The 10 Best Books of 2016

     A number of great books on early American history and culture came hot of the presses in 2016, and here, in no particular order, are my choices for the ten best selections of the past year.

Drew Lopenzina, Through an Indian's Looking Glass: A Cultural Biography of William Apess, Pequot (University of Massachusetts Press)

     The still relatively anemic field of American Indian history gathers strength from this analysis of the life and work of the Methodist minister and activist for Native rights.  Apess gained fame as a riveting public speaker, and his use of Christian logic to shame the white-dominant society in its use and abuse of non-whites was capped by his controversial assertion that Metacomet, the "King Philip" of the 1675-76 war that continues to bear his anglicized name, was the Indian equivalent of George Washington.  Lopenzina's careful portrait of Apess is especially--if accidentally--timely, considering the doleful events at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota.

Wendy Warren, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (Liverlight Publishing Corp.)
     Too often the history of slavery in early America is focused upon the South, where the "peculiar institution" was particularly critical to those colonies'/states' economies, but it was no less a linchpin of the northern economies, as Warren's study emphasizes.  The development of white supremacist racism was not a phenomenon confined to the South, but one that grew throughout British America and sharpened during the revolutionary and early national periods, the northern states' abolition of slavery notwithstanding.  Warren brings to center stage the necessity of African, African-American, and Indian slave labor to New England's fishing and whaling, shipbuilding, and shipping industries, and how this helped to solidify Euro-American racial identities in the eighteenth century.

Nicholas Guyatt, Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation (Basic Books)
     Guyatt's Bind Us Apart trees off of Warren in further explaining the construction of racial identity in British America, though from the perspective of the post-revolutionary intelligentsia.  While Thomas Jefferson was adamant that African Americans--whether through innate deficiencies or through deficiencies engendered by slavery--were unsuitable for citizenship or integration into the dominant white society, he had no doubt that the Indians were capable of "civilization" and even racial assimilation with whites.  However, as Guyatt points out, practically none of his peers felt even this degree of liberality with regard to the Indians, who were systematically deprived of nationhood, territorial sovereignty, and of their humanity.  The easy passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 forms the capstone to Guyatt's analysis.  The "blessings of liberty" were reserved for white Euro-Americans alone--a belief that was very widely shared nationwide, and became almost a religious doctrine in the South.

Catherine E. Kelly, Republic of Taste: Art, Politics, and Everyday Life in Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press)
     This one reminds me strongly of Richard L. Bushman's The Refinement of America (1992) and C. Dallett Hemphill's Bowing to Necessities (2002), with the addition of the political aspects of early American cultural identity formation.  Bushman did not address the development of a uniquely American artistic style, focusing instead upon how a Spartan republican sensibility expressed itself in architecture, dress, and decor, while Hemphill focused on how manners and etiquette developed to better distinguish class and social status in the early national period.  Kelly's great contribution to this discussion is to show how these things influenced and reflected political identities at the time.  Pair this one with . . .

Stephen C. Bullock, Tea Sets and Tyranny: The Politics of Politeness in Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press)
     It is well known that eighteenth-century middle- and upper-class Anglo-Americans identified themselves with the mother country through their cultivation of British mannerisms and speech, as well as in the ways they designed, furnished and decorated their houses, and accoutered themselves.  Bullock's Tea Sets and Tyranny trees off of Kelly's Republic of Taste to explain how the clothes one wore, the manners one displayed, and the ways social interactions were choreographed, were turned into overt political acts during the revolutionary period.  This aspect of American society was uniquely American, and established a foundation upon which so much of contemporary American culture stands, where strangers could reach judgments about each other by what they wear and how they present themselves.

Alan Taylor, American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804 (W. W. Norton)
     Taylor's American Colonies (2001) marked a shift from scholarly focus upon the Atlantic World--itself a great leap forward--in favor of a continental approach, devoting more attention to New France and New Spain in telling the story of Anglo-America.  This very important follow-up takes that same approach to explain the American Revolution as a continental event that involved the French and Spanish colonies, as well as the American Indian nations.  Regarding the latter, few of the standard histories of the Revolution bother to mention Indians as anything more than military auxiliaries or doomed observers.  Colin G. Calloway's The American Revolution in Indian Country (1995) remains the best history of the Revolution from an Indian perspective, but here Taylor gives the Indians their rightful place as interested players in what was a massive geopolitical event.

