Category: Colonial America

Stacy Schiff is known for her immersive storytelling and detailed characterizations. In “The Witches: Salem, 1692” (2015) she delves into the psychological and societal factors that contributed to the hysteria that led to the infamous Salem witch trials, such as the rigid Puritanical belief system, gender dynamics, and existing community tensions. Schiff’s portrayal of the…

David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America is a stunning academic achievement. Each of the four migrations Fischer examines receives book-length treatment and authoritative analysis. It’s remarkable to discover just how distinct each of these “great migrations” was—and how each has left a lasting cultural imprint on its respective geographic region long…

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 today, in 2022. The struggle over this fundamental right has shaped American society since the first European colonists arrived on its shores in the early seventeenth century. The remarkable story of Anne Hutchinson, the outspoken Puritan dissident who challenged the religious…

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]…