History / History by country / United States / Historical period / Colonial Period (1600-1775)

The Settlers' Empire: Colonialism and State Formation in America's Old Northwest

by Bethel Saler

The Settlers' Empire examines the peculiar status of the young United States as a postcolonial republic with its own domestic empire by looking at where these dual political responsibilities inevitably collided—in...

Lenape Country: Delaware Valley Society Before William Penn

by Jean R. Soderlund

Lenape Country is a sweeping narrative history of Lenape Indian encounters with European settlers in the Delaware Valley in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

The Life of Benjamin Franklin, Volume 3: Soldier, Scientist, and Politician, 1748-1757

by J. A. Leo Lemay

Volume 3 of the acclaimed biography narrates Franklin's growth from printer to public-spirited politician, soldier, and patriot.

The Forty Years that Created America: The Story of the Explorers, Promoters, Investors, and Settlers Who Founded the First English Colonies

by Edward M. Lamont

In this book, author Ted Lamont asks us to reconsider our country’s formative years, and explore the stories, lives, achievements, and failures of America’s earliest founding fathers: those who paved the...

The Puritans: A Sourcebook of Their Writings

by Perry Miller & Thomas H. Johnson

Critically acclaimed classic lets Puritans speak for themselves in crucial documents covering history, theory of state and society, religion, customs, behavior, biographies and letters, poetry, literary theory,...

The Lost Rocks: The Dare Stones and the Unsolved Mystery of Sir Walter Raleigh's Lost Colony

by David La Vere

What if the 1587 Lost Colony of Roanoke was not lost? What if the survivors left Roanoke Island, North Carolina and found their way to Georgia? That is the scenario scholars contemplated when a series of engraved...

New World Orders: Violence, Sanction, and Authority in the Colonial Americas

by John Smolenski & Thomas J. Humphrey

New World Orders juxtaposes case studies from Brazil to California to New York to explore the wide variety of legal and extralegal means by which social order was maintained in the early Americas.

Band of Giants

by Jack Kelly

Band of Giants brings to life the founders who fought for our independence in the Revolutionary War. Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin are known to all; men like Morgan, Greene, and Wayne are less familiar. Yet...

Between Slavery and Freedom: Free People of Color in America From Settlement to the Civil War

by Julie Winch, Jacqueline M. Moore & Nina Mjagkij

In Between Slavery and Freedom, Julie Winch explores the complex world of those people of African birth or descent who occupied the “borderlands” between slavery and freedom in the 350 years from the founding...

Benjamin Franklin's Intellectual World

by Matthew S. Holland, Paul E. Kerry, Jerry Weinberger & Lorraine Smith Pangle et al.

The essays in this volume explore how Franklin's political and philosophical thinking was informed, while examining the deep appeal that Franklin has had on generation after generation of Americans.

Encounters at the Heart of the World

Pulitzer Prize for History 2015

by Elizabeth A. Fenn

Winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for History

Encounters at the Heart of the World concerns the Mandan Indians, iconic Plains people whose teeming, busy towns on the upper Missouri River were for centuries at...

Race and the Early Republic: Racial Consciousness and Nation-Building in the Early Republic

by James Brewer Stewart, Michael A. Morrison, Daniel K. Richter & Lois E. Horton et al.

By 1840, American politics was a paradox-unprecedented freedom and equality for men of European descent, and the simultaneous isolation and degradation of people of African and Native American descent. Historians...

Subjects unto the Same King: Indians, English, and the Contest for Authority in Colonial New England

by Jenny Hale Pulsipher

"Subjects Unto the Same King offers a comprehensive survey of the structure and functionality of authority within and between cultures in seventeenth-century New England."—William and Mary Quarterly

The American Family in the Colonial Period

by Arthur W. Calhoun

This complete, fundamental, and authoritative classic — the result of years of research, analysis, and thought — describes the American family as a product of many factors, among them, the distinctive environment:...

The First American Cookbook: A Facsimile of "American Cookery," 1796

by Amelia Simmons

Exact reproduction of the first American-written cookbook published in the United States. Authentic recipes for colonial favorites — pumpkin pudding, winter squash pudding, spruce beer, Indian slapjacks, and...

Letters from an American Farmer

by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur

18th-century classic detailing seafaring life in New England and plantation culture in the South also provided Old World readers with first major impressions of American landscapes, people, and institutions....

The Colonial Craftsman

by Carl Bridenbaugh

Excellent study examines lives and work of American cabinetmakers, silversmiths, pewterers, printers, painters, blacksmiths, many other artisans, before 1775. Work, home, school, play, much more. ". . . fascinating...

The Pirates of the New England Coast 1630-1730

by George Francis Dow & John Henry Edmonds

Meticulously researched study recounts lurid exploits, punishments of William Kidd, Charles Harris, Thomas Tew, John Phillips, other marauders. Enhanced with almost 50 contemporary engravings and rare maps....

Child Life in Colonial Times

by Alice Morse Earle

A pioneering historian chronicles the everyday details of growing up in Colonial America in this engaging classic. Meticulously researched, it paints a vivid picture of infancy, toys, schooling, and more. 128...

Memoir of a Revolutionary Soldier: The Narrative of Joseph Plumb Martin

by Joseph Plumb Martin

A wide-eyed teenager during much of the Revolutionary War, Martin recounts in grim detail his harrowing confrontations with gnawing hunger, bitter cold, and the fear of battle.