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Includes American Historical Review and Journal of American History.
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Credo Reference: HISTORY

New England History Books in the Library

A Midwife's Tale

Drawing on the diaries of a midwife and healer in eighteenth-century Maine, this intimate history illuminates the medical practices, household economies, religious rivalries, and sexual mores of the New England frontier.

Age of Homespun

Using objects that Americans have saved through the centuries and stories they have passed along, as well as histories teased from documents, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich chronicles the production of cloth--and of history--in early America. Ordinary household goods provide the key to a transformed understanding of cultural encounter, frontier war, Revolutionary politics, international commerce, and early industrialization in America.

New England Bound

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.

Changes in the Land

William Cronon examines the ecological changes that occurred in New England from the beginning of the colonial period until the end of the eighteenth century.

The Shoemaker and the Tea Party

George Robert Twelves Hewes, a Boston shoemaker who participated in such key events of the American Revolution as the Boston Massacre and the Tea Party, might have been lost to history if not for his longevity and the historical mood of the 1830's.

Encyclopedia of New England: The Culture and History of an American Region

An essential work, the first to celebrate, document, and interpret New England's unique regional history and culture.

Shadows in the Valley

Explores the impact of changing medical practices on ordinary people in nineteenth-century America.

Children in Colonial America

Though it would be hard to tell from the historical record, European colonists and people enslaved from Africa had children, as did the indigenous families whom they encountered, and those children's life experiences enrich and complicate our understanding of colonial America. Through essays, primary documents, and contemporary illustrations, Children in Colonial America examines the unique aspects of childhood in the American colonies between the late sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries.

The Devil in the Shape of a Woman

For more than three hundred years we have been haunted by the question of why women in the early years of our country were vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft and possession? Carol F. Karlsen reveals the social construction of witchcraft in seventeenth-century New England and illuminates the larger contours of gender relations in that society.

Mary Coffin Starbuck and the Early History of Nantucket

Here is the dramatic history of the early days of Nantucket seen through the eyes of its foremost settlers, the island's "great woman," the legendary Mary Coffin Starbuck. The story recounts her family's voyage from England to the Bay Colony in 1642, and then her life in New England.

Indian New England Before the Mayflower

In offering here a highly readable yet comprehensive description of New England's Indians as they lived when European settlers first met them, the author provides a well-rounded picture of the natives as neither savages nor heroes, but fellow human beings existing at a particular time and in a particular environment. He dispels once and for all the common notion of native New England as peopled by a handful of savages wandering in a trackless wilderness.

The Unredeemed Captive

Nominated for the National Book Award, this book is set in colonial Massachusetts where, in 1704, a French and Indian war party descended on the village of Deerfield, abducting a Puritan minister and his children. Although John Williams was eventually released, his daughter horrified the family by staying with her captors and marrying a Mohawk husband.

The Pequot War

An analysis of the Pequot War (1636-1637), a pivotal event in New England colonial history. After years of peace, Puritan settlers mounted a brutal assault on the Pequot Indians of Connecticut. This book refutes claims that the settlers acted defensively to counter a Pequot conspiracy.

The Invasion of America

Studies the cultural devastation of Atlantic coastal Indian tribes by European civilization, particularly New England Puritans, and the creation of an ideology to justify the cruelty.

King Philip's War

King Philip's War was the most devastating conflict between Europeans and Native Americans in the 1600s. In this incisive account, award-winning author Daniel R. Mandell puts the war into its rich historical context.

The Puritan Family

The Puritans came to New England not merely to save their souls but to establish a "visible" kingdom of God, a society where outward conduct would be according to God's laws. This book discusses the desire of the Puritans to be socially virtuous and their wish to force social virtue upon others.

The Times of Their Lives

The utterly absorbing and real story of the lives of the Pilgrims, whose desires and foibles may be more recognizable to us than they first appear. Americans have been schooled to believe that their forefathers, the Pilgrims, were somber, dark-clad, pure-of-heart figures who conceived their country on the foundation of piety, hard work, and the desire to live simply and honestly. But the truth is far from the portrait painted by decades of historians.

New England Frontier

In contrast to most accounts of Puritan-Indian relations, New England Frontier argues that the first two generations of Puritan settlers were neither generally hostile toward their Indian neighbors nor indifferent to their territorial rights. Rather, American Puritans-especially their political and religious leaders-sought peaceful and equitable relations as the first step in molding the Indians into neo-Englishmen. This changed when accumulated Indian resentments culminated in the war of 1675.

A Little Commonwealth

This groundbreaking study examines the family in the context of the colony founded by the Pilgrims who came over on the Mayflower. Basing his work on physical artifacts, wills, estate inventories, and a variety of legal and official enactments, Demos portrays the family as a structure of roles and relationships, emphasizing those of husband and wife, parent and child, and master and servant.

