Category: Colonial America

There has long been a great lacuna in American history – the 150 years between the landing of the Pilgrims in 1620 and the American Revolution of the 1770s. Nathaniel Philbrick turns his talented pen to this obscure period in the 2006 bestseller “Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War.” Philbrick’s narrative essentially covers…

I picked up this book at a local library book sale. Last year I read “An Empire on the Edge” by the same author and thought I would give “Making Haste from Babylon” a try. There is much one might comment upon in Nick Bunker’s narrative of the Pilgrim experience, but I’ll limit mine to…

Freedom of speech has arguably never been more important in America than it is right now in 2022. The issue has been shaping us from the moment European colonists arrived on American shores in the early seventeenth century. The legendary case of outspoken Boston Puritan Anne Hutchinson resonates today for a variety of reasons. “American…

The North Atlantic maritime powers of the sixteenth century were determined to break the stranglehold that Spain and Portugal had on the trade routes to Asia in the southern hemisphere. They were convinced that there was a northwest passage along the northeastern seaboard of North America. It was just a matter of finding it. Roughly…

Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543) was a German-Swiss painter who worked in a Northern Renaissance style. One of his most famous paintings – “The Ambassadors”(1533) – hangs today in the National Gallery in London. It is rich in symbolism of life in the late Renaissance. The two ambassadors stand in front of a table filled…

Samuel Champlain was born in the Atlantic coastal village of Brouage in 1574 during a time of religious upheaval in France (nine religious wars between 1562 and 1598). Fischer speculates that Champlain was baptized and born Protestant and then converted to Catholicism, to which he remained deeply devoted for the rest of his life. “[Champlain]…