Population.

In 1700 about 250,000 inhabitants, white and black, lived along the seaboard and in the foothills of the Appalachians. Most of the whites were of English descent. Hundreds of thousands of Indians inhabited the backcountry. By 1776 the population of the colonies was about 2.5 million; immigration and a high birthrate were responsible for this tremendous growth. About one-half of the population in 1776 had migrated from the Old World—Europe or Africa—or were the children of immigrant parents. Traveling across the colonial landscape in the 1750s and 1760s, one would have heard a staggering variety of languages and dialects.

Germans.

About 10 percent of the population in the mid 1700s was German-speaking. Approximately five hundred thousand people emigrated from southwestern Germany and Switzerland in the eighteenth century: not all went to the New World. Many went north to Prussia;others went east to the Danube; and about...