For readers of Nathaniel Philbrick's Mayflower, a revolutionary argument for replacing Plymouth Rock with Jamestown as America's founding myth.

In school, students are taught two origin stories for Colonial America. The first is the story of the pilgrims: hardworking, devoted, religious people who made a colony and thrived. The second is that of Jamestown, where lazy louts committed treasonous acts and nearly starved to death before they were rescued by food supplies and martial law from England.

But both of these interpretations come from English sources: they were written up by the very governors and lords the American people threw off roughly 150 years later. In Marooned, Joseph Kelly reexamines the events of Jamestown and comes to a radically different and decidedly American interpretation of these first Virginians.

In this gripping account of shipwrecks and mutiny and America's earliest settlements, Kelly argues that the colonists at Jamestown were literally and figuratively marooned, cut loose from civilization, and cast into a state of nature. In Jamestown, the British caste system meant little: those who wanted to survive needed to work and fight and intermingle with the nearby native populations.

The desperation of the colony meant that for the first time, centuries before Locke or Jefferson penned the words, all men were equal, and the colonists themselves began to insist on being their own masters and choosing their own fates.