I finished The Colonial Experience by Daniel Boorstin on the plane trip home from Seattle. The book is the first in the famous historian's series, The Americans.

One of the things I liked best about Boorstin's book is that the reader actually learns something, rather than being subjected to an endless barrage of the author's opinions and theories. I haven't stepped back and absorbed the book enough to give a proper review, but here are a few interesting pieces of trivia I picked up about our colonial forebears.

In 1658, the Massachusetts Bay colony made Quakerism a crime punishable by death. Pennsylvania did not reciprocate against the Puritans, but even the Friends in Pennsylvania made murderers and traitors subject to the death penalty. Colonial Virginia made voting compulsory amongst those eligible. The trustees who ran Georgia forebade landowners without male heirs to pass on their estates--to their families at least. So, who got the land? The trustees, of course. By the time of the Revolution, the colonies boasted nine degree-granting institutions; England, two.

The Colonial Experience is the 17th and best book I've read in 2004. Hopefully, the two other volumes in Boorstin's trilogy will meet the first book's high standards.