Stephen Warren, The Worlds the Shawnees Made: Migration and Violence in Early America (University of North Carolina Press)
     The Shawnee Nation usually gets frequent mention in histories of the colonial wars, particularly the Seven Years' War, as well as in the American War for Independence, but--as with most other Indian nations apart from the Iroquois League--the Shawnee otherwise tend to be ignored.  Warren corrects this oversight with a study that highlights what the Shawnee odyssey has to teach us about the hardships and anguish of "always [being] the frontier."  Richard White first described the geographical and cultural "Middle Ground" between Indian and Euro-American settlements, and Warren provides a detailed and wrenching analysis of just what living in the Middle Ground involved, from the perspective of a nation that had been a power player in the Ohio Valley before their subjugation to Iroquois dominion in the seventeenth century.  Forced to vacate their homelands to shelter uneasily with the Cherokees, the Shawnee managed to reclaim some of their lost power and their land before losing it again to the Anglo-Americans after the Revolution.  Nevertheless, they managed--as had so many others--to adapt to rapidly changing worlds.

Wim Klooster, The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World (Cornell University Press)
     Here we have an excellent synthetic history of the Dutch commercial empire that seeks to encompass the entirety of the United Provinces' holdings in the Americas and Africa, rather than focusing on New Netherland and the Dutch West Indies, as previous studies have done.  Interestingly, Klooster once argued that the Dutch cannot be said to have had an empire that compares to the Spanish, French, and British models, but here he reconsiders the definition of empire to make a powerful argument that Dutch influence in the Atlantic World was foundational to establishing a mercantilist model of imperialism eagerly taken up and perfected by the British in the 1700s.  This is a much needed volume in a field that is sorely lacking due to the pride of place given to the other aforementioned empires in Atlantic History.

Carl Berger, Broadsides and Bayonets: The Propaganda War of the American Revolution (University of Pennsylvania Press)
     This is a much needed sort-of follow up to Bernard Bailyn's venerable two-volume Pamphlets of the American Revolution (1965), this time focusing upon the determined campaign to wage psychological warfare waged by both the revolutionary Americans and the British.  Both Bailyn and Berger emphasize the degrees to which the Americans started this aspect of the war in the 1760s, but while Bailyn is more interested in the loftier political arguments and counter-arguments, Berger is more interested in what really swayed the minds of the common reading public: stories of British atrocities against women and children, of kidnappings and murders committed by Britain's Indian allies on the frontier, and of the bribing of colonial officials.  The British fired back with their own lurid stories of Patriot atrocities, and this back-and-forth Berger presents in a compelling style that gives the Imperial Crisis and the War for Independence a degree of urgency that refreshes our thinking about the Revolution.

David J. Silverman, Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America (Harvard University Press)
     As we debate the prevalence of and increase of gun violence in the United States, this timely analysis explores how the introduction of firearms to American Indian communities totally transformed Native cultures.  It did not just change the ways that Indians hunted and made war.  It led to a disastrous shift in the ways that Indians thought about the cosmos.  However, Silverman notes that Indians--while valuing the gun's greater ability to kill--placed greater importance upon "the pyrotechnic terror" that gun's inflicted upon one's enemies.  Used as a tool of diplomacy in the increasingly volatile struggle between Britain and France, one is reminded of how the great powers trade weaponry to allies and client nations in modern geopolitical entanglements.  That client peoples may turn those weapons upon their patrons to press their own advantages should come as no surprise to those of us who know the conflicts of early North America.

     So, that's it.  Certainly there were a lot of excellent titles in early American history published in the last year, and if you have a favorite that I haven't listed, do write a comment below and tell me about it!

Historian of Religion vs. Religious Historian

     Hello, my name is John Howard Smith, and I am a Secular Humanist.  I am a specialist in the history of religion in early America, and when I introduce myself to my classes every semester, I am very careful to refer to myself as a "historian of religion," rather than as a "religious historian."  At first glance it would seem that both phrases mean exactly the same thing, but in fact they are very different things--or at least they ought to be understood to be very different things.  When I began my teaching career, I called myself a religious historian because I thought I was cleverly blending the facts that I study the religious with a tendency to think about my discipline in the way that a faithful believer thinks about his/her religion.
    However, I soon discovered that my students presumed that I meant to identify as a religious person who is a historian.  I teach at a mid-sized state university in Texas, a state where 93% of its citizens profess a belief in one deity or another, and only 2% are willing to identify as atheist.  My university is located in a semi-rural part of Northeast Texas, where evangelical Protestantism is especially dominant and Catholicism has a sizable presence.  It is safe to say that the numbers of avowed atheists are at or below 1%.  I realized that I needed to clarify my introductory statements when, after a lecture about Calvinism, a student asked me if I was a Calvinist!  I tend to explain religions and theologies in terms that adherents would use, and thus tacitly adopt the persona of an adherent.  This, I think, allows me to let particular theologies speak for themselves, but I am apparently so good at this that I can fool some of my students into thinking I am by turns a Taoist, a seventeenth-century Congregationalist, or a Mormon.

