America Unabridged

To teach, write, or read about the “colonial era” is a special challenge. No other part of American history is as remote from our own; by the same token, none has been studied for as long. Revisions lie piled on revisions; and divergent styles of scholarship are stretched across an extraordinary range. The tableau of colonial America constructed in, say, 1875 looks markedly different from its successors in 1920 and 1960, and the latter bear only partial resemblance to predominant views today.

The list of books here embodies the work of the last generation or so. As such, its emphasis is social history: everyday life, ordinary people; cultural tradition, popular mentality; race, ethnicity, class, and gender. Still, that constitutes a very big tent, with no single organizing center. The authors themselves are a mixed lot: a semiotic, a biographer, a novelist, a little clutch of museum curators, plus several professional historians (not all of them full-time “colonialists”). But this, too, is emblematic. Precisely because of its remoteness, early American history has excited many different imaginations; indeed it encourages—not to say, insists on—such diversity.

Two caveats. The list does not treat all of colonial America with an even hand; some colonies and regions are more fully represented than others. Moreover, the list makes only light reference to chronology and, if anything, tilts somewhat toward the first part of the story. No doubt, in years to come these same elements will have a very different distribution, since historiography, no less than history itself, is ever-changing.

by Alfred W. Crosby, Jar. (1972; Greenwood). This was, and is, a foundational work in the very lively sub-field of environmental history. It traces the Old World/New World transfer of life forms—plants, animals, humans, microorganisms—that began with Columbus and continued for generations thereafter. Along the way it touches such key topics as the Native American “demographic catastrophe” (wholesale mortality among Indian populations, principally from the arrival of previously unknown disease pathogens), the highly controversial origins of syphilis, and a world-changing revolution in floodways. Implicitly it makes an even larger point—that 1492 remains the single most important date in modern history. Then did two worlds (or three or four) begin to become one, a process that continues still.

by Tzvetan Todorov (1982; English translation, 1984; University of Oklahoma). A European cultural theorist and semiotic here explores a vast existential issue, “the discovery self makes of the other,” in a specifically American context. And as he does so, he throws a dazzling light on the history of cultural “encounter” between the colonizers and the colonized. His focus is sixteenth-century Mexico and the Caribbean; Columbus and the conquistador Courtés are among his chief characters. But the hopes, the doubts, the unleveled fears, the chronic misunderstandings, the whole indenting struggle to deal with newness and difference: These ingredients were present everywhere Europeans, Indians, and Africans came together.

by William Cronon (1983; new edition, 2003; Hill and Wang). This is environmental history brought literally to ground level. It shows, with great clarity and precision, the intricate dynamics of ecosystem change, especially the role of cultural values (on the human side) and biological adaptation (on nature’s side). It also offers a different kind of vantage point for viewing the clash of colonists with native peoples. And it concludes with some suggestive foreshadowing of more modern developments, the most notable how a “people of plenty” began right away to become a “people of waste.”

by Edmund S. Morgan (1975; Norton). Considered a classic virtually from the moment of its publication, Morgan’s book “may be read as a history of early Virginia, but it is intended to be both more and less than that,” according to the author. Less, because it doesn’t try to cover every aspect of the subject; more, because its main theme has the broadest possible reach. In the rough, disorderly atmosphere of seventeenth-century Virginia was born a linked commitment to individual rights on the one hand and racially based slavery on the other. And from this grew “the central paradox of American history,” freedom riding piggyback atop bondage. The tale, as told here, combines erudition and interpretive ingenuity with much narrative panache. Its tone is ironic, its import profound.

by John Barth (1960; Doubleday). Sometimes fiction conveys a truth to which academic scholarship does not (cannot?) aspire; take Sot-Weed, for example. Set first in post-Elizabethan England, then in early Maryland, this long novel offers up an edgy, earthy, altogether human portrayal. Its central character, one Ebenezer Cooke, is a brilliant composite of then-prevalent values, opinions, style, taste, and (most remarkably) diction. His Don Quixote-like exploits are realistic, outlandish, and, often enough, hugely funny. The result is time travel of the most absorbing kind; moreover, Barth’s imagined world fits neatly with all we have learned from the usual run of documentary “facts.”

by James Merrell (1989; Norton). Forty years ago Native Americans barely registered on any radar screen of colonial history. Now, thanks to a powerful new research enterprise—with the scholarly tag of “ethnohistory”—they have a central position. The Indians’ New World follows the Catawba people from their origins in the Carolina backcountry through their first dealings with white colonists, the resultant disease, a growing involvement in external trade, missionary contact, demographic and geographic reconfiguration, and, finally, the renewal of their tribal identity. At every point the book shows them not simply as victims but also as resourceful agents of their own destiny—a picture that applies broadly to other Indian groups as well.

