Mobility.

No matter where a visitor to colonial America looked, he or she could find people on the move. For many individuals and families, in fact, the long move that brought them across the Atlantic to America was only the longest in a series of moves that began in the British Isles or on the European continent. The Pilgrims who settled Plymouth colony had first left England to seek refuge from religious persecution in Holland before embarking for the New World. Families who sailed from England to Massachusetts Bay could often remember when they, their parents, or their grandparents had first moved from country villages to larger English towns such as Ipswich and Great Yarmouth in search of jobs in manufacturing. Thousands of single young people traveled from the seventeenth-century English countryside to London in search of opportunity. Many of them took...