Resources
Do you have a hankering to bake Narragansett journey cake or plumb the depths of 17th century medicine? Are you searching for the latest best-reads in history? Scroll down for our resources - and let us know if you’ve found another great resource we should add.
Publications
From their table to yours
Savor the taste of early Massachusetts with the Partnership of Historic Bostons’ 24-page recipe booklet, The Pleasure of the Taste.
From Narragansett venison stew to English pippin tart − it’s yours for the cooking! We offer recipes from the English, New England and Native American past, modernized for today’s kitchen. Based on original recipes from 17th century cookery books, the Plimoth Patuxet Museums, and the Tomaquag Museum.
Contact us to purchase a copy of The Pleasure of the Taste for $5 plus postage.
17th century medicine defined
From caudle to zotica, 17th century medicine abounded in terms that today leave us mystified. At least, that’s what we found when we offered our Partnership of Historic Bostons’ 2017 fall lecture series on medicine and mortality. What is a humor, and why do we have four? What’s a lithotomy − and why did people dread it? To answer these and other questions, we created a short glossary of 17th century medical terminology. Here’s an online version.
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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 new books, and some that we just want to recommend. Check back! We’ll be updating this list.
General
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.
Grandjean, Katherine. American Passage: The Communications Frontier in Early New England. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.
Hall, David D. The Puritans: A Transatlantic History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019.
Philbrick, Nathaniel. Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War. New York: Penguin, 2006.
Silverman, David J. This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.
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. First Founders: American Puritans and Puritanism in an Atlantic World. Lebanon, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2012.
Bremer, Francis J. Puritanism: A Very Short History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Bremer, Francis J. John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Cooper, James F. Tenacious of Their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Hall, David D. A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England. New York, Knopf, 2011.
Morgan, Edmund S. The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop. New York: Pearson, 2007.
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.
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.
black new england
Greene, Lorenzo, The Negro in Colonial New England. New York: Columbia University Press, 1942.
Handouts for Recovering Black History: A Workshop, presented by Michelle Stahl, Monadnock Center for History and Culture, and Jennifer Carroll, Historical Society of Cheshire County, April 17, 2024, for local historians identifying the Black community in early New England:
Slavery
Secondary sources
Allibhai, Aabid, “Race & Slavery at the First Church in Roxbury: The Colonial Period, 1631-1775,” Unitarian Universalist Church, February 3, 2023.
Boles, Richard, Dividing the Faith: The Rise of Segregated Churches in the Early American North. New York: New York University Press, 2020.
DasSarma, Anjali, and Linford D. Fisher, “The Persistence of Indigenous Unfreedom in Early American Newspaper Advertisements, 1704-1804,” Slavery & Abolition, March 30, 2023, 1-25.
Fisher, Linford D., “‘Why Shall Wee Have Peace to Bee Made Slaves’: Indian Surrenderers During and After King Philip’s War,” Ethnohistory 64, no.1 (January 1, 2027), 91-114.
Gonzalez, Eduardo, “Of One Blood? Cotton Mather’s Christian Slavery”, historicbostons.org
Hardesty, Jared Ross, Black Lives, Native Lives, White Worlds: A History of Slavery in New England. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019.
Hardesty, Jared Ross, Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century Boston. New York: New York University, 2016.
Harvard University, “Responsibility and Repair: Legacies of Indigenous Enslavement, Indenture, and Colonization at Harvard and Beyond,” conference, November 2 and 3, 2023.
Harvard University, “Report of the Presidential Committee on Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery.” Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2022.
Manegold, C.S. Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.
Maskiell, Nicole Safford, “‘Here Lyes the Body of Cicely Negro’: Enslaved Women in Colonial Cambridge and the Making of New England History,” New England Quarterly, vol. XCV, no. 2, June 2022.
Newell, Margaret Ellen, “Our Hidden History: Roger Williams and Slavery’s Origins,” Providence Journal and Bulletin, August 29, 2020.
Newell, Margaret Ellen, “The Changing Nature of Indian Slavery in New England, 1670-1720,” in Colin G. Calloway and Neal Salisbury, eds., Reinterpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience. Boston: The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2003, 106-136.
Newell, Margaret Ellen, Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015.
Sesay Jr., Chernoh M., “The Revolutionary Black Roots of Slavery’s Abolition in Massachusetts,” in New England Quarterly, vol. LXXXVII, no. 1, March 2014.
Tucker, Wayne, Eleven Names Project: Recovering Enslaved People of Massachusetts, substack
Warren, Wendy. New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America. New York: Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2018.
Primary sources
Jonathan Edwards’s church records from Northampton, Mass., Congregational Library & Archives.
“Flora's confession and testimony, 1749 July 23” from the Second Church of Ipswich, Mass., Congregational Library & Archives.
Mather, Cotton, A Good Master Well Served. A Brief Discourse on the Necessary Properties & Practices of a Good Servant in Every-Kind of Servitude. Boston: B. Green and J. Allen, 1696.
Mather, Cotton, The Negro Christianized. An Essay to Excite and Assist that Good Work, The Instruction of Negro-Servants in Christianity. Boston: B. Green, 1706.
Mather, Cotton, “Rules for the Society of Negroes,” broadsheet, 1693.
Sewell, Samuel, The Selling of Joseph: A Memorial. Boston: printed by Bartholomew Green and John Allen, 1700.
Stolen Relations: Recovering Stories of Indigenous Enslavement in the Americas.
Native peoples
William Apess. On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot, ed. Barry O’Connell. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.
Bragdon, Kathleen J. Native People of Southern New England, 1500-1650. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996.
——————————-. Native People of Southern New England, 1650-1775. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020.
Brooks, Lisa. Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018.
Calloway, Colin G. After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 1997.
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.
Lopenzina, Drew, Through an Indian’s Looking-Glass: A Cultural Biography of William Apess, Pequot. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2017.
Lopenzina, Drew, Red Ink: Native Americans Picking Up the Pen in the Colonial Period. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012.
Mandell, Daniel R. Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England, 1780-1880. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.
National Park Service, “Native Americans and the Boston Harbor Islands.”
O’Brien, Jean M. Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
Soliz, Chester P. The Historical Footprints of the Mashpee Wampanoag: Appeal to the Great Spirit. Sarasota, Florida: Bardolf & Company, 2001.
Strobel, Christoph. Native Americans of New England. Praeger, 2020.
Waabu O’Brien, Frank, Understanding Indian Place Names in Southern New England. Boulder: Bauu Press, 2010.
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.
Williams, Roger. A Key Into the Language of America, ed. Dawn Dove, Sandra Robinson, Loren Spears, Dorothy Herman Papp, Kathleen Bragdon. The Tomaquag Museum Edition. Yardley, PA: Westholme Publishing, 2019.
The tribes of the Eastern Woodlands also provide important histories of their people, including museums. This is not a complete list.
Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center
Mashantucket (Western) Pequot Tribal Nation
Massachusett Tribe at Ponkapoag
Nulhegan Abenaki Tribe at Nulhegan-Memhremagog
Wampanoag Tribe of Chappaquidick
Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah)
