhathi", an early hatha yogic text, describes the origin of the 84 classic asanas said to have been revealed by the Hindu deity Lord Shiva. Observing that there are as many postures as there are beings and asserting that there are 84 lakh or 8,400,000 species in all, the text states that Lord Shiva fashioned an asana for each lakh, thus giving 84 in all, although it mentions and describes only two in detail: Siddhasana and Padmasana. The number 84 is symbolic rather than literal, indicating completeness and sacredness.


title: Asana

text: The "Hatha Yoga Pradipika" (15th century) specifies that of these 84, the first four are important, namely the seated poses Siddhasana, Padmasana, Bhadrasana and Simhasana.


title: Asana

text: The pillars of the 16th century Achyutaraya temple at Hampi are decorated with numerous relief statues of yogins in asanas including Siddhasana balanced on a stick, Chakrasana, Yogapattasana which requires the use of a strap, and a hand-standing inverted pose with a stick, as well as several unidentified poses.


title: Asana

text: By the 17th century, asanas became an important component of Hatha yoga practice, and more non-seated poses appear. The "Hatha Ratnavali" by Srinivasa (17th century) is one of the few texts to attempt an actual listing of 84 asanas,


title: Asana

text: although 4 out of its list cannot be translated from the Sanskrit, and at least 11 are merely mentioned without any description, their appearance known from other texts.


title: Asana

text: The "Gheranda Samhita" (late 17th century) again asserts that Shiva taught 84 lakh of asanas, out of which 84 are preeminent, and "32 are useful in the world of mortals." The yoga teacher and scholar Mark Singleton notes from study of the primary texts that "asana was rarely, if ever, the primary feature of the significant yoga traditions in India." The scholar Norman Sjoman comments that a continuous tradition running all the way back to the medieval yoga texts cannot be traced, either in the practice of asanas or in a history of scholarship.


title: Asana

text: From the 1850s onwards, a culture of physical exercise developed in India to counter the colonial stereotype of supposed "degeneracy" of Indians compared to the British, a belief reinforced by then-current ideas of Lamarckism and eugenics. This culture was taken up from the 1880s to the early 20th century by Indian nationalists such as Tiruka, who taught exercises and unarmed combat techniques under the guise of yoga. Meanwhile, proponents of Indian physical culture like K. V. Iyer consciously combined "hata yoga" with bodybuilding in his Bangalore gymnasium.


title: Asana

text: Singleton notes that poses close to Parighasana, Parsvottanasana, Navasana and others were described in Niels Bukh's 1924 Danish text "Grundgymnastik eller primitiv gymnastik" (known in English as "Primary Gymnastics"). These in turn were derived from a 19th-century Scandinavian tradition of gymnastics dating back to Pehr Ling, and "found their way to India" by the early 20th century.


title: Asana

text: Yoga asanas were brought to America in 1919 by Yogendra, sometimes called "the Father of the Modern Yoga Renaissance", his system influenced by the physical culture of Max Müller.


title: Asana

text: In 1924, Swami Kuvalayananda founded the Kaivalyadhama Health and Yoga Research Center in Maharashtra. He combined asanas with Indian systems of exercise and modern European gymnastics, having according to the scholar Joseph Alter a "profound" effect on the evolution of yoga.


title: Asana

text: In 1925, Paramahansa Yogananda, having moved from India to America, set up the Self-Realization Fellowship in Los Angeles, and taught yoga, including asanas, breathing, chanting and meditation, to tens of thousands of Americans, as described in his 1946 "Autobiography of a Yogi".


title: Asana

text: Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888–1989) studied under Kuvalayananda in the 1930s, creating "a marriage of hatha yoga, wrestling exercises, and modern Western gymnastic movement, and unlike anything seen before in the yoga tradition." Sjoman argues that Krishnamacharya drew on the "Vyayama Dipika" gymnastic exercise manual to create the Mysore Palace system of yoga. Singleton argues that Krishnamacharya was familiar with the gymnastics culture of his time, which was influenced by Scandinavian gymnastics; his experimentation with asanas and innovative use of gymnastic jumping between poses may well explain, Singleton suggests, the resemblances between modern standing asanas and Scandinavian gymnastics. Krishnamacharya, known as the father of modern yoga, had among his pupils people who became influential yoga teachers themselves: the Russian Eugenie V. Peterson, known as Indra Devi; Pattabhi Jois, who founded Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga in 1948; B.K.S. Iyengar, his brother-in-law, who founded Iyengar Yoga; T.K.V. Desikachar, his son, who continued his Viniyoga tradition; Srivatsa Ramaswami; and A. G. Mohan, co-founder of Svastha Yoga & Ayurveda. Together they revived the popularity of yoga and brought it to the Western world.


