The most recommended books about Colonial America

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.

Jane-Emily is a YA classic, both a sweet romance and a spooky ghost mystery, set in the early 1900s. 

It’s also the book I described in my introduction as the one that made me fall in love with this genre! I first read it when I was about ten, and I immediately recommended it to my best friend, who was also an avid reader. To this day, we are both still scared of those mirrored gazing balls people display in gardens.

When my own children were young, I bought an old paperback on eBay and read it to them, savoring the story that I’ve re-read so many times once again. Even after all these years, Emily’s ghost still delivers chills as she unleashes her wrath on the innocent nine-year-old Jane, and the romance developing between Jane’s young aunt and an old friend of the family plays a part.

One exciting… show more.

Pre-revolution America is not usually my era for historical fiction but when I tell you that this novel grabs you with visceral detail, I mean it. Smells, textures, glares—everything is so vividly told! The resistance in this novel is really simple survival, as the whole New England village seems to have it in for our heroine Ruth. But she stubbornly holds out, trying to forge a path forward for herself. We get treated to some local politics, some ship lore, run-ins with Indigenous Nations (some good, some bad) and local brigands, and always anchored in Ruth’s evolving notions of right and wrong. The ending was also delicious. Think Last of the Mohicans meets Cold Mountain, but with a surprise for our heroine.

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 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.

When the deities dedicated to the history of the French and Indian War got together to recommend their own list of the best books on the war that made America, they made Francis Parkman’s multi-volume work required reading. And the good news is that even if they had not, it is worth diving into headfirst.

The French and Indian War is often overshadowed by the American and then French Revolutions that followed on its heels. Yet, neither of them would have ever happened without the completely lopsided British victory in the first. Parkman, writing in the Nineteenth Century, was among the first scholars to shed light on the immense impact wrought by the fight for control over North America in the 1750s. His work is massive as it digs into the very origins of both countries’ humble beginnings and rapid growth in the New World. But fear not! If his… show more.

A Place Called Freedom attracted me instantly because of its multiple settings (Scotland, London, and Virginia) and the theme of ordinary people struggling against adversity. 

The novel provides vivid insight into governmental repression of religion and the denial of basic human rights. As a historian, I enjoy reading historical fiction. Follett is a master of his craft, blending human interest stories with accurate history. Through his characters, he shows how people lived and reacted to historical events.

A Place Called Freedom transports the reader into the years prior to the American Revolution, and his vivid geographical descriptions made me feel like “I was there!”  

The fourth book of the series that spawned the hit TV show Outlander is notable for a number of things, not the least of which is the debut of Rollo, a wolf/Irish wolfhound hybrid who’s won in a game of dice by the Frazers’ nephew, Ian Murray.

Quickly becoming Ian’s shadow, Rollo goes on to be a constant presence throughout the series, sometimes intimidating, sometimes exasperating, and often comforting to those under his watch.

Rollo is a very good dog and a definite highlight of this dramatic series that’s a wild mash-up of historical and science fiction.

I loved this book for being historical fiction at its finest, and I loved the main character, Mary Deerfield, for being a woman who did not fit within her own time.

It’s 1660s Boston, and Mary is married to an abusive man. Determined not to die at his hand, she must fight against everything in her society to free herself from her marriage.

I loved how this book so insightfully explored the dynamics of an abusive relationship while also bringing to vivid life a distant time and place. 

A fascinating exploration of the Salem witch trials that illustrates how the New England girls whose accusations lead to the wrongful execution of thirteen innocent women and imprisonment of some two hundred more were victims of war trauma in the Maine woods. During the so-called King Phillip’s War, Puritan immigrants who seized land as part of their Massachusetts Bay Colony Charter waged horrific, brutal battles with Native Americans defending their land from coveters and invaders. Their wives and children were there to witness and suffer it. This book was a key to my greater understanding of the land seizure and other events that led to and fueled the Salem Witch trials.