74 books like One Small Candle

Bangs is the dean of Pilgrim history. Strangers and Pilgrims is a hard-to-find book these days, but if you want to go far deeper than most portraits of the Pilgrims do, it’s worth the search. Bangs focuses on the experience of the separatist Pilgrims in the Dutch city of Leiden (many of the Pilgrims went there around 1608, before traveling on the Mayflower in 1620) and shows how those years in the Dutch Republic shaped what followed. This is a richly illustrated, carefully researched, and cogent analysis of English separatists who made new lives for themselves in a strange land not just once, but twice.

If you want to learn about the Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony, the most essential source is Mayflower passenger and longtime governor William Bradford’s own history. Bradford explains the circumstances that led a portion of his congregation to transplant themselves to the New World, then goes year by year through the colony’s first three decades. His annals aren’t dry, though. Bradford also has a wicked sense of humor. If would-be colonists weren’t tough enough for what awaited them in New England, they should remain across the Atlantic “till at least they be mosquito proof.” You shouldn’t only read Bradford. He’s a partisan in this contentious history, after all. But you shouldn’t pass on one of the great works of seventeenth-century American non-fiction.

If you want to know the individual stories of the men, women, and children who traveled on the Mayflower, you won’t find a better short guide than Caleb Johnson. This book is concise and meticulously researched at the same time. Caleb Johnson is a indefatigable researcher whose efforts have brought forth new information about several Pilgrims. In The Mayflower and Her Pilgrims you can read about pious separatists, bastard children, and feisty servants, all in one well-organized and easy-to-digest book.

Historian Daniel Silverman tells the story of the Pilgrims amid recounting the experience of the Massasoit's Wampanoags who signed a defense treaty with Plymouth Governor John Carver that endured throughout the great chief's lifetime, about 40 more years. For me, one of the more telling vignettes in his account is that of the young Indian child forced to sing “This Land is Your Land” at a school Thanksgiving celebration on land that once had belonged to his people. His subtitle, "The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled Story of Thanksgiving" is appropriate to the history he relates, if not an understatement. Silverman's book provides a compassionate view of the complex path the Native Americans had to navigate with the Europeans who were pushing them out of the land they had inhabited for more than 12,000 years.

Former Historian General of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants, Stratton writes a complete treatment of the history and genealogy of the Plymouth Colony. While the book contains verbatim transcriptions of important documents and an annotated bibliography, which are manna to the writer of historical fiction, it also has informative chapters on law and order, inheritance, morality and sex, everyday life and manners, freemen and servants, and the diaspora of Pilgrim families to other towns in the colony. Thus, along with other books listed here, the research done by the author helped me to create the real world of the Plymouth Colony and allowed me to reinforce the concept that the Pilgrims were not so different from their millions of descendants four centuries later.

James Deetz was an American anthropologist and his wife, a cultural historian. Their book was the result of studying Plymouth Colony court transcripts, wills, probate listings, and rare firsthand accounts, and then combining the facts with archeological evidence from various sites in Plymouth. This book shows a reality of the Pilgrims and Pilgrim life very different from the straight-laced, nearly mythical images from the 18th and 19th centuries: an all too human group who wore bright clothing, drank, believed in witches, had premarital sex and adulterous affairs, and committed petty and serious crimes. This book is informative and eye-opening.

Simply put: this book is one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read.

PJ is a world-renowned artist who turned his hand to writing with this period piece, set aboard the famous ship bound for the new world. I had the enormous privilege of visiting PJ’s studio in Dublin several years ago and fell in love with his artwork on the spot.

In a world of flashy, computer-rendered illustrations, PJ’s style is timelessly beautiful.

The simplicity of the story, paired with the epic scope of his artwork makes this book a constant pleasure to revisit over and over again.

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history, Philbrick’s book tells the extraordinary story of the first fifty-five years of the Plimoth Colony, beginning with the arduous and perilous journey of the little wooden ship Mayflower and ending in the bloody King Philip’s War, which nearly wiped out the New England colonists and the native populations as well. Philbrick's writing style is compelling and never boring. This book is full of factual information and makes an old story new.

Well, the title was amusing. The rest of the book was fascinating, alarming, and totally surprising for an author who was researching the lives of Puritans in early New England. The public records, Puritan laws, along with Thompson’s analysis opened up a world of new information and removed every myth I’d heard about these staunchly religious people.

The Scarlet Letter is dripping with diction. Nathaniel Hawthorne chooses his words so carefully during certain descriptions that my language-loving self feels jealous about his precision. This classic explores sin, as well as the dark side of the soul. A vengeful old scholar is an unusual villain, but Roger Chillingworth in The Scarlet Letter is so smart and evil.