title: Asana

text: In 1960, Vishnudevananda Saraswati, in the Sivananda yoga school, published a compilation of sixty-six basic postures and 136 variations of those postures in "The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga".


title: Asana

text: In 1966, Iyengar published "Light on Yoga: Yoga Dipika", illustrated with some 600 photographs of Iyengar demonstrating around 200 asanas; it systematised the physical practice of asanas. It became a bestseller, selling three million copies, and was translated into some 17 languages.


title: Asana

text: In 1984, Dharma Mittra compiled a list of about 1,300 asanas and their variations, derived from ancient and modern sources, illustrating them with photographs of himself in each posture; the Dharma Yoga website suggests that he created some 300 of these.


title: Asana

text: The asanas have been created at different times, a few being ancient, some being medieval, and a growing number recent. Some that appear traditional, such as Virabhadrasana I (Warrior Pose I), are relatively recent: that pose was probably devised by Krishnamacharya around 1940, and it was popularised by his pupil, Iyengar. A pose that is certainly younger than that is Parivritta Parsvakonasana (Revolved Side Angle Pose): it was not in the first edition of Pattabhi Jois's "Yoga Mala" in 1962. Viparita Virabhadrasana (Reversed Warrior Pose) is still more recent, and may have been created since 2000. Several poses that are now commonly practised, such as Dog Pose and standing asanas including Trikonasana (triangle pose), first appeared in the 20th century, as did the sequence of asanas, Surya Namaskar (Salute to the Sun). A different sun salutation, the Aditya Hridayam, is certainly ancient, as it is described in the "Yuddha Kaanda" Canto 107 of the "Ramayana". Surya Namaskar in its modern form was created by the Raja of Aundh, Bhawanrao Shriniwasrao Pant Pratinidhi; K. Pattabhi Jois defined the variant forms Surya Namaskar A and B for Ashtanga Yoga, possibly derived from Krishnamacharya. Surya Namaskar can be seen as "a modern, physical culture-oriented rendition" of the simple ancient practice of prostrating oneself to the sun.


title: Asana

text: In 1966, Iyengar's classic "Light on Yoga" was able to describe some 200 asanas, consisting of about 50 main poses with their variations. Sjoman observes that whereas many traditional asanas are named for objects (like Vrikshasana, tree pose), legendary figures (like Matsyendrasana, the sage Matsyendra's pose), or animals (like Kurmasana, tortoise pose), "an overwhelming eighty-three" of Iyengar's asanas have names that simply describe the body's position (like Utthita Parsvakonasana, "Extended Side Angle Pose"); these are, he suggests, the ones "that have been developed later". A name following this pattern is Shatkonasana, "Six Triangles Pose", described in 2015. Mittra illustrated 908 poses and variations in his 1984 "Master Yoga Chart", and many more have been created since then. The number of asanas has thus increased with time, as summarised in the table.


title: Asana

text: Sjoman notes that the names of asanas have been used "promiscuous[ly]", in a tradition of "amalgamation and borrowing" over the centuries, making their history difficult to trace. The presence of matching names is not proof of continuity, since the same name may mean a different pose, and a pose may have been known by multiple names at different times. The estimates here are therefore based on actual descriptions of the asanas.


title: Asana

text: The asanas of hatha yoga originally had a spiritual purpose within Hinduism, the attainment of samadhi, a state of meditative consciousness. The scholar of religion Andrea Jain notes that medieval Hatha Yoga was shared among yoga traditions, from Shaivite Naths to Vaishnavas, Jains and Sufis; in her view, its aims too varied, including spiritual goals involving the "tantric manipulation of the subtle body", and at a more physical level, destroying poisons. Singleton describes Hatha Yoga's purpose as "the transmutation of the human body into a vessel immune from mortal decay", citing the "Gheranda Samhita"'s metaphor of an earthenware pot that requires the fire of yoga to make it serviceable. Mallinson and Singleton note that the purposes of asana practice were, until around the fourteenth century, firstly to form a stable platform for pranayama, mantra repetition (japa), and meditation, practices that in turn had spiritual goals; and secondly to stop the accumulation of karma and instead acquire ascetic power, tapas, something that conferred "supernatural abilities". Hatha Yoga added the ability to cure diseases to this list. Not all Hindu scriptures agreed that asanas were beneficial. The 10th century "Garuda Purana" stated that "the techniques of posture do not promote yoga. Though called essentials, they all retard one's progress," while early yogis often practised extreme austerities (tapas) to overcome what they saw as the obstacle of the body in the way of liberation.