     I learned during graduate school that my chosen subfield is largely dominated by religious historians--historians who are nominal or professed Christians.  The vast majority of the greats in the historiography of religion in early America, men and women who have essentially defined interpretations of the role and importance of religion in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, include Sydney Ahlstrom, David D. Hall, Mark A. Noll, Nathan O. Hatch, George Marsden, Amanda Porterfield, and Catherine Brekus.  Along with others whose specialties were in political history or other aspects of social or cultural history, such as Perry Miller, Edmund S. Morgan, Bernard Bailyn, Richard Bushman, and Pauline Maier, while never explicitly stating it, nevertheless presume two basic premises:

       1. Religion in and of itself is a beneficial element of civilization, and Christianity is a critical, defining pillar of Western civilization; and

           2. Christianity is fundamentally correct in its singular truth claims.

These two concepts suffuse practically all of twentieth-century Western historiography to such a degree that it can be difficult to realize that they are there if you have never questioned them.

     However, since the rise of the "New Left" in the 1960s, more scholars have begun to doubt these presumptions, but in the realm of early American historiography of religion they remain stubbornly pervasive.  As I explained in the introduction to my The First Great Awakening: Redefining Religion in British America, 1725-1775 (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014), the treatment of non-Christian religions practiced by Indians, Africans and Afro-Caribbeans brings the pro-Christian bias into bold relief (7).  The Christianization of these groups is detailed in a quietly triumphalist fashion (cf. Mechal Sobel's Trabelin' On and Linford D. Fisher's The Indian Great Awakening), as a great achievement for all concerned, whereas individuals who proved immune to the religion of their conquerors and oppressors are treated with the same disappointed disdain felt by the likes of David Brainerd in the middle-colony backcountry and Samuel Davies in Virginia.  I have characterized the use of Christianity to spark a revival of traditional Indian religions, and the use of Christianity by African Americans to create a kind of faith that proved capable of eroding the institution of slavery, in a way that acknowledges the corrosive influence of colonial religion upon non-white peoples, rather than tacitly thanking God for Christianity and praising the syncretists for their ingenuity.  The rediscovery of elder beliefs and practices sustained the Indians and African Americans, not the acceptance of Christianity or elements of it.

     A testament to the influence of professing Christianity upon American historiography is presented by Darren Dochuk,  Thomas S. Kidd, and Kurt W. Peterson in American Evangelicalism: George Marsden and the State of American Religious History (Notre Dame University Press, 2014).  An early festschrift dedicated to Marsden, they assert in the introduction that "the rise of religion in America's new historical consciousness and the attempt by some scholars to write history from a faith-friendly perspective" represents a positive turn away from "scientific hegemony" and "postmodern perspectivalism" (7, 9),  The ultimate goal, they are brazen enough to claim, is that the celebration of the influence of evangelical Christianity upon American history will lead to a reassertion of fundamentalist Christian principles in American political life, epitomized by the rise of the "'Tea Party' movement that has countered President Barack Obama at every turn" (4).

     Activist scholarship is nothing new, and nothing necessarily to disparage, but contrary to religious historians' claims, the influence of secularism in early American historiography has been practically nonexistent.  Nobody had ever written an article or book asserting that religion had no significant influence upon the development of American society and culture.  The closest that one can get to such an assertion is Bernard Bailyn's and Gordon S. Wood's interpretations of the American Revolution as being, as Jon Butler summarized it in Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Harvard University Press, 1990), "a profoundly secular event" (192).  Butler had earlier declared the First Great Awakening to have been a non-event, but his claim was difficult for him to support, and roundly rejected by the early Americanist community--both secular and religious (myself included).  The debate is not over whether or not religion shaped American identity, but over the degrees to which it has during specific periods of history.

     So, I am a historian of religion, and I think that my nonbelief gives me a far more objective, clear-eyed view of the past than those who cannot see beyond their various religious and denominational filters.  My own scholarship is activist in opposing the agenda beginning to be advanced by Kidd and his compatriots, who seek to out-Marsden Marsden and tear down what little there ever was of the wall of separation between Church and State, and put forward a distorted vision of early America to bring that about.  I realize that I have much in common with Don Quixote, but just as one eats an elephant one bite at a time, I shall tear down as many windmills as I can, one lance-blow at a time.

