100 books like Dunmore's New World

A comprehensive examination of the Ohio Valley native nations during the decades leading up to Dunmore’s War. Though the covering of the actual campaign makes up a small portion of this book, any researcher desiring a balanced view of the conflict for land in the Ohio couldn’t ask for a better resource than A Country Between.

Osprey books are often the best place to start when researching a new historical topic. While writing my novel, Many Sparrows, I relied on this slender volume more than any other. Richly illustrated, packed with maps, vivid without getting bogged down in detail… if you want to begin delving into the topic of Dunmore’s War (Point Pleasant being its single notable battle), this is the book for you.

Part of the “History of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier” series, this book presents readers with many entertaining and informative accounts of Ohio life throughout the frontier era. The period covered in this book is just over 100 years, so Dunmore’s War, while given attention, is not explored in detail. Still, I found this book a valued and comprehensive survey that helped me to understand the political and cultural factors that led to the conflict in 1774, as well as what followed after.

Yet another book about the Ohio frontier broader in scope than Dunmore’s War, but a chapter in this book is devoted to it. What sets this book apart is its focus on individual men and women who struggled to survive (and in some instances shaped) the constant wars on the Ohio frontier during the period: Daniel Boone; Chief Logan; the Zane family; Simon Kenton; Lewis Wetzel; the Girty brothers; George Rogers Clark, and more. The examination of their lives and the events they witnessed, lived through, and helped shape, lends a fuller picture of life during this turbulent era.

How did the Virginia slaveholders somehow become the most celebrated spokesmen for “liberty” and “equality” in the Revolutionary Era even though they all owned hundreds of slaves? Morgan contends that to understand this paradox one has to go back to 17th-century colonial Virginia where American slavery and American freedom emerged together. Moreover, argues Morgan, those days not only had a profound effect on the American Revolution and the Early Republic, but on everything that has happened since.

Finally, Henry Spelman gets his own book! There is no shortage of Jamestown literature on John Smith, Pocahontas, John Rolfe, and Chief Powhatan, but Karen Ordahl Kupperman’s Relation of Virginia: A Boy’s Memoir of Life with the Powhatans and the Patawomecks offers the intriguing account of Henry Spelman, a 14-year-old English boy sent to live with the Chesapeake Algonquians during highly volatile times between Virginia’s indigenous population and the Jamestown colonists. 

I find this book particularly compelling for multiple reasons: it reverses traditional narrative roles and details a member of colonial society who was placed in servitude to the Indigenous population, it was one of very few examples of first-hand historical testimony from an adolescent (none survive from 1580's Roanoke, and only Alonso de Olmos offered an eyewitness account of the annihilation of the Ajacan Jesuits in 1570), and it has often been glossed over by Jamestown scholars.

Fiction allows for the portrayal of a kind of absorption in the processes and materials of a historical period that is unusual in nonfiction. It can give a powerful sense of how time actually passed for people. Vermeer’s chaotic domestic routine as a painter was splendidly imagined by Tracy Chevalier in Girl with a Pearl Earring, for example. But the technical innovators of the Dutch Golden Age – the telescopists, the astronomers, the surveyors and engineers – are yet to be celebrated in this way. Sadly, nobody has written the story of Simon Stevin, who built a sand-yacht that could outrun a galloping horse as it whipped along the Dutch strand, or of Cornelis Drebbel, who demonstrated a submarine for King James I that mysteriously managed to stay underwater with its crew for several hours in the River Thames.

However, Stella Tillyard has performed this service on behalf of… show more.

The issues that led to the American Revolution are often oversimplified, and discussion of them can lose the human element, as well as the complexities of the issues and effects they had on real people.

A key example is the quartering of British troops “among the people” in America. The details of this grievance with the British government are widely misunderstood – troops were not quartered in private homes, as is often incorrectly written; instead, the British Quartering Acts constituted an indirect form of taxation.

This book explains the complications and implications of quartering in a wonderfully readable manner, clarifying the perspectives of governments and citizens on both sides. It is a book about people, and how the laws affected them.

This novel, published in 2000 by the University Press of New England, has in my opinion never gained the readership it deserves. It’s a rich, funny, deeply humane captivity tale based on the true story of Nathan Blake, who was taken by Algonkian-speaking people from his home in Keene, New Hampshire, in 1746, and brought up to Canada, where he was held for three years as a slave. The novel weaves a defamiliarized but extremely plausible-feeling tapestry of early colonial America that complicates the stereotypes established by Cooper’s influential novel set in the same period, and Hebert’s main character, Caucus-Meteor—an elderly, multilingual Indian and the last survivor of his band—is by my lights one of the great characters in literature.

Pearsall’s book is the sort that leaves a reader entertained, deeply informed, and unable to see the past the same way again. Polygamy, she shows, was at the center of the social and political systems of many Indigenous nations. As European soldiers and settlers attempted to trade with—or dominate—the people of these nations, they provoked violent reprisals. Opposition to monogamy drove Indigenous resistance movements. Europeans increasingly argued that their monogamous practices made them racially and religiously superior to the people they subordinated. The centrality of metaphors about monogamy and polygamy to American revolutionary political ideas is one of the book’s most enlightening—and entertaining—contributions in a book rich with surprises.