Old World Customs.

European colonists came to America with assumptions about what constituted a good house, family, farm, community, food, and entertainment. They drew these ideas from what they had known in the Old World, and they poured all of their energy into re-creating that manner of living in their new surroundings. Colonists exchanged exotic Algonquian names of rivers, hills, and places for familiar English, German, Dutch, or Spanish ones. They clustered traditional houses in the village patterns they had known in Europe, giving them familiar names such as Plymouth, Boston, and Ipswich. European settlers displayed loyalty to their monarchs by giving important towns names such as Jamestown, Charlestown, and Williamsburg. They sought to establish traditional European families and to eat, drink, dress, live, and be buried at death in European ways.

Adaptation.

Yet for all their efforts to re-create Old World patterns in the New World, those...