Film Review: "The Witch"

     On its surface, The Witch would appear to be another horror movie that mines the rich veins of Euro-American folklore to tell an oft-told scary story about arboreal disciples of Satan afflicting befuddled Puritans.  However, American tastes for supernatural horror do not run along lines of fascination with early seventeenth-century New England.  The writer and director, Robert Eggers, was brave to attempt to tell such a story, since inevitably it would be compared to The Crucible and The Blair Witch Project, among others.  Refreshingly, The Witch does not attempt to set itself in or very near Salem, Massachusetts, and avoids the temptation to make any reference to it.  Rather, it aims to tell an original story culled from the witchcraft lore that terrified Puritan New Englanders in the darkest winter nights and whenever they dared to peer into the dense virgin forest.

     The film opens on a family standing under threat of banishment for religious nonconformity in 1630.  The father, William, is a minister who has apparently been ejected from his pulpit for his doctrinal and theological stringency, and has run afoul of the authorities.  "I will not be judged by false Christians," he declares, and opts to leave with his family to a tract of unincorporated land beyond Plymouth's borders.  One is immediately reminded of Anne Hutchinson, whose 1634 trial for religious noncomformity was compounded by her assuming ministerial authority due to her excellent theological self-training.  Her remove to Rhode Island, and later to Long Island, ended tragically with her death in an Indian attack, and the possibility of such a fate would surely have hung heavily in the minds of the film's protagonists.  They attempt to establish a farmstead, but struggle.  The mother, Kate, is nursing a young infant that is abducted while under the watch of her elder daughter, Thomasin.  A cloaked figure can be seen carrying the baby off into the woods far faster than Thomasin can keep up, and a chain of events is set in motion that steadily heaps suspicion upon Thomasin, who proves increasingly unable to defend herself.

     The film presumes that early modern beliefs in the supernatural, and particularly of witches, is grounded in fact.  After the abduction, a harrowing scene suggests an old woman butchering the baby and smearing her naked body with the viscera in order to gain the power of flight upon a stick (not a broomstick, which was a later seventeenth-century notion).  The witch, appearing under the guises of a hare and--in one hypnotic scene--a beautiful young woman, works with Satan--appearing as "Black Phillip," the family's billy goat--to recruit Thomasin into a coven.  The family's misfortunes, and they are many, are underscored by William's inability to provide for them, which weakens fault lines found in any family: resentment, misunderstandings, coincidences, bad judgment, and misconceptions.  Another death seals the parents' belief that Thomasin has made a pact with Satan, and in the end she agrees to write in his book, strips naked, and follows him into the forest, where she communes with a new family of compatriots who will "live richly," "see the world," and--of course--fly.  She sees no reason not to, as she knows from her father's Calvinist tutelage that she will be damned anyway for the taint of Original Sin that Christians believe compromises us all, to say nothing of her myriad sins both great and small.

     Historically, the film strives for accuracy in its material culture, and is largely successful.  Unfortunately, it does lean a bit too much upon the popular belief that Puritans dressed in nearly colorless clothing.  The spoken dialogue is largely true to the period, though a bit too stilted.  People who are intimate with each other tended not to speak to each other in the language of the King James Bible, the construction of their sentences too formal to be believable.  In this respect The Crucible (1996) is closer to what one would have heard at the time.  Eggers clearly did good research on period beliefs and the records of New England witch trials, as the tropes are all there, and he never heaps them on in bulk, making the film more realistic.  As a specialist in the period, I recognized some tropes that were not formally introduced, which might place the average viewer at some disadvantage, but most Americans know about witches as cackling old crones flying around on broomsticks, using baby's blood for their spells, and that they can take the forms of animals, and so anybody with even a passing familiarity with the Salem witch trials would recognize most of what is presented.  Snippets from trial transcripts shaped some of the dialogue, and here and there I recognized bits of testimony from the trials of Abigail Hobbs and Bridget Bishop in 1692, but otherwise one does not find that such transcriptions were overused.  For financial reasons the filming was done in northern Ontario, rather than in New England, but the landscape comes across as authentic, the immediate setting underscoring a sense of the isolation and homesickness with which the earliest New Englanders struggled.

