hello and welcome to our into the 18th century lecture today we're going to be looking at what groups immigrated to the English North American colonies in the 18th century which are the years of the 1700s and we'll be looking at what Regional differences developed between New England the middle and southern colonies as well as the eastern and western portions of those colonies we'll also look at what political developments occurred between 1700 and 1750 so by the start of this lecture we basically got most of the 13 colonies established and we're kind of looking at generally what's going on in this early half of the century and we'll be looking at different political developments until we get to the French and Indian War in later lectures and then very quickly into American independence so we left off talking about how terribly violent and mismanaged the English colonies were in the 17th century and we can see that most clearly in the year 1776 in which you have overlapping really violent events in New England we have King Philip's and down in Virginia at Jamestown we have Bacon's Rebellion super violent events that threatened the English colonial government in both places and some of the uncertainty coming out of those events culminates in the Salem Witch Hunt in the Massachusetts Bay Colony when scared colonists blamed at first the most vulnerable among them for the bad things that were happening that they didn't understand and couldn't control luckily as the colonies moved into the 18th century things settled down a little bit rapid population growth and diversity meant that social and religious cohesiveness and Puritan influence declined a little bit they're going to have to put up with other people by this point so just five years after the Salem Witch Hunt the Massachusetts General Court issued a public apology and eventually granted monetary compensation to the families of those they'd executed five years before in the 18th century British North America grew in population it grew in wealth and self-government they've got more people more money and more say in their government in 1600 there were about 75 000 people in New England by 1700 a quarter Million by 1760 1.6 million and almost 2 million by the revolution and this growth was the result of a lot of smaller changes the population growth rate increased as infant mortality declined and as immigration increased we'll have more non-english immigrants coming to the colonies in this period creating greater ethnic diversity though the English was still the largest group and while a bunch of Europeans may not sound like a lot of diversity to us Thomas Payne will later argue that England cannot be the mother country of these colonies because of this diversity that England shouldn't rule over such an ethnically diverse population colonists had longer life expectancies in the 18th century than previously in New England life expectancy was almost 70 for men and about 63 for women and while yellow fever and cholera remained common diseases like malaria and dysentery were less of a problem now than they'd been in the 1600s colonists were developing resistance and had better living conditions so if you think about it if you're healthy when you catch the flu in Jamestown you're probably going to fare a lot better than if you were barely getting enough calories to survive and then got sick on top of that so colonists had better living conditions that led to them having more resistance to these diseases because they were surviving them low population density also helped prevent epidemics by isolating the sick and colonies will also have pretty strict quarantine laws when epidemics break out Additionally the science of inoculation developed and they began inoculating healthy people so they wouldn't die if and when they caught a lethal virus and the most lethal virus that everyone feared in colonial America was smallpox so smallpox creates pustules all over the body on the skin filled with pus and at least since the 16th century the Chinese practiced a version of inoculation called insufflation which is basically they would take that pus out of those pustules and they would dry it out they'd let it dry and then they would blow that dried smallpox matter into the nose they would inhale this matter from at least the 17th century India Africa and the Ottoman Empire had practiced a form of inoculation called variolation dipping a sharp iron needle into that dried smallpox matter weakening it with the heat and then puncturing the skin of a healthy person with that needle now the Turkish method as it was called was introduced to British scientists in the 17 teens and Lady Mary Wortley Montague who used to stay on the slide brought this method from Turkey back to England and she was allowed to experiment on orphans and prisoners but she showed that it worked and she introduced the method of the British public in 1721 but that is not how Americans and the colonies found out about it it was the enslaved African onisimus who taught the Reverend Cotton Mather about inoculation basically Mather commented that there was an outbreak going on and asked onesimus if they had similar outbreaks in Africa and he explained that they didn't because they did this thing that made it so that they didn't have to worry about that so the Reverend Cotton Mather begins an initial trial of inoculation of variation that showed about six deaths out of the 244 people he inoculated that's a 2.4 death rate now the natural exposure death rate is 14 so that's actually really good but also still scary to undergo because that's still a two percent death rate so there was a great debate amongst colonists over inoculation the Reverend Cotton Mather called it a gift from God those opposed said that disease was God's will that they were messing with the will of God they even attempted to firebomb Mather's house leaving a note saying I will inoculate you with this that we could only read because the bomb didn't go off eventually smallpox vaccines were developed using the related cow pox virus which is not lethal to people so you do the same process as variolation with that iron needle but you're using cow pox to do it which means the death rate is basically zero because cowpox is not lethal to people and yet if you've had cow pox you'll never have smallpox and if you've had cowpox or smallpox a single time you're probably not going to have smallpox again for the rest of your life so these cowpox vaccines were created that's actually where the word vaccine comes from vodka meaning cow cowpox but to explain this process of variation a little bit more I found the least gross version of this I could get for you uh which is going to focus on the variolation side using the actual smallpox inoculation which is what they used for decades if you want the grosserversion look on YouTube for clips from the HBO miniseries about John Adams specifically the scenes where he has his family inoculated but take a look at the less gross version in the lecture