by Kenneth Silverman (1984; Welcome Rain). Puritanism: We can’t avoid it, nor should we. And perhaps the best way to approach it is through its crankiest, most famous, most frequently stereotyped and caricatured American exemplar, the Boston minister Cotton Mather. Fortunately, Mather is the subject of the finest account of any individual life from early America. Read this book, and you know him. Moreover, the times no less than the life are fully presented here: society and economy, religion and science, the natural and the built environment, ideas, fashion, custom, and taste. Take it all together, and this is biography morphing into histoire totale.

by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum (1974; Harvard). Witchcraft is another subject impossible to avoid. Nothing else in the sprawling terrain of colonial history is quite so notorious, or so vulnerable to popular sensationalism. However, witchcraft has also attracted serious scholars, as a kind of prism for examining the inner-life dimension of early American (especially Puritan) experience. Witness the Boyer-Nissenbaum team’s remarkable Salem Possessed. Starting from a bit-by-bit dissection of the local community, the book moves outward and downward to uncover a host of hidden but fundamentally dynamic connections. Its endpoint—and the deepest, broadest connection of all—is an unexpected bridge between witch-hunting and early capitalism. Thus is Salem’s story rescued from the hands of antiquarians and hucksters and given lasting historical significance.

by Jonathan Fairbanks et al. (1982; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; out of print). Historical evidence comes to us in things no less than in words. And New England Begins was perhaps the supreme example of a historically informed—and informative—museum exhibition. Mounted some 20 years ago by Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, it re-created a long-lost physical world—the look, the tone, the texture, the feel of it, and, by dint of careful interpretive effort, much of its meaning as well. The range of objects included was enormous, from high-style parlor chairs, needlework embroideries, and silver goblets to humble chamber pots, firedogs, clay pipes, and shovels. The show, like all shows, was evanescent; fortunately, however, it lives on in a handsomely produced catalogue three volumes long. Here one can find a full array of excellent images together with 10 essays reflecting the best of recent material culture study.

by Ira Berlin (1998; Belknap). Only within the past decade have historians come to appreciate the centrality of chattel slavery in early American life. Take out slavery, most now agree, and everything would look different: economic growth and development, most obviously, but also social structure, cultural forms, even individual psychology. As much as or more than any other group, African-American bondsmen (and women) built the foundations of our modern nation. This is the burden of Many Thousands Gone, a sweeping overview of its inevitably painful subject. But the book does more than establish the matter of sheer importance; it adds complexity and nuance by showing the many different forms slavery took, the concomitant growth of racist ideologies, and the never-ceasing struggle of the slaves themselves to resist, or at least to temper, the terms of their oppression.

John Demos is the Samuel Knight Professor of History at Yale. His books include The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story From Early America.

In 1804 an obscure English sailor named John Davis published an imaginative account of the seventeenth-century romance between Pocahontas and Capt. John Smith and called it The First Settlers of Virginia, An Historical Novel. Davis’s book disappeared from view almost at once, but two decades later, in 1821, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy appeared, an adventure tale of the Revolutionary War in which the historical George Washington makes several stiff, fatherly, and entirely fictitious cameo appearances. So well received was this combination (despite its turgid and gelatinous prose) that ever since, with very little dissent, Cooper has been regarded as the father of American historical fiction.

It is a very ancient form of fabulation, to be sure, telling dramatic, made-up stories about vanished ways of life or departed heroes. Its appeal is part antiquarian, part mythological, and as a literary exercise it is at least as old as the Iliad. Homer, indeed, seems to have laid out all the essential features of the serious historical novel: No matter how much the author concentrates on the foreground of character and action, such fiction always attempts to tell the larger history of the tribe—why Troy fell, how Rome was founded. It rarely chronicles a whole life or story from beginning to end but likes to choose instead one or two crucial episodes and begin in medias res. Its nature is to range widely, from Hades to Olympus, and its form is inherently epic.

In its modern version, inaugurated by Sir Walter Scott with Waverley in 1814, a nearly archeological fidelity to historical research and detail is added, along with the working definition that a novel is “historical” only if its action takes place at least half a century before its year of publication. (Tolstoy was well aware of both Scott and Homer when he sat down to write the greatest of historical novels, War and Peace.)