title: Asana

text: The yoga scholar and practitioner Theos Bernard, in his 1944 "Hatha Yoga: The Report of a Personal Experience", stated that he was "prescribed … a group of asanas calculated to bring a rich supply of blood to the brain and to various parts of the spinal cord .. [and] a series of reconditioning asanas to stretch, bend, and twist the spinal cord" followed when he was strong enough by the meditation asanas. Bernard named the purpose of Hatha Yoga as "to gain control of the breath" to enable pranayama to work, something that in his view required thorough use of the six purifications.


title: Asana

text: Asanas work in different ways from conventional physical exercises, according to Satyananda Saraswati "placing the physical body in positions that cultivate awareness, relaxation and concentration". Leslie Kaminoff writes in "Yoga Anatomy" that from one point of view, "all of asana practice can be viewed as a methodical way of freeing up the spine, limbs, and breathing so that the yogi can spend extended periods of time in a seated position."


title: Asana

text: Iyengar observed that the practice of asanas "brings steadiness, health, and lightness of limb. A steady and pleasant posture produces mental equilibrium and prevents fickleness of mind." He adds that they bring agility, balance, endurance, and "great vitality", developing the body to a "fine physique which is strong and elastic without being muscle-bound". But, Iyengar states, their real importance is the way they train the mind, "conquer[ing]" the body and making it "a fit vehicle for the spirit".


title: Asana

text: Iyengar saw it as significant that asanas are named after plants, insects, fish and amphibians, reptiles, birds, and quadrupeds; as well as "legendary heroes", sages, and avatars of Hindu gods, in his view "illustrating spiritual evolution". For instance, the lion pose, Simhasana, recalls the myth of Narasimha, half man, half lion, and an avatar of Vishnu, as told in the "Bhagavata Purana". The message is, Iyengar explains, that while performing asanas, the yogi takes the form of different creatures, from the lowest to the highest, not despising any "for he knows that throughout the whole gamut of creation ... there breathes the same Universal Spirit." Through mastery of the asanas, Iyengar states, dualities like gain and loss, or fame and shame disappear.


title: Asana

text: Sjoman argues that the concept of stretching in yoga can be looked at through one of Patanjali's "Yoga Sutras", 2.47, which says that [asanas are achieved] by loosening ("śaithilya") the effort ("prayatna") and meditating on the endless ("ananta"). Sjoman points out that this physical loosening is to do with the mind's letting go of restrictions, allowing the natural state of "unhindered perfect balance" to emerge; he notes that one can only relax through effort, "as only a muscle that is worked is able to relax (that is, there is a distinction between dormancy and relaxation)." Thus asanas had a spiritual purpose, serving to explore the conscious and unconscious mind.


title: Asana

text: Since the mid-20th century, asanas have been used, especially in the Western world, as physical exercise. In this context, their "overtly Hindu" purpose is masked but its "ecstatic … transcendent … possibly subversive" elements remain. That context has led to a division of opinion among Christians, some asserting that it is acceptable as long as they are aware of yoga's origins, others stating that hatha yoga's purpose is inherently Hindu, making Christian yoga an evident contradiction or indeed "diametrically opposed to Christianity". A similar debate has taken place in a Muslim context; under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, yoga, formerly banned as a Hindu practice, has been legalised, while mainly-Hindu Bali has held a yoga competition in defiance of a ruling by Indonesia's Muslim Ulema Council.


title: Asana

text: In a secular context, the journalists Nell Frizzell and Reni Eddo-Lodge have debated (in "The Guardian") whether Western yoga classes represent "cultural appropriation". In Frizzell's view, yoga has become a new entity, a long way from the "Yoga Sutras" of Patanjali, and while some practitioners are culturally insensitive, others treat it with more respect. Eddo-Lodge agrees that Western yoga is far from Patanjali, but argues that the changes cannot be undone, whether people use it "as a holier-than-thou tool, as a tactic to balance out excessive drug use, or practised similarly to its origins with the spirituality that comes with it".


title: Asana

text: From a Hindu perspective, the practice of asanas in the Western world as physical exercise is sometimes seen as yoga that has lost its way. In 2012, the Hindu American Foundation ran a "Take Back Yoga" campaign to emphasise yoga's roots in Hinduism.


title: Asana

text: In the West, yoga is practiced mainly by women. For example, in Britain in the 1970s, women formed between 70 and 90 percent of most yoga classes, as well as most of the yoga teachers. It has been suggested that yoga was seen as a support for women in the face of male-dominated medicine, offering an alternative approach for chronic medical conditions, as well as to beauty and ageing, and it offered a way of meeting other women. Singleton notes that women in yoga are in the tradition of Mollie Bagot Stack's 1930 League of Health and Beauty, influenced by Stack's visit to India in 1912 when she learnt some asanas, and in turn of Genevieve Stebbins's Harmonic Gymnastics.


