Colonial America

Into the Wilderness
Rosanne Bittner

Sixteen-year-old Jessica Matthews and her family live in splendid isolation in the Allegheny Mountains in 1753 until one fateful day when the usually peaceful Indians attack. Luckily Noah Barnes is traveling in the area and fights off the warriors, sustaining an injury. While recuperating in the Matthewses' cabin, the 29-year-old hunter cum English spy and Jessica fall in love, but Noah must travel to Virginia to warn the governor that the French are rallying the tribes to fight the English settlers, even though he faces imprisonment. While he's away the Matthewses are attacked again, and Jessica is taken prisoner and led into French territory. Bittner's gripping love story features actual historical characters and brings the bravado and daring of the early American settlers to life. This is the first in a planned series of romances about the westward expansion, and if the rest are as good as this one, they shouldn't be missed.
Booklist Review; March 2002.

Remember the Morning
Thomas Fleming

Reaching deeply into the Colonial past of the United States, this sixth volume in the Stapleton series chronicles the turbulent life of Catalyntie Van Vorst; her fated friend and ex-slave, Clara; and their mutual lover, Malcolm Stapleton. Kidnapped as youngsters by the Seneca, Catalyntie and Clara are returned to their Dutch family at age 17, but they can never totally shed their Indian personas. Forced by circumstances to become self-sufficient, Clara becomes half-owner of a tavern where anti-monarchical conspiracies are hatched. Catalyntie is a businesswoman, too, trading with Indians and setting up a store in New York City. Malcolm successfully lives his life as a fearsome warrior or soldier, depending on which affiliation brings him closer to his lifetime goal to build an American consciousness. Infused with Fleming's (Loyalties: A Novel of World War II, LJ 5/1/94) thorough command of history and his stereotype-smashing insights into the psychology of ambitious, conflicted young people, this historical saga is a marvelously fresh reinterpretation of an era.
Library Journal Review; August 1997.

Drums of Autumn
Diana Gabaldon

Gabaldon continues her series of massive time-travel romances starring Claire Mackenzie (nee Randall) and her beloved Highlander, Jamie. Although parts of the book take place in the present, most of the tale is laid in Charleston, South Carolina, before the American Revolution--in the 1760s, to be precise. There the Scots exiles live under the long shadow of Culloden and the gallows and sense the first political winds that eventually turned into revolution. Gabaldon is clearly trying to write on the same scale as Margaret Mitchell, and in terms of length and of thoroughness of research, largely succeeds (this is no Braveheart: Gabaldon has done her historical homework). She has also created a large cast of characters, most of them archetypal but good of their kind, and has achieved pacing that is sufficiently brisk to help rather than hinder her plethoric tome's other qualities by holding reader attention. Furthermore, it is quite possible to start the Outlander saga with this book, although dedicated followers of this giant among time-travel romances will enjoy it even more.
Booklist Review; November 1996.

The Widow’s War
Sally Gunning

In 1761, Massachusetts-born attorney James Otis challenged the British government's right to impose legal writs on the American Colonies. He was also an outspoken abolitionist and supporter of women's suffrage. In her latest novel, Gunning (Fire Water) uses Otis as a catalyst for change in the life of Lyddie Berry. While most people find the lawyer's sentiments appalling, she is quietly thrilled - in fact, Otis's speeches inspire Lyddie to defy her son-in-law, a pompous businessman who assumed legal responsibility for her following the accidental death of her fisherman husband. Gunning exposes the sexism of the era - married women were denied the right to own property and were barred from signing contracts, while widows were under the thumb of male heirs and granted use of only one-third of their deceased husband's property- and juxtaposes it with the racism of the white Colonists against Native Americans. By merging historical fact with riveting fiction, she offers readers an intimate peak into the daily life of pre-Revolutionary War Satucket, MA. Along the way, they'll get a vivid sense of the race, gender, and class dynamics of America's foreparents while enjoying a wonderful story. This is historical fiction at its best; highly recommended.
Library Journal Review; January 2006.

