American Colonies Books – History 1600s, 1700s

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

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. American history 1600s, 1700s.

The Americans: the Colonial Experience – American Colonies Books

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. American colonies books.

Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743-1776 – American Colonies Books

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. American colonies books, American history 1600s, 1700s.

Term Paper Resource Guide to Colonial American History – American Colonies 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. American colonies books.

Colonial America: An Encyclopedia of Social, Political, Cultural, and Economic History – American Colonies Books

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. American history 1600s, 1700s.

The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment – American History 1700s

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. American colonies books, American history 1600s, 1700s.

Home and Child life in Colonial Days – American Colonies History

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. Books on colonial America.

Explorers and Settlers: Historic Places Commemorating the Early Exploration and Settlement of the United States – American Colonies Books

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. American colonies books, American history 1600s, 1700s.

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

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. American colonies books.

The American Colonial Mind and the Classical Tradition; Essays in Comparative Culture – American History 1700s, 1600s

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. American colonies books, American history 1600s, 1700s.

Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War – American Colonies History

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, American history 1600s, 1700s.

War on the Run: The Epic Story of Robert Rogers and the Conquest of America’s First Frontier – American History 1700s

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. American colonies books.

The First American Revolution – American Colonies History

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. American colonies books, American history 1600s, 1700s.

King Philip’s War: The History and Legacy of America’s Forgotten Conflict – American Colonies Books

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. American colonies books, American history 1600s, 1700s.

The Golden Age of Colonial Culture – American Colonies Books

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. American colonies books.

Dutch Explorers, Traders and Settlers in the Delaware Valley, 1609-1664 – American Colonies History

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. American colonies books.

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

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. American colonies books, American history 1600s, 1700s.

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

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. American colonies books, American history 1600s, 1700s.