     Stylistically, the film can be favorably compared with the best work by Stanley Kubrick, as well as to E. Elias Merhige's brilliant short film, Begotten.  The viewer genuinely feels transported to another time and place--one that is immensely terrifying on account of the constant threat of satanic assault, and in a setting that is nothing short of breathtaking in its loneliness and uncertainty.  The spare score by Mark Korven is heavy on discordant period string instruments and ominous a capella singing, doubling down on the tension between family members, and between the family and the forest that shelters an evil they are helpless to resist.  The muted color palette seems to underscore the sense of long ago and far away, except where there is candlelight and blood, at which points the colors are rich, dare I say warm.  Upon second viewing, one can see still more easily that the family was doomed as soon as they passed through the gate and out into the unknown.  Among the townspeople who look back at them as they leave are a pair of Wampanoag Indians, and I had thought that the fear of Indians would compound the family's fears of leaving the relative security of the town, but this does not seem to have entered their minds, which is something of an oversight.  The Indians were presumed by most first-generation New Englanders to be the devil's minions, and some passing reference to this belief would have ramped up the tension just a bit more.  However, the physical absence of Indians beyond the first few minutes of the film speaks to the fact that disease epidemics had already done much to depopulate the region by 1630, while concentrated southern Algonquian settlement lay farther to the north and west than the protagonists would likely have traveled.  That they put down stakes relatively close to Plymouth is mentioned a few times, specifically that the town is only a day's ride away by horse.  Nevertheless, it is questionable that the family simply found an unoccupied or unclaimed tract of land and declared squatters' rights, as the film suggests.  Rather, they would most likely have had to bargain for the land with the nearest Indian community that claimed it as part of their territory, or purchased/leased it from someone else.

     Early modern conceptions of witches were heavy on presumptions that young girls and women were most prone to satanic temptation, due to Eve's inherent spiritual weakness that men believed cursed the female sex.  Thomasin, who is in her very early teens, has begun to blossom into womanhood, and she becomes an object of her younger brother's burgeoning sexual curiosity as well as of her mother's jealousy.  As Carol Karlsen argues in The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (1987), it was in part the fear of female sexuality that motivated patriarchy in general, and witchcraft beliefs in particular after the Reformation.  Thomasin's road to perdition begins with her cruelly teasing her baby sister that she is "the witch in the wood" who delivered baby Samuel to the devil, and from then on every foul coincidence and frightful turn of events happens in her presence, fueling her parents' suspicions, as well as those of her younger siblings.  Too often things said in jest or sarcastically were used against accused witches, and Thomasin's imprudence is the shovel with which she has begun to dig her own grave.  Her father seems to be the last to fully succumb to his fears about her, which only inflame her mother's conviction that she is a rival, a murderer, and a soon-to-be whore.  Such rhetoric fills the writings of early modern clergymen, witch hunters, and magistrates presiding over witch trials, and Eggers uses these just enough to tell a horrifying story that is all the more unsettling for its simplicity.  Nothing is overdone or oversold, though one must remember that this is a movie, and not a scrupulous docudrama.

     Students who have read David D. Hall's Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (1989) and Karlsen's The Devil in the Shape of a Woman will be able to understand this movie as more than a period horror piece.  I do take issue, though, with Eggers's subtitling the film "A New England Folktale," since the narrative fits no specific story predating the Salem witch trials, but I suspect that this is only to reinforce the setting.  While witchcraft beliefs were far stronger in New England than in the other Eastern Seaboard colonies, they still existed, and so theoretically the setting could have been western Pennsylvania or backcountry Carolina, though to do so would have robbed the film of a necessarily dark atmosphere.  I would recommend screening The Witch in classes on witchcraft and the Salem Witch Trials in particular, and perhaps also in courses on early New England history.  It economically offers a plausible glimpse into the world of first-generation Puritan New England, and one the horror of which stems from the what-if scenario of witchcraft, Satan, and damnation being all too real.

Fifty Essential Books

Welcome to my new blog!  Students interested in pursuing advanced study in early American history come to me and ask what they should read to build a foundation in the field, and so here I've compiled a list of what I consider to be the fifty titles most essential for developing your expertise.  Others would assemble a different list, to be sure, and I hope that readers will post their suggestions in the comments.  The list is in alphabetical order by author, not in any ranked order of quality or significance.

Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 (2000)--This is the book for understanding what Americans call the French and Indian War, and which Winston Churchill called--quite rightly--the First World War.  Few other works on this conflict place it in a truly global context like this one, and it gives pride of place to American Indian nations as having a critical stake in the outcome of the war, following Francis Jennings (see below).

Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (2002)--Little consideration had ever been given before to the role that animal husbandry and pasturage played in colonial America apart from brief mentions in economic histories, and Anderson's book contends that hogs and cattle especially constituted the cutting edge of European colonialism in North America, and fundamentally shaped the creation of Anglo-American culture and territorial expansion, as well as the greater implications of empire that affected everybody living in the Eastern Woodlands.

James Axtell, Natives and Newcomers: The Cultural Origins of North America (2001)--Too often histories of colonial America are Eurocentric and, more specifically, Anglocentric, in focus, with Indians appearing only as opponents in war, peripheral trading partners, or obstacles to westward expansion.  Axtell is among a generation of historians who have substantively corrected that two-dimensional interpretation to demonstrate the degrees to which "natives and newcomers" influenced each other.

Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1968)--Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History, Bailyn's study of English and Anglo-American political philosophy in the eighteenth century goes far in demonstrating colonial British-American political sophistication, and makes a case for the Revolution as a conservative defense of long-held English political beliefs.

Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (1975)--Students who want to fully grasp the still too influential idea that the history of early America is that of New England "writ large," as Jack P. Greene put it (see below) need only read this classic work.  While there are certainly elements of American identity that owes much to Puritan Calvinism, Bercovitch did not seem to think that our identity owes just as much to other European institutions, to say nothing of the heavy influence of African-American elements.

Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America, rev. ed. (2003)--This is an excellent introduction, along with Jon Butler's Awash in a Sea of Faith (see below), to the religious landscape of colonial British America.  Her discussion of religion's influence upon the American Revolution is especially valuable.

Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (1996)--A staple of colonial women's history, Brown's best known work is a powerful exploration of how masculinity, femininity, class and racial identity shaped each other in the seedbed of Anglo-America.

Joy Day Buel and Richard Buel, Jr., The Way of Duty: A Woman and Her Family in Revolutionary America (1995)--This list is a little short on the revolutionary period, but I have to include this one about Mary Silliman-Selleck whose biography, however it isn't one of an ordinary woman for the time, nevertheless opens a window into what everyday life was like during the Revolutionary War.

Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (1990)--Winner of the Albert J. Beveridge Award by the American Historical Association, Butler makes a powerful argument for the weakness of Christian institutions in early American history, and that people were more attached to old non-Christian beliefs and practices even as they claimed to be good Christians.

Colin G. Calloway, One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark (2003)--Too often early Americanist historiography presumes a continent that effectively ends at the Mississippi River, with occasional mentions of New Mexico at the time of the Pueblo Revolt, and Calloway's One Vast Winter Count goes a long way toward dispelling this.  Indian peoples are the sole focus in this book, which does not treat the trans-Appalachian West as though it was an empty space waiting for Euro-American settlement.

Colin G. Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America (2006)--The Proclamation of 1763 is often glossed over as an ending point in colonial America classes and the starting point in revolutionary America classes, but what the British decreed that year carried enormous implications for the Indian peoples of the trans-Appalachian West, and this is the primary focus of this work.

Joseph A. Conforti, Saints and Strangers: New England in British North America (2008)--This is an excellent brief overview of the settlement and development of New England, with an emphasis upon the powerful role religion played in the formation of regional identity.

William S. Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983)--This pioneering work in environmental history helped destroy the romantic myth of American Indians living in perfect harmony with the land by demonstrating that while Indians and English colonists had different understandings of land use and ownership, that Indians were just as capable of causing permanent damage as were Europeans, thus emphasizing Indian humanity by underscoring mutual frailties.

Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (1969)--This groundbreaking work answered some questions that had too long been unaddressed, and puts in proper perspective the degree to which colonial North America/the United States imported relatively small numbers of Africans compared to the West Indies and Brazil, and thus that the former depended upon natural increase in the African-American population to grow and maintain the "peculiar institution."

John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (1994)--Histories that read more like novels or mysteries are too much of a rarity in American historiography, and Demos's study of the life of Eunice Williams is an excellent example of how history, at bottom, is about people simply living their lives under circumstances both ordinary and extraordinary.

David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989)--Fischer's mammoth study of the transplantation and intertwining of the four main English cultural regions (Southern, East Anglian, Midland, and Borderland) to Massachusetts, the Chesapeake, and the cis-Appalachian backcountry suffers from a certain degree of reductionism, but that does little to compromise its value to understanding how those particular regions of the Atlantic Seaboard developed culturally.

Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (1993)--The African-American experience during the Revolution is put front-and-center in this fantastic book, highlighting the ambivalence with which slaves and free blacks faced the Revolution and contended forcefully with its egalitarian and libertarian rhetoric.  A beautiful extension of the groundbreaking work by Benjamin Quarles.

Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of the Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (1988)--This work successfully challenged the then-dominant interpretation that New England was the seedbed of American culture, and that the true roots of the American "system" lay in the southern colonies, which suffered--still suffers, some would argue--from scholarly neglect as a consequence of the Civil War.

Philip Greven, Four Generations: Land and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (1970)--Greven's groundbreaking foray into microhistory is a perfect example of how understanding local history can inform understandings of regional history, in this case of New England.

Ramon A. Gutierrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (1991)--A classic of colonial New Mexican history, this study shows how religion was used by the Spanish to subjugate the Indian nations of the region, part of which involved the effort to breed Indian identity out of Spanish America.