In the highly personal list that follows (alphabetical by author) I have observed Scott’s chronological limitation of 50 years. I have also bowed to Dr. Johnson’s plain, unimprovable dictum that the function of literature is to “bring realities to mind”—in this case, broad, sweeping, musket-loading, plainscrossing, hog-butchering, unmistakably big-shouldered American realities. I have had to exclude a few favorites, either because they were written too close to their time of action (The Red Badge of Courage) or because, good as the novel might be (Gone With the Wind), its tribal themes were too faint.

by Willa Gather (1927; many editions). A French priest, based on the real-life Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy, establishes a diocese in mid-nineteenth-century New Mexico and Arizona. Kit Carson appears under his own name. Gather warned other writers against “over-plotting” their novels. Here in a series of quiet, loosely related, almost gaunt scenes, she creates an absolutely beautiful evocation of American landscape and life.

by E. L. Doctorow (1975; Chelsea House). Fiction by the pointillist method: Drop by drop, color by color, Doctorow builds up a wildly shimmering portrait of New York City at the beginning of the twentieth century. Like many other historical novelists, he mingles real and fictional characters. His originality here is one of scale and energy; several invented families find themselves entwined with (among others) Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, Harry Houdini, J. P. Morgan, and Emiliano Zapata.

by A. B. Guthrie, Jr. (1947; Mariner Books). It is sometimes said that there are really only two basic plots in fiction: Someone goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. This is the first plot. Its hero, Boone Caudill, leaves Kentucky in 1830 and travels up the Missouri into Blackfoot country, where he marries an Indian and lives as a Mountain Man until the first rumblings of the westering wagon trains can be heard in the valleys below. Guthrie won a Pulitzer Prize for a later novel, The Way West, but this is a far better story, about a brief, savage, and defining moment in American history.

by Jack Finney (1970; Simon & Schuster). Time travel back to New York City in 1882. In an afterword Finney says tongue-in-cheek that he hasn’t “let accuracy interfere with the story.” In fact, it’s a wonderfully entertaining (and very accurate) love poem to an American place and moment. Illustrated with drawings and photographs.

by Oakley Hall (1978; Bantam; out of print). This is the second basic fictional plot. Hall’s protagonist is an unlikely but brilliantly persuasive amalgam of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Adams, a bookish Eastern stranger who arrives in the Dakota Territory in 1883 and tries to make a new life for himself. Lynchings, vigilantes, cattle drives, saloons, and brothels—it’s never been better done. As a bonus, we have the Scottish Lord Machray, likewise a stranger come to town, a spectacularly Falstaffian character based on the historical Marquis de Morés.

by Conrad Richter (1940; Ohio University). A beautiful first sentence: “They moved along in the bobbing, springy gait of a family that followed the woods as some families follow the sea.” This is followed by a great lyric saga of the settlement of the Ohio Valley at the end of the eighteenth century. Gentle, anguished, profoundly inevitable—American history as Chekhov might have written it.

by Elizabeth Madox Roberts (1930; Ivan R. Dee). One of the most appealing heroines in American fiction, Diony Hall, marries and moves with her new husband in 1777 into the Kentucky wilderness. There’s not much more to the plot than that. But here the simple, abstract theme of human nature against the wilderness is brought to life in gorgeous prose, tempered by the author’s remarkable introduction of other voices, such as those of Thomas Jefferson, Bishop Berkeley, Daniel Boone, and the poet Virgil. (As the baseball player and manager Casey Stengel said apropos of the perennial dispute about plot over character, “Good pitching will always stop good hitting, and vice-versa.”)

by Kenneth Roberts (1929; Down East Books). Arundel is a town in southern Maine. From it in 1775 young Steven Nason joins Col. Benedict Arnold on his expedition up the Kennebec River and overland for a doomed assault on Quebec. Roberts wrote many best-selling historical novels, including Northwest Passage and Rabble in Arms. But for sheer storytelling exuberance and historical detail (not to mention a rich and sympathetic depiction of New England Indian life), this has always seemed to me the pick of the lot.

by Michael Shaara (1974; Ballantine). Henry James thought that the novel could arrive at the condition of art only by means of the third-person point of view. Here, in a tour de force of disciplined imagination, Shaara re-creates the Battle of Gettysburg from the several points of view of its actual soldiers, North and South: Lee, Longstreet, Pickett, Buford, and most especially Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Realistic dialogue, interior monologue, heartbreaking metaphors and similes: There are no invented characters, but the techniques of fiction and history have rarely been so powerfully fused.

by Gore Vidal (1984; Knopf). Vidal makes two perfect technical decisions. The first is to avoid a full-scale birth-to-death narrative and to tell only the story of Lincoln’s Presidency. The second is to present Lincoln not from the inside, like the characters in Shaara’s novel, but only from the outside, as observed by a revolving carousel of his enemies and friends, including John Hay, William Seward, and Lincoln’s intermittently mad wife, Mary. The result is Homeric, noble, a history focused on a single, mysterious, barely flawed hero who ultimately wills his own murder, the young John Hay comes to believe, “as a form of atonement for the great and terrible thing that he had done by giving so bloody and absolute a rebirth to his nation.”

