Jamestown, after much painful experimentation, established the kinds of local institutions, beliefs, and practices that colonizers recognized as the prerequisites to successful settlement and that we have come to recognize as the seedbeds of the American republic. The Jamestown Project by Karen Ordahl Kupperman (392 pages, Belknap Press, 2009) “Discovery” has been a term and a process more subject to revision than most in recent decades. It was …