Colonial New England

Bernard Bailyn gives us a compelling account of the first great transit of people from Britain, Europe, and Africa to British North America, their involvements with each other, and their struggles with the indigenous peoples of the eastern seaboard.

A devout Puritan minister in 17th-century New England, Roger Williams was also a social critic, diplomat, theologian, and politician who fervently believed in tolerance. Banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635, Williams purchased land from the Narragansett Indians and laid the foundations for the colony of Rhode Island as a place where Indian and English cultures could flourish side by side, in peace. James A. Warren tells the remarkable and little-known story of the alliance between Roger Williams's Rhode Island and the Narragansett Indians, and how they joined forces to retain their autonomy and their distinctive ways of life against Puritan encroachment.

Frontier: the word carries the inevitable scent of the West. But before Custer or Lewis and Clark, before the first Conestoga wagons rumbled across the Plains, it was the East that marked the frontier - the boundary between complex Native cultures and the first colonizing Europeans.Here is the older, wilder, darker history of a time when the land between the Atlantic and the Appalachians was contested ground - when radically different societies adopted and adapted the ways of the other, while struggling for control of what all considered to be their land.

This stunning anthology of classic colonial suspense fiction plunges deep into the native soil from which American horror literature first sprang. While European writers of the Gothic and bizarre evoked ruined castles and crumbling abbeys, their American counterparts looked back to the colonial era’s stifling religion, and its dark and threatening woods.

The Sabbath in Puritan New England by Alice Morse Earle published by Charles Scribner’s Sons 1891.

Set against the backdrop of the Age of Exploration, Black Flags, Blue Waters reveals the dramatic and surprising history of American piracy's "Golden Age" when lawless pirates plied the coastal waters of North America and beyond. Best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin illustrates how American colonists at first supported these outrageous pirates in an early display of solidarity against the Crown, and then violently opposed them. Upending popular misconceptions and cartoonish stereotypes, Dolin provides this wholly original account of these seafaring outlaws.

When the Mayflower reaches Plymouth in 1620, survival—not romance—is on everyone's mind. Yet amid the brutal winter that claims half the settlers, an unexpected connection forms between John Alden, a skilled cooper with no family ties, and Priscilla Mullins, a merchant's daughter who loses everything. As spring brings new life to the struggling colony, their relationship blossoms—until cultural differences pull them apart. John clings to tradition while Priscilla explores the healing wisdom of their Wampanoag neighbors. With military leader Miles Standish also pursuing Priscilla, John...

What if the local legends were true? What if the whispers from the past never faded? In the quiet corners of New England, where history holds a grudge, some stories are best left untold. From a lonely Vermont trail where a mysterious lantern lures hikers to their doom, to a historic Salem house where a 17th-century diary is not a journal but a trap, this collection unearths the terrifying truths behind the region’s most unsettling folklore. Venture to a salt-scoured lighthouse on the coast of Maine where the dead keeper still stands watch, walk the silent grounds of a Harvard graveyard ...

New England has always had a special place in the national memory. Its rich folklore and colorful history is woven into the national identity, and destinations such as Plymouth Rock, the lighthouses of Maine, and Vermont's autumn leaves are quintessential symbols of the United States. But New England has always had a dark side, a strange side. Monsters and ghosts lurk in its woods and old houses, and strange monuments that may be from a forgotten civilization puzzle local investigators.

Sometime between 1610 and 1611, William Shakespeare wrote The Tempest. The idea for the play came from the real-life shipwreck in 1609 of the Sea Venture, which was caught in a hurricane and grounded on the coast of Bermuda during a voyage to resupply England's troubled colony at Jamestown, in present-day Virginia. A lesser known passenger was Stephen Hopkins. During the 10 months the Sea Venture passengers were marooned on Bermuda, Hopkins was charged with trying to incite a mutiny and condemned to die, only to have his sentence commuted moments before it was to be carried out.

On April 19, 1775, the American Revolution began at the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts. The "shot heard round the world" catapulted this sleepy New England town into the midst of revolutionary fervor, and Concord went on to become the intellectual capital of the new republic. In The Minutemen and Their World, Robert Gross has written a remarkably subtle and detailed reconstruction of the lives and community of this special place, and a compelling interpretation of the American Revolution as a social movement.

The year is 1639. The governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony records a bizarre aerial event over Boston's Muddy River —the first documented UFO report in American history. It would not be the last. For centuries, the skies over New England have been a stage for the unbelievable. This meticulously researched chronicle uncovers the region's most compelling and chilling encounters with the unknown. Journey from the Puritan world of supernatural omens to the Cold War paranoia of nuclear alert scrambles and discover the shocking truth hidden in forgotten archives and eyewitness testimony. ...

Author Carol F. Karlsen reveals the social construction of witchcraft in 17th-century New England and illuminates the larger contours of gender relations in that society and attempts to answer the question why some women were vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft and possession.

Did you know that the first English settlement in the New World was a disaster? Perhaps you have heard the story of Roanoke before. Or maybe even the creation of Jamestown. But have you heard about the Spanish colonies in North America? Or the French and Dutch settlements? Colonial America was diverse, with European settlers from various nations coming to the New World and meeting the Native Americans who already inhabited the land. What were their interactions like? Was there any semblance of peace between all of the groups who called this land their home?

In her analysis of the cultural construction of gender in early America, Elizabeth Reis explores the intersection of Puritan theology, Puritan evaluations of womanhood, and the Salem witchcraft episodes. She finds in those intersections the basis for understanding why women were accused of witchcraft more often than men, why they confessed more often, and why they frequently accused other women of being witches.

In a work that fundamentally recasts the history of colonial America, Wendy Warren shows how the institution of slavery was inexorably linked with the first century of English colonization of New England. While most histories of slavery in early America confine themselves to the Southern colonies and the Caribbean, New England Bound forcefully widens the historical aperture to include the entirety of English North America.

At the end of 1618, a blazing green star soared across the night sky over the northern hemisphere. From the Philippines to the Arctic, the comet became a sensation and a symbol, a warning of doom or a promise of salvation. Two years later, as the Pilgrims prepared to sail across the Atlantic on...

A Sweeping HIstory of the Great State of Rhode Island America's smallest state has an outsized story to tell. From Roger Williams's radical experiment in religious freedom to Samuel Slater's mill that launched the Industrial Revolution, from the dark profits of the slave trade to the fierce struggles of immigrant mill workers, Rhode Island has been a laboratory for democracy's greatest promises and deepest contradictions. The Ocean State traces four centuries of Rhode Island history, revealing how a tiny colony of religious exiles became the birthplace of American industry, a haven for ...

Did you know that Plymouth was named by the explorer John Smith in 1608? Twelve years later, in 1620, the Pilgrims started their journey from Plymouth, England, and were blown off course, landing in Plymouth, North America. As if it was a sign from God, the Pilgrims decided not to continue their journey but to settle right where they landed, starting one of the earliest American communities.

A Sweeping History of the Great State of Massachusetts From the Puritan vision of a "city upon a hill" to the gleaming biotech corridors of the twenty-first century, Massachusetts has wielded influence on American life wildly disproportionate to its size. This sweeping history reveals a state of profound contradictions—simultaneously provincial and cosmopolitan, fiercely idealistic yet repeatedly compromising its principles, a beacon of progress that has often betrayed its own values. Daniel Hardy traces four centuries of transformation: the Puritan theocracy that banished dissenters ...