The most recommended books about Colonial America

Written by a first-rate historian of wide learning, this is one of those rare books that causes one to rethink your assumptions about history. White brings climate change to the forefront in a book that ranges widely over the European settlement of America and looks at it from a climatic perspective. This is technically an academic book but is so nicely written that you’ll be glued to the page.

I love this book’s choc-a-block presentation of actual archival fragments from Jewish life in the British colonies that would eventually become Canada.

I also like that the book’s husband-wife, antiquarian, author team aimed to fuse together two objectives in one book: on the one hand, to paint a relatable picture of what Jewish life looked like during this period when Upper Canada was still being formed, and on the other hand, to account for the step-by-step process of Jews gaining civil rights in the new world.

When I teach Canadian Jewish history, I not only read this book with my students but also bring them into the archives that contain Godfrey’s trove of archival fragments of early Jewish Canadiana, which they collected before and while writing the book.

This is another sociologically inflected study, which broadens the context of belief behind witchcraft accusations. Like all the best work of the last forty years, it helps us to grasp the internal logic of witch-beliefs in the minds of intelligent and actually very sophisticated people, rather than falling back on the old chestnuts of hysteria, prejudice and the madness of crowds.

Weisman constantly reminds us that a supposed superstitious consensus (in contrast to the sceptical consensus of the modern world) simply didn’t exist. So much of the furious energy of thinking about witches was generated by disagreement and doubt. We’re also presented with conflicting and complementary opinions about witches, both from below in the neighbourhood, and from above among ministers and magistrates. In the end, as Weisman points out, however enduring beliefs about witchcraft may have been, as a crime it could not survive condemnation of the proofs, including so-called… show more.

How does Anna Belfrage produce book after wonderful book with (or so it seems) as much ease as a conjuror performs an intriguing magic trick?

How does she keep the Graham Saga going with each episode about the family so compelling and exciting through the next generation - and the next? Each new novel is exquisitely alive and fresh!

Times of Turmoil is a gripping tale of apparently ordinary people following their seemingly ordinary lives in Colonial America in 1718 – although given that the main characters have experienced travel through time, they are hardly ‘ordinary’.

Ms. Belfrage’s research is spot on, with just enough backstory from the previous books without overloading the details. An excellent series, with this latest contribution, no exception.

In Facing East, Richter uses both historical research and imagination to shift the perspective on early America from the west-facing European view to the east-facing Native American one. The result is a deeply researched, well written, and surprisingly moving book exploring a series of Native lives (Pocahontas, King Philip, Kateri Tekakwitha), events (Christian Indian missions, King Philip's War, the French and Indian War), and subjects (Native American trade, religion, the expansion of the English Empire).

I deeply enjoyed Archer’s book for its intimate depiction of Boston’s life under British occupation from 1768 until mid-1770.

It was a city under siege in many respects, with four thousand troops in a community of only sixteen thousand souls. The city’s streets –mostly paved with oyster shell—come to life with details on tavern fare, street life, troop encampment, epidemics, the violent celebrations of the annual Pope’s Day, popular song parodies, and the three hundred women who initiated a boycott of foreign tea.

Here too you can meet early patriot leaders like James Otis, who was rendered “insane” by a blow to the skull by a furious tax collector and wandered, raving, for years, until he was struck down by a lightning bolt. Archer’s book pulls you into the torment and the glory of life in a powder keg destined to explode.

American Passage’s portrayal of early New England as a fluid frontier where people, goods, and information traveled is excellent.

I like how Grandjean retells the English settlement of the region in terms of how people moved and communicated with one another. She forces readers to rethink our ideas of settler colonialism. In reality, English settlements were tiny islands in a vast sea of Indian lands.

As if life in a Puritan colony isn’t horrifying enough, there’s a monster hanging around, ready to rip everyone to holy shreds for their sins. That’s Slewfoot in a nutshell, but there’s so much more than that. I loved the main character, a confident English woman who was sold into marriage to a Puritan colonial man by her father (gee, thanks, Dad). Big surprise—Puritan life isn’t all that great for her, especially due to her new husband’s smarmy brother, who wants what’s theirs.

I enjoyed this remarkable book, which I’d describe as part folktale, part historical fiction, and part monster-ghost-fest. I really felt that I was there, and as a New England transplant myself, I felt a bit ashamed of the local ancestry’s absurd ways long gone. But as is my taste, the fantastic supernatural element and its complex world held most of my attention. I found this novel to… show more.

A ground-breaking work, which demonstrates how the theoretical witch was embodied by real women, and how a seemingly bizarre fantasy was plausible in among the shapes and rhythms of daily life. This influential study is as much a social, economic and cultural history of seventeenth-century New England as it is strictly speaking a history of witchcraft – indeed, Karlsen demonstrates clearly that the latter cannot be assimilated with an appreciation of the former. Context is everything, and without it we just fall back on stereotypes and tired assumptions.

Witches and neighbours were two-sides of the same coin, the former a projection of the hostile emotions of the latter, and, as Karlsen explains, this fraught relationship was fundamentally gendered. To appreciate how some people were accused of witchcraft, we need first to explore relationships between people in the community, including relations between women. Honour, reputation, age, status and so on, were… show more.

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.