Want to know more?
The literature on early New England is vast, and important scholarship is published every year. Here’s a list of some of the classics, some of the best of new books, and some which we just want to recommend. We’ll be updating this list often, so be sure to check back or sign up for our emails.
General information
Bailyn, Bernard. The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.
Bremer, Francis J. One Small Candle: The Plymouth Puritans and the Beginning of English New England. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Bremer, Francis J. First Founders: American Puritans and Puritanism in an Atlantic World. Lebanon, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2012.
Hall, David D. A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England. New York, Knopf, 2011.
Hall, David D. The Puritans: A Transatlantic History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019.
Morgan, Edmund S. The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop. New York: Pearson, 2007.
Philbrick, Nathaniel. Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War. New York: Penguin, 2006.
Everyday life
Hall, David D. Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Deetz, James and Patricia Scott Deetz. The Times of Their Lives: Life, Love, and Death in Plymouth County. New York: Anchor Books, 2000.
Morgan, Edmund S. The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.
Puritanism
Bremer, Francis J. Puritanism: A Very Short History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Cooper, James F. Tenacious of Their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Rogers, Daniel. As a City on a Hill: The Story of America’s Most Famous Lay Sermon. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018.
Rogers-Stokes, Lori. Records of Trial from Thomas Shepard's Church in Cambridge, 1638-1649: Heroic Souls. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.
Slavery
Hardesty, Jared Ross. Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century Boston. New York: New York University, 2016.
Manegold, C.S. Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.
Newell, Margaret Ellen. Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015.
Native peoples
Brooks, Lisa. Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018.
DeLucia, Christine M. Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.
Demos, John. The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America. New York: Penguin, 1995.
Lepore, Jill. The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity. New York: Vintage, 1999.
Silverman, David J. This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.
Soliz, Chester P. The Historical Footprints of the Mashpee Wampanoag: Appeal to the Great Spirit. Sarasota, Florida: Bardolf & Company, 2001.
Warren, James. God, War and Providence: The Epic Struggle of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians against the Puritans of New England. New York: Scribner Publishing, 2018.
Women
LaPlante, Eve. American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, the Woman Who Defied the Puritans. New York: Harper Collins, 2004.
Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England 1650 – 1750. New York: Vintage, 1980/1991.
Jan Davidszoon de Heem, Student in his Study,
original in the Ashmolean, Oxford University