Max Byrd’s most recent book is Shooting the Sun, a novel about Charles Babbage and the Santa Fe Trail.

African-Americans have experienced a cultural paradox, or a contradiction. For many years, until World War II, they were largely excluded from the official history of the United States. Not in the sense that they went unmentioned; after all, one can hardly conceive a history of the United States that does not deal with slavery, abolitionism, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. But it was certainly possible to talk about blacks largely as objects, not agents, as primitives, as an unfortunate population whose presence was largely an annoyance, a misfortune, or a tragedy. Blacks were usually presented as a people without a history in Africa, and they were presented as contributing nothing historically important to American life. Indeed, Western slavery had brought blacks into the loop of civilization and so was something of a perverse gift.

This neglect, this denial, however, did not stop blacks from being an object of fascination for whites, with stage minstrelsy, with books and commentaries about race and the meaning of racial characteristics and traits, with ritualized lynching and acts of terrorism, with laws against miscegenation and socializing between the races, and against blacks exerting any sort of political presence in the land. Their being a people without a history made them, in the eyes of whites, a people unworthy of respect, which whites reinforced by making them a people without power, but they were not, by any means, a people devoid of interest. Indeed, they had a deviant allure, largely because what whites saw in black people was what they feared to see in themselves. As Ralph Ellison put it, “The white American has charged the Negro American with being without past or tradition (something which strikes the white man with a nameless horror), just as he himself has been so charged by European and American critics with a nostalgia for the stability once typical of European cultures.…”

It was the abolitionist movement in the United States that generated the first histories of blacks. One of the earliest was the white abolitionist and children’s writer Lydia Maria Child’s An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, first published in 1833, tracing the history of slavery, the general status of the condition of blacks in the United States, their past in Africa, and their contributions to world civilization. It is largely a moral and political defense of the slaves’ right to be free based in good measure on an assessment of their history. So controversial was the subject at the time that Child wrote in her preface: “I am fully aware of the unpopularity of the task I have undertaken; but though I expect ridicule and censure, I cannot fear them.”

In 1836 the abolitionist Robert Benjamin Lewis published what is credited with being the first black history by a black: Light and Truth: Collected From the Bible and Ancient and Modern History, Containing the Universal History of the Colored Man and Indian Race, From the Creation of the World to the Present Time. This was followed in 1841 by the fugitive slave J. W. C. Pennington’s A Textbook of the Origin and History of the Colored People. Yet another black abolitionist writer, William C. Nell, wrote The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution in 1855. William Wells Brown, who wrote the first black American novel, play, and travel book, produced The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements in 1863, followed by The Negro in the American Rebellion: His Heroism and His Fidelity (1867) and The Rising Son; or The Antecedents and Advancement of the Colored Race (1874). (Incidentally, Benjamin Quarles’s Black Abolitionists, published in 1969, remains a very solid account of black involvement in the abolitionist movement.)

The first truly professional black historian, or the first black to write something like a professional history of African-Americans, was George Washington Williams, with his two-volume work History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880, published in 1882. The American Negro Academy, founded in 1897, with members including William H. Crogman, Alain Locke, Carter G. Woodson, James Weldon Johnson, and W. E. B. Du Bois, was something like a combination of salon and think tank. Its members made presentations at the meetings, and although they were not exclusively devoted to history, it was a major topic. After all, Johnson was to write a history of Harlem, and Locke a history of black music; Du Bois and Crogman were to write histories of African-Americans, and Woodson was to become the father of Negro history.

Woodson, who, like Du Bois, earned a doctorate from Harvard, founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915 and the Journal of Negro History four months later. He introduced the idea of Negro history into the mainstream of the culture in 1926 by starting Negro History Week, which became Black History Month in 1976. He also published a number of books dealing with African and African-American history.

Historically black colleges were important in developing the study of black history, not only by introducing courses in the subject but also by having faculty members who devoted themselves to it: August Meier, Rayford Logan, Alrutheus Taylor, and Charles H. Wesley, among others.

