“My Brooks ancestors were among the earliest waves of emigrants to leave England and settle in North America. Once arrived, for centuries, they lived difficult and hard-bitten lives, eking out survival in place after place after place, and moving ever westward—from Virginia, to the Carolinas, Alabama, Arkansas, Texas, Arizona—in search of land they could hold on to and belong to once again,” writes early American literature scholar Joanna Brooks. “I have always wondered why my ancestors and thousands upon thousands of poor English abandoned their homelands to settle in the Americas.” This book ... More

“My Brooks ancestors were among the earliest waves of emigrants to leave England and settle in North America. Once arrived, for centuries, they lived difficult and hard-bitten lives, eking out survival in place after place after place, and moving ever westward—from Virginia, to the Carolinas, Alabama, Arkansas, Texas, Arizona—in search of land they could hold on to and belong to once again,” writes early American literature scholar Joanna Brooks. “I have always wondered why my ancestors and thousands upon thousands of poor English abandoned their homelands to settle in the Americas.” This book is the product of a years-long scholarly search for answers. Brooks uses her own family history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century working-class English emigration as a point of departure for a searching investigation of an untold dimension of American history. She locates in American folk ballads a treasure trove of clues to the catastrophic contexts that propelled early English emigration to the Americas, and she follows the songs back across the Atlantic to find histories of economic displacement, environmental destruction, and social betrayal at the heart of the early Anglo-American migrant experience. Why We Left offers an unprecedented glimpse into the way common English migrants understood and narrated their own place in history and the hard-bitten memories and sensibilities they passed down to their Anglo-American descendants.