Daniel Denton’s A Brief Description of New-York: A Pre-Industrial American Dream
Keywords:
Daniel Denton, colonial America, American Dream, frontier ideology, agrarianism, early American literatureAbstract
This article analyzes Daniel Denton’s A Brief Description of New-York, an eyewitness account published in 1670 that served as an early English advertisement for the colony. The paper explores how Denton’s tract presented New York as an agrarian paradise, emphasizing climate, topography, economic potential, and relations with Native Americans to attract immigrants. The author contends that Denton’s work, while romantically appealing, was a partial account that omitted socio-political controversies to focus on material advantages. This study examines the literary and intellectual connections between Denton’s thesis and later American ideologies, such as Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian paradise and Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis. The article demonstrates how Denton’s materialistic bias was likely well-considered given contemporary political interests, but his vision of wealth and standing for hard-working individualists was undermined by the rapid engrossment of land by wealthy planters.
(The abstract and keywords were prepared retrospectively for indexing purposes using AI-assisted tools and editorial review, based on the original article. They did not appear in the original publication.)
References
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