Greene, Jack. Pursuit of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Summary
This book proposes a “social development” model to understand the emergence of American cultural patterns. This model sees colonial development going through three distinct stages: simplification (disorientation/new environment) to Elaboration (acculturation/adaption/settlement and population expansion) to Replication (acceptance). It thus challenges the assumption that the development of American culture can be told within a framework derived from the New England experience and treat the southern colonial experience as an exception; this is what Greene defines as the “Declension Model.” Greene contends that American culture emerged beginning around 1660 as a product of the social convergence of the four broad cultural regions – the Chesapeake, New England, the Middle Colonies, and the Lower South. Far from being a peripheral area (deviant), the southern colonies and states were before 1800, the mainstream of British-American development. It was a region that, he argues, exemplified the most important element of British-American culture: the conception of America as a place in which free people could pursue their own individual happinesses in safety and with a fair prospect. Thus, New England was more of the deviant region, rather than the normative.

See also: Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom