American Colonies Books – History 1600s, 1700s

Books about Colonial America – Collection

Free pdf books about colonial America. U.S. History 1607-1775. Some book titles: The history of the United States of America from the discovery of the continent, The original United States of America, Making thirteen colonies, The British colonies in North America, Understanding the Declaration of Independence, The Revolutionary War Era, Women of colonial America, The Colonial era, The colonial wars, prelude to the American Revolution; the struggle between France and Great Britain for supremacy in North America: 1689-1763, Founding the American colonies, Early America, The story of the Thirteen Colonies, Provincial America, 1690-1740, The colonial experience; readings in early American history, The British colonies, The colonial period, 1607-1750, The Explorers and settlers : a sourcebook on colonial America, Colonial times, 1600-1700, Early settlers in America: Jamestown, Plymouth, and Salem, the peoples of early North America, The Atlantic Frontier: colonial American civilization, 1607-1763.

Books about Colonial America Politics & Government to 1775 – Collection

Free pdf books about US politics and government to 1775. Some book titles: Roots of the Republic : American founding documents interpreted, The founding of America, The origins of American politics, Politics and society in colonial America, Foundations of colonial America: a documentary history, The provincial governor in the English colonies of North America, The varieties of political experience in eighteenth-century America, American political writing during the founding era, 1760-1805, A Benjamin Franklin reader.

Books on U.S. Colonial Era Social Life & Customs to 1775 – Collection

Free online books about life in Colonial America; American social history to 1775. Some book titles: Colonial living, Colonial crafts, Artisans, Colonial life, The writer’s guide to everyday life in Colonial America, Growing up in colonial America, Life in the American colonies, Colonial America to 1763, Home life in colonial days, Daily life in colonial America, How the colonists lived, Holidays and celebrations in colonial America, Child life in colonial days, The American woman in Colonial and Revolutionary times, 1565-1800, Colonial folkways : a chronicle of American life, Colonial women of affairs : women in business and the professions in America before 1776, Inventors and inventions in colonial America, Sexual revolution in early America, Life in the American colonies : daily lifestyles of the early settlers, Life in a colonial town.

Books about Puritans in America – Collection

Free pdf books about Puritans in American history. Some book titles: Puritanism : opposing viewpoints, Life among the Puritans, The Puritans in America : a narrative anthology, The Puritan tradition in America, 1620-1730, The worship of the English Puritans, John Winthrop : politician and statesman, The New England Puritans, figures of nonconformity in early modern England, The charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, The American Puritans, their prose and poetry, Puritan New England : essays on religion, society, and culture.

Road to the American Revolution – Books Collection

Free online books on the causes of the American Revolution, at the Internet Archive. Some book titles: The colonial background of the American revolution, colonial radicals and the development of American opposition to Britain, 1765-1776, The causes of the American Revolution, the story of the Boston Tea Party and the beginning of the American Revolution, Smugglers & patriots : Boston merchants and the advent of the American Revolution, The coming of the Revolution, 1763-1775, Great Britain and the American colonies, 1754-1783, The Stamp Act of 1765, Thomas Hutchinson and the origins of the American Revolution, Colonies in revolt, The Revolutionary War home front, Events leading to the American Revolution, The Boston Massacre, The navigation acts and the American Revolution.

Colonials and Patriots: Historic Places Commemorating Our Forebears 1700-1783 –

Author: Bloom, John Porter and Utley, Robert M., eds.

U.S. Dept. of Interior, National Park Service 1964

A volume in the series, “The National Survey of Historic Sites and Buildings”. Part I: Colonials and Patriots: The Historical Background. Part II: National Survey of Historic Sites and Buildings. Approximately 180 sites and buildings are profiled.

The Americans: the Colonial Experience

Author: Boorstin, Daniel J.

Random House 1958

“This study of colonial America attempts to show that it was not merely an offshoot of the mother country, but a new civilization… The author centers his highly informative work on colonial education, the special qualities of American speech, and the growth of a distinct culture.” -Booklist.

Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743-1776

Author: Bridenbaugh, Carl

Oxford University 1971

“A masterly history of urban life in the Colonies that recreates, by a brilliant synthesis of contemporary documents, the authentic temper and spirit of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Newport and Charleston during the crucial years preceding the American Revolution. From civic archives, letters, contemporary books, periodicals, speeches and tracts, from every imaginable source of record, Mr. Bridenbaugh has fashioned a vast and amazingly coherent portrait of early metropolitan America.” -Book cover.

Term Paper Resource Guide to Colonial American History

Carpenter, Roger M., ed.

ABC-CLIO 2009

Students from high school age to undergraduate will use this volume to get a jumpstart on assignments in Colonial American history with the hundreds of term paper suggestions and research information offered here in an easy-to-use format. Users can quickly choose from the 100 important events, ranging from the first attempt at colonization at the Lost Colony of Roanoke, Virginia, in 1585 to the ratification of the Constitution in 1791.

Colonial America: An Encyclopedia of Social, Political, Cultural, and Economic History

Author: Ciment, James

Sharpe Reference 2006

“This encyclopedia captures it all: the people, institutions, ideas, events, and the creation of the first three hundred years of American history. While it focuses on the thirteen British colonies stretching along the Atlantic, Colonial America sets this history in its larger contexts. Entries also cover Canada, the American Southwest and Mexico, and the Caribbean and Atlantic world directly impacting the history of the thirteen colonies. This encyclopedia explores the complete early history of what would become the United States, including portraits of Native American life in the immediate pre-contact period, early Spanish exploration, and the first settlements by Spanish, French, Dutch, Swedish, and English colonists.” Publisher.

The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment

Author: Commager, Henry Steele

Anchor/Doubleday 1977

“The foremost American historian of his generation delves into the nation’s European origins, illuminating how the new country embodied the principles of the Enlightenment–ideals that Europe, trapped by tradition and privilege, could not itself realize. “…crystalline clarity of…writing [causes] explosions in the reader’s mind…history to be pondered and cherished.”–The New York Times. “Learning and reason are at the service of a mind whose understanding of democracy gains brilliance and power from a passion for…freedom.”–Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

Home and Child life in Colonial Days

Author: Earle, Alice Morse; Glubok, Sherley, ed.

MacMillan 1969

“Abridged from Earle’s “Home Life in Colonial Days” (1898) and “Child Life in Colonial Days.”(1899). An illustrated, popular history of everyday life.

Explorers and Settlers: Historic Places Commemorating the Early Exploration and Settlement of the United States

Author: Ferris, Robert G., ed.

U.S. Dept. of Interior, National Park Service 1968

This is a volume in the series, “The National Survey of Historic Sites and Buildings”. This volume has two parts. The first offers a brief, narrative background for the period of early exploration and settlement. The second consists of evaluations and descriptions of historic sites and structures associated with the period. Over 250 such sites are profiled.

Empires at War: The French and Indian War and the Struggle for North America, 1754-1763

Author: Fowler, William M.

Walker 2005

On September 13, 1759, after a daring and unexpected ascent up a steep bluff, Wolfe’s English troops confronted Montcalm’s French troops and Canadian irregulars on the Plains of Abraham. The battle that followed determined Canada’s destiny, but it was only one of many confrontations on several continents in what historians consider the first global war. The central drama, the part of the conflict that took place in North America, has become known as the Seven Years’ War.
Empires at War captures the sweeping panorama of this first world war and the huge cast of characters who fought it. William Fowler’s narrative is adept at describing the battles and portraying the important players on all sides, incorporating the perspectives of the First Nations leaders and Canadian volunteers so critical to French initiatives throughout the war. Among the war’s many outcomes were the ceding of Quebec to Britain and the final destruction of Acadia. The war was also waged in Europe, the West Indies, Asia, India and Africa. Before it ended, nearly 1,000,000 men had died.

The American Colonial Mind and the Classical Tradition; Essays in Comparative Culture

Gummere, Richard M.

Harvard University 1963

“This book is concerned with … the impact of Greek and Roman ideas on the lives and thoughts of the men who settled and colonized America from the Jamestown of 1607 to the establishment of the United States in 1789. For a clear understanding of these personalities and activities, it has seemed best to present their indebtedness in the form of essays, largely biographical …” – Preface.

Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War

Philbrick, Nathaniel

Viking 2006

From the perilous ocean crossing to the shared bounty of the first Thanksgiving, the Pilgrim settlement of New England has become enshrined as our most sacred national myth. Yet, as bestselling author Nathaniel Philbrick reveals in his spellbinding new book, the true story of the Pilgrims is much more than the well-known tale of piety and sacrifice; it is a fifty-five-year epic that is at once tragic, heroic, exhilarating, and profound.
The Mayflower’s religious refugees arrived in Plymouth Harbor during a period of crisis for Native Americans as disease spread by European fishermen devastated their populations. Initially the two groups—the Wampanoags, under the charismatic and calculating chief Massasoit, and the Pilgrims, whose pugnacious military officer Miles Standish was barely five feet tall—maintained a fragile working relationship. But within decades, New England would erupt into King Philip’s War, a savagely bloody conflict that nearly wiped out English colonists and natives alike and forever altered the face of the fledgling colonies and the country that would grow from them.

War on the Run: The Epic Story of Robert Rogers and the Conquest of America’s First Frontier

Ross, John F.

Bantam 2009

Often hailed as the godfather of today’s elite special forces, Robert Rogers trained and led an unorthodox unit of green provincials, raw woodsmen, farmers, and Indian scouts on “impossible” missions in colonial America that are still the stuff of soldiers’ legend. The child of marginalized Scots-Irish immigrants, Rogers learned to survive in New England’s dark and deadly forests, grasping, as did few others, that a new world required new forms of warfare. John F. Ross not only re-creates Rogers’s life and his spectacular battles with breathtaking immediacy and meticulous accuracy, but brings a new and provocative perspective on Rogers’s unique vision of a unified continent, one that would influence Thomas Jefferson and inspire the Lewis and Clark expedition. Rogers’s principles of unconventional war-making would lay the groundwork for the colonial strategy later used in the War of Independence—and prove so compelling that army rangers still study them today. Robert Rogers, a backwoods founding father, was heroic, admirable, brutal, canny, ambitious, duplicitous, visionary, and much more—like America itself.

The First American Revolution

Rossiter, Clinton

Harcourt, Brace 1984

“From his monumental study of the political ideas that sustained the rise of liberty in Colonial and Revolutionary America, ‘Seedtime of the Republic’, Clinton Rossiter has culled the present volume. The First American Revolution is a selective account Of the government, religion, social structure, and intellectual life of the thirteen colonies. “What I have tried to do,” Mr. Rossiter states, “is to describe the total environment as one extremely favorable to the rise of liberty, and to single out those facets which seemed most influential in creating this environment.”” -Book cover.

King Philip’s War: The History and Legacy of America’s Forgotten Conflict

Schultz, Eric B. and Tougias, Michael J.

Countryman 1999

King Philip’s War–one of America’s first and costliest wars–began in 1675 as an Indian raid on several farms in Plymouth Colony, but quickly escalated into a full-scale war engulfing all of southern New England.
At once an in-depth history of this pivotal war and a guide to the historical sites where the ambushes, raids, and battles took place, King Philip’s War expands our understanding of American history and provides insight into the nature of colonial and ethnic wars in general. Through a careful reconstruction of events, first-person accounts, period illustrations, and maps, and by providing information on the exact locations of more than fifty battles, King Philip’s War is useful as well as informative. Students of history, colonial war buffs, those interested in Native American history, and anyone who is curious about how this war affected a particular New England town, will find important insights into one of the most seminal events to shape the American mind and continent.

The Golden Age of Colonial Culture

Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Annapolis, Williamsburg, Charleston

Wertenbaker, Thomas J.

Cornel University 1975

The eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment “produced a great flowering of American culture, since England was to colonial America as Greece was to Rome. Like Rome, the colonies borrowed their cultural beginnings and then transformed them into something peculiarly their own. Thomas Wertenbaker here examines the cultural development of six colonial centers – Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Annapolis, Williamsburg, and Charleston. He synthesizes a wide range of source materials to provide a lively picture of the particular culture of each city and the diverse influences and traditions which shaped it.” -Book cover.

Dutch Explorers, Traders and Settlers in the Delaware Valley, 1609-1664

Weslager, Clinton A.

University of Pennsylvania 1961

Contents: Henry Hudson – First expedition – Island in the Delaware – Swanendael tragedy – Indians-and the building of Fort Nassau – Intruders, forts and beaver trade – Secret instructions for Peter Minuit – Building activities and architecture – Dutch maps and geographical names – End of the Dutch era.

The Origins of American Slavery: Freedom and Bondage in the English Colonies

Wood, Betty

Hill and Wang 1997

Though the English did not begin their colonization of the New World with the intention of enslaving anyone, by the end of the seventeenth century chattel slavery existed in each of England’s American colonies. Why? And why did the English enslave West Africans rather than native Americans or Europeans? Historians have usually stressed either racial ideology or determining economic and demographic factors, but Betty Wood suggests that a more complex rationale was at work. In this important new analysis, Wood begins by exploring the meanings of freedom and bondage in sixteenth-century English thought and the ideas that men and women of Tudor England had about Africans and native Americans. She studies their prejudices against non-Christians, their responses to models of slavery in the Spanish and French colonies, and their assessment of their own labor shortages, and in the light of these various factors interprets the decision of the English to resort to slave labor in the colonies. She then follows the spread of slavery through the seventeenth century, from the Caribbean and the Carolinas to Virginia tobacco country and finally among the Puritans and Quakers farther north.

A Brave Vessel: The True Tale of the Castaways who rescued Jamestown and Inspired Shakespeare’s The Tempest

Woodward, Hobson

Viking 2009

Merging maritime adventure and early colonial history, A Brave Vessel charts a little-known chapter of the past that offers a window on the inspiration for one of Shakespeare’s greatest works. In 1609, aspiring writer William Strachey set sail for the New World aboard the Sea Venture, only to wreck on the shores of Bermuda. Strachey’s meticulous account of the tragedy, the castaways’ time in Bermuda, and their arrival in a devastated Jamestown, remains among the most vivid writings of the early colonial period. Though Strachey had literary aspirations, only in the hands of another William would his tale make history as The Tempest-a fascinating connection across time and literature that Hobson Woodward brings vividly to life.