David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (1989)--Religion's influence on the formation of New England identity is a well-traveled subject, but Hall's work focuses more on such subjects as occultism, folk religion, and apocalypticism as integral to New Englanders' everyday lives.  The culminating character sketch of Samuel Sewell is particularly revealing.

Richard Hofstadter, America at 1750: A Social Portrait (1972)--Richard Hofstadter had only just begun this project when he died unexpectedly, and so this was compiled from that draft, along with some of his unpublished writings and lecture notes, by his wife, and despite its feeling unfinished and thus underdeveloped, it is nevertheless a great overview of the year 1750 in British America.  I often assign this in courses on the American Revolution as a first reading to bring students up to speed.

Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (1999)--Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History, Isaac's study of eighteenth-century Virginia was groundbreaking in its interdisciplinary, "dramaturgical" approach, showing how geography, culture, politics, and society all influence one another.

Francis P. Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies & Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (1988)--A brilliant example of activist scholarship, Jennings takes his fellow historians to task for discussing the French and Indian War without treating the American Indian nations as nations with much at stake in what Fred Anderson called "the war that made America."

Jane Kamensky, Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (1999)--This work introduces students to the power of words in ways that are both fascinating and challenging.  The degree to which society determines what one can and cannot say has been heavily studied only in connection to the First Amendment, but how religion, patriarchy, and class restricted speech in the early colonial period was not much considered before Kamensky's book came out.  Especially illuminating is her analysis of slander and libel cases in New England's overly litigious society.

Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelicalism in Colonial America (2007)--There are few synthetic histories of the First Great Awakening, and while this one is written from a decidedly pro-Christian, pro-evangelical viewpoint, and I disagree with Kidd's argument that evangelical Protestantism forms the basis of American identity, he does offer an excellent overview of the major figures and dynamics of the Awakening.

Sung Bok Kim, Landlord and Tenant in Colonial New York: Manorial Society, 1664-1775 (1978)--Why this book is out of print is a mystery to me, seeing as how every historian who analyzes colonial New York history cites it as a key work for understanding the intricacies of social, political, and economic relationships along the Hudson Valley in the wake of the English conquest of New Netherland.

Hugh T. Lefler and William S. Powell, Colonial North Carolina: A History (1973)--Histories of the colonial South focus too much upon Virginia and South Carolina, and while my home state of North Carolina was a little slower in developing in the first two decades of the eighteenth century, its divergence from its parent colonies to the north and south after 1720 is well worth studying.

James T. Lemon, The Best Poor Man's Country: A Geographical Study of Early Southeastern Pennsylvania (1976)--This is a classic work in regional history, as well as the beginnings of Pennsylvania that focuses on the ways in which landscape and climate shape historical progression and societal development.  The Palatine German migration to the area in the early 1700s gets more attention here than it had in the past, enhancing this book's value. 

Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789, rev. ed. (2007)--The inaugural volume in the Oxford History of the United States in 1982, this is the best synthetic treatment of the Revolution in its political, social, economic, and military facets.

Brendan McConville, The Kings Three Faces: The Rise & Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776 (2006)--McConville makes a compelling case for colonial Americans' affectionate attachment to the British institution of constitutional monarchy, and particularly the figure of King George III, and thus that the American Revolution was undertaken with great reluctance until the colonists realized that George III was no longer their champion and protector.

John J. McCusker and Russell Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607-1789 (1987)--This is the foundational text for understanding the economies of colonial and revolutionary America, especially for comprehending currency valuations and means of exchange.  It also has great tables on colonial and regional population figures.

Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776 (1968)--Maier's argument that the American people's disenchantment with being part of the British Empire, and their disaffection for King George III and the idea of constitutional monarchy was a painful, gradual process, was not necessarily a new one when it was published, but it is among the best articulated versions of it.  Her influence is readily seen in McConville's The King's Three Faces (see above).  The Neo-Whigs of the 1950s and '60s tended to downplay the great reluctance of the proto-revolutionaries to push for separation and independence, and Maier does much to emphasize how easily the Revolution could have been stillborn in the Continental Congress.

Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (1997)--I list this title more out of sentiment than anything else, as I had the great pleasure to meet the late Prof. Maier when I was a doctoral student in 1999.  She was giving the annual Fossick Lecture at SUNY-Albany, and at the subsequent reception I got to have a very nice extended conversation with her.  She graciously autographed my paperback copy, in which she predicted that I would "have a distinguished career in history."  Nevertheless, this is an excellent study of one of the most puzzled over and misunderstood texts in all of early America, and provides ample fodder for student discussions of the Declaration, from the early drafts to the final one signed by Congress.

Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (1975)--Winner of the Albert J. Beveridge Award by the American Historical Association, this book radically altered the way we understand the early development of slavery in America, tackling the chicken-and-egg question of racism and slavery in America, suggesting an answer while leaving it open enough for vigorous debate.

Edmund S. Morgan, The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727-1795 (1962)--This list is rather short on biographies, but this one is a must-read for the emerging Early Americanist.  Through Morgan's sympathetic treatment, the reader still gets a beautiful portrait of eighteenth-century New England, including the two most important events to sweep the region: the First Great Awakening and the American Revolution.

Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (1999)--Also a recipient of the Beveridge Award, this work has become the volume for understanding the development of slavery and African-American culture in the South.  Whereas too many studies of slavery did little to explain the differences in the way that slavery was thought of and practiced in the Chesapeake and Lowcountry regions, this work forcefully highlights those differences in terms of how they fundamentally shaped African-American identity.

Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded (2005)--Specialists in a particular period and place imagine what it was like to be there, to experience that sensory world.  Too often our studies of times and places is undertaken in silence--not of the world around us, but of the world in which our subjects lived. Rath makes an effort to let us hear the soundscapes of early America, and we gain a new appreciation for the significance of sounds both familiar and strange to us.

Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (1992)--The Iroquois League was indisputably the most powerful grouping of Indian tribes in eastern North America, and Richter's study establishes this fact and the ways in which the Iroquois worked to take from European colonialism the best advantages that could be had to enlarge their power and influence in the Eastern Woodlands.

Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (2003)--A much needed correction to Eurocentric narratives of early America that always run from east to west, Facing East suggests an alternative vision that puts Indians at the center of colonial American history, establishing their critical roles in American development.  His innovative use of interpretative reconstruction remains controversial, given the lack of primary source materials from a Native viewpoint, but provides ample fodder for debate.

Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500-1643 (1982)--Along with the works of Colin Calloway, Francis Jennings, Daniel K. Richter, Salisbury's Manitou and Providence highlights the degree to which cooperation between natives and newcomers, rather than just conflict, was key to the success of European colonialism in North America.  While discussing English attitudes toward the Indians, it also emphasizes the ways the Southern Algonquians thought about the English--each side's prejudices shaped by their respective worldviews.

John Howard Smith, The First Great Awakening: Redefining Religion in British America, 1725-1775 (2015)--Of course I'm going to put this on my list, but I think that it truly is the best synthetic history of the Awakening that does not take for granted that Christianity is the only one true religion, and also gives African Americans, American Indians, and women greater prominence in the revivals.  Also, it highlights contributions made by sects such as the Moravians, who heretofore have not figured in any histories of the Awakening.

Alan Taylor, American Colonies (2001)--Another winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History, this makes an excellent first book to read when stepping into the deep waters of early American history, not least for the fact that it tackles all of North America, rather than focusing only upon the British colonies.

Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies (2010)--Did he leave anybody out?  No, and that is what makes this the standard history of a conflict that gets far too little analysis.  Following historians who interpret the American War for Independence as a civil war, Taylor proves that the War of 1812 was no less a civil war--one that nearly tore the United States apart, but otherwise in victory confirmed American independence.

Frederick B. Tolles, Meeting House and Counting House: The Quaker Merchants of Colonial Philadelphia, 1682-1763 (1948)--Until the publication of this book, most of what academics studied about Quakers was their theology and nineteenth-century commitments to social/moral reform.  Tolles shows us that Philadelphia's Quakers consciously walked away from many of their religious principles in the wake of material success and political empowerment in the eighteenth century, setting the stage for an internal reformation at the time of the Seven Years' War.

Barbara Tuchman, The First Salute: A View of the American Revolution (1986)--This was the first history of the Revolution that I had ever read, and it remains one of the best short studies.  Her thesis that the War for Independence was lost through British vacillation and incompetence rather than won by the Continental Army, with substantial help from the French navy, was not widely well received, but it is nonetheless spot-on.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (1990)--Winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for History, this is a masterpiece of social microhistory that takes the life of an ordinary woman living and working on the Maine frontier to illuminate women's experiences in the final decades of the "long" eighteenth century.

Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (1969)--There simply is no better political analysis of the American Revolution, particularly with regard to the intricacies of the Constitutional Convention and the process of ratification of the Constitution.

Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1991)--Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History, Wood's argument for the innate radicalism of the Revolution was controversial, but no less convincing in spite of critical flaws in his support of the argument.

Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (1966)--In spite of its antiquated subtitle, Black Majority is a classic of early New Left scholarship that underscores the role African Americans played in the early history of South Carolina, culminating in the ill-fated Stono Rebellion of 1739.

John Howard Smith