Providence Island, 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony
Karen Ordahl Kupperman (born 23 April 1939) is an American historian who specializes in colonial history in the Atlantic world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.[1]
Karen Kupperman married Joel J. Kupperman, professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut. They have two children, Michael Kupperman and Charlie Anders Kupperman. While the children were young, Kupperman taught at the University of Connecticut. She moved to the University of Cambridge for two years with her family, earning a PhD in 1978. She then taught at the University of Connecticut until 1995. She was a Mellon Faculty Fellow at Harvard University from 1980 to 1981. In 1995 she became a professor of history at New York University.[2]
Kupperman's focus has been on contacts and ventures in the Atlantic world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
and on the interactions between the participants.[3]
Kupperman’s Apathy and Death in Early Jamestown won the Binkley-Stephenson Award of the Organization of American Historians for the best article in The Journal of American History in 1980.[4] Her best-known work may be her 1993 Providence Island, 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony, which won the American Historical Association's Albert J. Beveridge Award. Barbadian historian Sir Hilary Beckles has said of this work that it "makes a seminal contribution to early West Indian economic and social history."
Her 2000 book Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America won the AHA Prize in Atlantic History.[1]
Her 2007 interpretation of the settlement of early Virginia, The Jamestown Project, argues that the activity of the Virginia Company and the establishment of Jamestown, Virginia must be viewed within the broader context of English expansionary efforts, and that the structure of a functional colony was evolved through trial and error.
A reviewer said she merged these ideas well, and produced an engaging and accessible work.[5]