title: Asana

text: Asanas have, or are claimed to have, multiple effects on the body, both beneficial and harmful. These include the conscious usage of groups of muscles, effects on health, and possible injury especially in the presence of known contraindications.


title: Asana

text: A 2014 study indicated that different asanas activated particular groups of muscles, varying with the skill of the practitioners, from beginner to instructor. The eleven asanas in the Surya Namaskar sequences A and B (of Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga) were performed by beginners, advanced practitioners and instructors. The activation of 14 groups of muscles was measured with electrodes on the skin over the muscles. Among the findings, beginners used pectoral muscles more than instructors, whereas instructors used deltoid muscles more than other practitioners, as well as the vastus medialis (which stabilises the knee). The yoga instructor Grace Bullock writes that such patterns of activation suggest that asana practice increases awareness of the body and the patterns in which muscles are engaged, making exercise more beneficial and safer.


title: Asana

text: Medieval hatha yoga texts make a variety of claims for the benefits brought by the asanas, both spiritual and physical. The "Hatha Yoga Pradipika" (HYP) states that asanas in general, described as the first auxiliary of hatha yoga, give "steadiness, good health, and lightness of limb." (HYP 1.17) Specific asanas, it claims, bring additional benefits; for example, Matsyendrasana awakens Kundalini and makes the semen steady; (HYP 1.27) Paschimottanasana "stokes up the digestive fire, slims the belly and gives good health"; (HYP 1.29) Shavasana "takes away fatigue and relaxes the mind"; (HYP 1.32) Siddhasana "bursts open the door to liberation"; (HYP 1.35) while Padmasana "destroys all diseases" (HYP 1.47) and if done together with retention of the breath in pranayama confers liberation. (HYP 1.44–49) These claims lie within a tradition across all forms of yoga that practitioners can gain supernatural powers, but with ambivalence about their usefulness, since they may obstruct progress towards liberation. Hemachandra's "Yogashastra" (1.8–9) lists the magical powers, which include healing, the destruction of poisons, the ability to become as small as an atom or to go wherever one wishes, invisibility, and shape-shifting.


title: Asana

text: The asanas have been popularised in the Western world by claims about their health benefits, attained not by medieval hatha yoga magic but by the physical and psychological effects of exercise and stretching on the body. The history of such claims was reviewed by William J. Broad in his 2012 book "The Science of Yoga". Broad argues that while the health claims for yoga began as Hindu nationalist posturing, it turns out that there is ironically "a wealth of real benefits".


title: Asana

text: Physically, the practice of asanas has been claimed to improve flexibility, strength, and balance; to alleviate stress and anxiety, and to reduce the symptoms of lower back pain. Claims have been made about beneficial effects on specific conditions such as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and diabetes. There is evidence that practice of asanas improves birth outcomes and physical health and quality of life measures in the elderly, and reduces sleep disturbances and hypertension. Iyengar yoga is effective at least in the short term for both neck pain and low back pain.


title: Asana

text: The National Institutes of Health notes that yoga is generally safe "when performed properly", though people with some health conditions, older people, and pregnant woman may need to seek advice. For example, people with glaucoma are advised not to practise inverted postures. The "Yoga Journal" provides separate lists of asanas that it states are "inadvisable" and should be avoided or modified for each of the following medical conditions: asthma; back injury; carpal tunnel syndrome; diarrhoea; headache; heart problems; high blood pressure; insomnia; knee injury; low blood pressure; menstruation; neck injury; pregnancy; and shoulder injury.


title: Asana

text: The practice of asanas has sometimes been advised against during pregnancy, but that advice has been contested by a 2015 study which found no ill-effects from any of 26 asanas investigated. The study examined the effects of the set of asanas on 25 healthy women who were between 35 and 37 weeks pregnant. The authors noted that apart from their experimental findings, they had been unable to find any scientific evidence that supported the previously published concerns, and that on the contrary there was evidence including from systematic review that yoga was suitable for pregnant women, with a variety of possible benefits.


title: Asana

text: In the "Yoga Sutras", the only rule Patanjali suggests for practicing asana is that it be "steady and comfortable". The body is held poised with the practitioner experiencing no discomfort. When control of the body is mastered, practitioners are believed to free themselves from dualities such as heat and cold, hunger and satiety, or joy and grief. This is the first step toward relieving suffering by letting go of attachment.


title: Asana

text: Different schools of yoga, such as Iyengar and The Yoga Institute, agree that asanas are best practised with a rested body on an empty stomach, after having a bath. From the point of view of sports medicine, asanas function as active stretches, helping to protect muscles from injury; these need to be performed equally on both sides, the stronger side first if used for physical rehabilitation.