Daily Life in Colonial New England

Life for the individuals who chose to come to New England during the Colonial Period was anything but easy. This reference resource explores the everyday details of colonial life in New England and exposes as myth much of what we might believe about this era, environment and people. How exactly and why did their religious beliefs help structure their lives? What roles did women play in this society? How were people tried and punished for their crimes? Students can find thoroughly researched answers to these questions and others to help them learn exactly what everyday life was like for New Englanders during the Colonial Period. Students may be surprised to find what a large role the environment played in these people's lives, from the structuring of their homes to their diet and health. Religion was a driving force for most of them, in ways that may be difficult for modern-day readers to understand. Here readers will find an excellent description of how religion could play the role it did and how it affected the details of everyday living. Details of the lives of the Native Americans in New England during this era as well as Africans who had been brought to this location by the settlers are also provided.

Captors and Captives

On February 29th, 1704, a party of French and Indian raiders descended on the Massachusetts village of Deerfield, killing 50 residents and capturing more than a 100 others. within a framework stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes. They show how the assault grew out of the aspiration of Nw England family farmers, the ambitions of Canadian colonists, the calculations of French officials, the fears of Abenaki warriors, and the grief of Mohawk women as they all struggled to survive the ongoing confrontation of empires and cultures. of a variety of individuals involved, examining how captives and captors negotiated cultural boundaries. They take in social, political, literary, religious and military history, and reveal connections between cultures and histories usually considered separate.

Colonial Intimacies

In 1668 Sarah Ahhaton, a married Native American woman of the Massachusetts Bay town of Punkapoag, confessed in an English court to having committed adultery. For this crime she was tried, found guilty, and publicly whipped and shamed; she contritely promised that if her life were spared, she would return to her husband and "continue faithfull to him during her life yea although hee should beat her againe." These events, recorded in the court documents of colonial Massachusetts, may appear unexceptional; in fact, they reflect a rapidly changing world. Native American marital relations and domestic lives were anathema to English Christians; elite men frequently took more than one wife, while ordinary people could dissolve their marriages and take new partners with relative ease. Native marriage did not necessarily involve cohabitation, the formation of a new household, or mutual dependence for subsistence. Couples who wished to separate did so without social opprobrium, and when adultery occurred, the blame centered not on the "fallen" woman but on the interloping man. Over time, such practices changed, but the emergence of new types of "Indian marriage" enabled the legal, social, and cultural survival of New England's native peoples. The complex interplay between colonial power and native practice is treated with subtlety and wisdom in Colonial Intimacies. Ann Marie Plane uses travel narratives, missionary tracts, and legal records to reconstruct a previously neglected history. Plane's careful reading of fragmentary sources yields both conclusive and fittingly speculative findings, and her interpretations form an intimate picture, moving and often tragic, of the familial bonds of Native Americans in the first century and a half of European contact.

The Name of War

Winner of the Bancroft Prize King Philip's War, the excruciating racial war--colonists against Indians--that erupted in New England in 1675, was, in proportion to population, the bloodiest in American history. Some even argued that the massacres and outrages on both sides were too horrific to "deserve the name of a war." The war's brutality compelled the colonists to defend themselves against accusations that they had become savages. But Jill Lepore makes clear that it was after the war--and because of it--that the boundaries between cultures, hitherto blurred, turned into rigid ones. King Philip's War became one of the most written-about wars in our history, and Lepore argues that the words strengthened and hardened feelings that, in turn, strengthened and hardened the enmity between Indians and Anglos. Telling the story of what may have been the bitterest of American conflicts, and its reverberations over the centuries, Lepore has enabled us to see how the ways in which we remember past events are as important in their effect on our history as were the events themselves. Winner of the the 1998 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award of the Phi Beta Kappa Society

People of the Wachusett

Nashaway became Lancaster, Wachusett became Princeton, and all of Nipmuck County became the county of Worcester. Town by town, New England grew?Watertown, Sudbury, Turkey Hills, Fitchburg, Westminster, Walpole?and with each new community the myth of America flourished. In People of the Wachusett the history of the New England town becomes the cultural history of America's first frontier. Integral to this history are the firsthand narratives of town founders and citizens, English, French, and Native American, whose accounts of trading and warring, relocating and putting down roots proved essential to the building of these communities. Town plans, local records, broadside ballads, vernacular house forms and furniture, festivals?all come into play in this innovative book, giving a rich picture of early Americans creating towns and crafting historical memory. Beginning with the Wachusett, in northern Worcester County, Massachusetts, David Jaffee traces the founding of towns through inland New England and Nova Scotia, from the mid-seventeenth century through the Revolutionary Era. His history of New England's settlement is one in which the replication of towns across the landscape is inextricable from the creation of a regional and national culture, with stories about colonization giving shape and meaning to New England life.