In the decades following England’s 1655 conquest of Spanish Jamaica, the western Caribbean became the site of overlapping and competing claims—to land, maritime spaces, and people. English Jamaica, located in the midst of Spanish American port towns and shipping lanes, was central to numerous projects of varying legality, aimed at acquiring Spanish American wealth. Those projects were backdrop to a wide-ranging movement of people who made their own claims to political membership in developing colonial societies, and by extension, in Atlantic empires. Boundaries of Belonging follows the stories of these individuals—licensed traders, smugglers, freedom seekers, religious refugees, pirates, and interlopers—who moved through the contested spaces of the western Caribbean. Though some were English and Spanish, many others were Sephardic, Tule, French, Kalabari, Scottish, Dutch, or Brandenberg. They also included creole people who identified themselves by their local place of origin or residence--as Jamaican, Cuban, or Panamanian. As they crossed into and out of rival imperial jurisdictions, many either sought or rejected Spanish or English subjecthood, citing their place of birth, their nation or ethnicity, their religion, their loyalty, or their economic or military contributions to colony or empire. Colonial and metropolitan officials weighed those claims as they tried to impose sovereignty over diverse and mobile people in a region of disputed and shifting jurisdictions. These contests over who belonged in what empire and why, and over what protections such belonging conferred, in turn helped to determine who would be included within a developing law of nations.

Through networks of trails and rivers inland and established ocean routes across the seas, seventeenth-century Virginians were connected to a vibrant Atlantic world. They routinely traded with adjacent Native Americans and received ships from England, the Netherlands, and other English and Dutch colonies, while maintaining less direct connections to Africa and to French and Spanish colonies. Their Atlantic world emerged from the movement of goods and services, but trade routes quickly became equally important in the transfer of people and information.Much seventeenth-century historiography, however, still assumes that each North American colony operated as a largely self-contained entity and interacted with other colonies only indirectly, through London. By contrast, in "Atlantic Virginia," historian April Lee Hatfield demonstrates that the colonies actually had vibrant interchange with each other and with peoples throughout the hemisphere, as well as with Europeans.

This book is about My son Tyler Geiger. Tyler lived with CP for 10 years until the tragic accident that took his life.This book is about how I never held Tyler back from doing anything in life. From going to camp to riding horses. I hope that this book will help parents with disabled children to let them live and enjoy life. Just because you have a disablity doesn't mean you can't do evrything everyone else does. Our children need to enjoy life just as we have.This book also shows how Tyler touched so many people in life and the lessons he taught them.