There has always been a populist strain running through some black historiography that largely consists of the idea that the redemption of the African-American mind, as well as the political salvation of the African-American, will come with a proper understanding of a history that has not only been denied by whites but distorted and stolen. A variety of writers would fit in this school. They include J. A. Rogers (Nature Knows No Color-Line and Sex and Race), George G. M. James (Stolen Legacy: Greek Philosophy Is Stolen Egyptian Philosophy, a work that directly inspired Martin Bernal’s two-volume Black Athena), John Henrik Clarke, St. Clair Drake (Black Folk Here and There: An Essay in History and Anthropology), Chancellor Williams, Afrocentric and nationalist-oriented scholars like Molefi Asante and Tony Martin, and works like the Nation of Islam’s highly controversial The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews. The best historical accounts of this school of black history are Wilson J. Moses’s Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History and Clarence Walker’s We Can’t Go Home Again.

There are today far too many able historians, both white and black, who write about black history, from Barbara Fields to Robin D. G. Kelley, from Darlene Clark Hine to Patricia Sullivan, for anyone to be able to pick out just a few. What follows is my list of what I think are classic or essential works.

by W. E. B. Du Bois (1903; many editions), is probably the most influential or, at least, most discussed book published by a black American intellectual in the twentieth century, although The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual by Harold Cruse and a few others might rate closely being this masterwork. It is not strictly a history of African-Americans; indeed, it is almost a synthesis of forms: biography, fiction, historical and economic analysis, and autobiography. One might think of some other Du Bois books that are more strictly historical, like The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870 and Black Reconstruction, but none seem to have captured the major issues facing the black masses and the black elite as this work did, and none of his other books were as widely read. This is Du Bois’s analysis of the New South and race.

Winthrop Jordan’s White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (1968; University of North Carolina) is still the most detailed and richly researched account of the development of race as an idea and the creation of racial attitudes and beliefs in the United States during the era of the rise and dominance of slavery.

(1941; Beacon), the anthropologist Melville Herskovits’s pathbreaking study of the retention of African heritage in the New World, meant to refute the work of the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, who postulated that slavery had destroyed slaves’ African culture and forced them to organize an entirely new one. It should be read with a lesser-known but important book by Du Bois, Black Folk Then and Now: An Essay in the History and Sociology of the Negro Race, published in 1939, which deals with some of the same issues but mostly complements Herskovits’s work.

by Paula Giddings (HarperTrade), first published in 1984, is the best single-volume history of black women in the United States.

by Lerone Bennett (1962; Johnson Publishers), is one of the most popular single-volume histories of blacks ever written. Bennett, the executive editor at Ebony for many years, writes with considerable narrative skill. Also, I would mention here John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom, first published in 1947 and, like Bennett’s book, reissued many times. It remains the gold standard as the one-volume history of African-Americans. It has probably been read by more students than any other black history book.

by Amiri Baraka (1963; HarperTrade). Ralph Ellison never liked this book, and Amiri Baraka is certainly not a historian. Yet the book has held up well over the years. There are points that one can argue with, but on the whole this is a compelling account of the development of African-American people through their music, their transition from African to American, from non-Christian to Christian, from slave to “citizen.” There are certainly others who knew more about black folklore and the blues —Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Howard Odum, and Alan Lomax—and sometimes Baraka is a bit superficial. Nevertheless, this book is an important account of the African-American experience in an expressive art that seemed to capture the complexity of that journey more accurately than any other.

by Nathan Huggins (1971; Oxford). There have been many books published about the Harlem Renaissance, but this early one by Nathan Huggins remains one of the best interdisciplinary studies of the period. David Levering Lewis’s When Harlem Was in Vogue, first published in 1981, is still the most popular single-volume history of the era, and more broadly comprehensive than Huggins’s book, but Huggins’s astute judgments of the era have yet to be matched by any historian.

by Taylor Branch (1988; Simon & Schuster). This initial volume in Branch’s epic history is the most compelling, gripping, altogether most powerful narrative available of the first stage of the civil rights movement, an absolutely stunning book.

Martin Duberman’s biography Paul Robeson (1988; New Press) has incredible historical sweep, telling a textured, amazingly well-researched story of a powerful, uncompromising, and tragic figure in American cultural and political life. It is complemented nicely by Gerald Home’s Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1963, published in 1986 (State University of New York).

by Jacqueline Jones (1985; Knopf). Jones is one of the finest labor historians of her generation, and this work is a definitive social and economic history of black women and the family. It should be read together with Giddings’s book.

Gerald Early is a professor of English, American studies, and African-American studies and the former director of the African and Afro-American Studies Program at Washington University in St. Louis. His works include Lure and Loathing: Essays on Race, Identity, and the Ambivalences of Assimilation.