100 books like This Land Is Their Land

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.

Most people knows that the Pilgrims were religious, but most Americans today know very little about the beliefs and practices that animated the separatists who chose to leave England and the Dutch Republic and cross the ocean. Francis Bremer is the best possible guide to this essential part of the Pilgrim story. Bremer knows puritanism better than anyone, and he knows how to fit the Pilgrims into that larger framework. In One Small Candle (the title comes from William Bradford’s history), Bremer explains how the lay leadership of men and women was central to separatism and to the religious organization of the colony.

The best source of information about the Pilgrim journey from their origin as Puritan/Dissenters in Scrooby, England. Bradford, who would serve multiple terms as governor of Plymouth Plantation, gives the lie to many of our commonly held beliefs about the Pilgrims and their experiences fleeing England, living in Holland, and coming to New England. He is detailed, candid, and very readable. Seeing the story from his first-person point of view helped me to see the Pilgrims as flawed individuals, whether appropriating a tribe's entire cache of seed corn on their first day on Cape Cod, Bradford's being upended in a snare set to trap animals, or their first Indian guest entering the settlement and asking for beer, it is not, ironically, the traditional Pilgrim story.

Historian George Willison has published an account of the Pilgrims, who called themselves Saints (or Saincts) and the Strangers, or non-Puritan workmen who filled out their company, in a conversational style that sets the record straight on many of the Pilgrim “facts” we always have accepted. For example, not only is there no evidence that the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, no one even suggested the idea until the son of a colonist who arrived several years after the original Pilgrims, mentioned it in passing when he was in his 90s. Willison's narrative has the quality of listening to Grandpa telling stories from his childhood and wonderfully complements primary documents. 

Not often does a history text make me guffaw. Hendrik van Loons writing is an exception. His scholarship is serious, his delivery casual and delightful. In 1922, Van Loon won the first Newberry Prize for his children's book, The History of Mankind.

The Story of America is not a linear history; it is more like an explanation, of putting it all together, around a campfire. Van Loon assumes the reader's familiarity with the events of history, and he makes value judgments and simplifies the complex with no loss of significance. It is more an explanation of history and motivation than a history of events.

Sub-titled “A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth,” this first-person account of the Pilgrims' early years includes detail not found in Bradford's account. As Winslow's purpose was to attract new immigrants to support Plymouth Plantation, he tends to paint a much rosier picture than the more straightforward Bradford. This book's advantage is that it was written contemporaneously.

When Caleb’s Crossing came out I couldn’t wait to read it. Not only was it written by one of my favorite authors, it was inspired by a true story and set in the same place and time period as the novel I was working on. Brooks’ depiction of the love between a Puritan minister’s daughter and the son of a Wampanoag leader is fraught with tension as two very different cultures collide. The novel brings to life the forces driving the conflict through the characters of Bethia and Caleb as they struggle to navigate a perilous time and the looming prospect of war.

This book had me at the premise. College sophomore Avery Delacorte is flying home for Thanksgiving when her plane goes down in the Rocky Mountains. She and Colin, a teammate from her college swim team, survive, along with three young boys. Avery and Colin have to keep themselves, and the boys, alive for five days in the mountains during a snowstorm. I love the way this book shows the struggle of surviving in the wilderness during the winter and explores the complicated feelings Avery has after rescue and the impact those feelings have on her relationships.