The Rising Shore - Roanoke
Deborah Homsher

Owing to perpetual interest in the subject matter, the 2007 release of the English film Roanoke: The Lost Colony, and the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, this first novel about one of American history's most enduring mysteries may appeal to the literary and book club set. The author's two nonfiction books--Women & Guns and From Blood to Verdict--revealed her interest in feminism and crime. Here, too, she is careful with her facts, using as narrators the famous Eleanor Dare (nee White), daughter of Colony leader John White and the mother of the first English child born in the New World, and Margaret, a documented Colony member. The invented portions are believable, including the ending--you can debate the details, but it seems quite logical. The events of 1587 are viewed from the perspective of the women, both of whom are all but powerless as they are carried across the Atlantic and into the New World, one by her longing for recognition from her father and the other by a notion that it had to be better than London, for she'd 'never met any beggar girls from Virginia.' Lots of violence and tragedy in this version of early American history.
Library Journal Review; August 2007.

The Jamestown Project
Karen Ordahl Kupperman

In the four hundredth anniversary year of Jamestown, historian Kupperman enlarges its story to encompass the Atlantic world that gave rise to it. The view from England toward the New World is what the author strives to reconstruct, successfully so. A century behind rival Spain in colonizing ventures, English captains eyed the east coast of North America with myriad possibilities in mind: as a base for raiding Spanish ships, as harboring a water route to the East Indies, and as an opportunity for reestablishing Christianity on a purified footing. The encounter of these concepts with the reality that was America--its people, climate, and landscape--is where Kupperman's account thrives, as she explores the experiences of various colonizing ventures, of which Jamestown was but one. Kupperman argues that Jamestown survived by attracting tremendous public interest in England, which translated into sustained supply for a decade, and by a trial-and-error method for motivating settlers through incentives rather than compulsion. A fine contextualization of the oft-told Jamestown epic.
Booklist Review; February 2007.

American Heros
Edmund S. Morgan

Despite the lowbrow title, these are intelligent, opinionated essays on America between 1600 and 1800. Morgan, a revered historian and the bestselling author of Benjamin Franklin, wrote the earliest chapter in 1937, the latest in 2005. Many describe obscure events but pack a surprising punch. In 'Dangerous Books,' the author tells the story of Yale (where he is professor emeritus), founded in 1701 as a bastion of Puritanism, but with a library of works by English Enlightenment intellectuals. In 1721 six members of the faculty, including the rector, horrified the community by publicly renouncing Calvinism. The last official American execution for witchcraft occurred in 1692, but the popular belief in witchcraft continued well into the 19th century: in a marvelously recounted vignette, Morgan describes Philadelphia in 1787, where a few miles from the halls where America's elite were debating our Constitution, a mob abused and finally killed an old woman accused of witchcraft. Three of the 17 essays are previously unpublished. Happily, all are up to the standards of this wise, venerable (now 93) and deeply thoughtful historian.
Publishers Weekly Review; March 2009.

Mayflower
Nathaniel Philbrick

In this remarkable effort, National Book Award-winner Philbrick (In the Heart of the Sea) examines the history of Plymouth Colony. In the early 17th century, a small group of devout English Christians fled their villages to escape persecution, going first to Holland, then making the now infamous 10-week voyage to the New World. Rather than arriving in the summer months as planned, they landed in November, low on supplies. Luckily, they were met by the Wampanoag Indians and their wizened chief, Massasoit. In economical, well-paced prose, Philbrick masterfully recounts the desperate circumstances of both the settlers and their would-be hosts, and how the Wampanoags saved the colony from certain destruction. Indeed, there was a first Thanksgiving, the author notes, and for over 50 years the Wampanoags and the Pilgrims lived in peace, becoming increasingly interdependent. But in 1675, 56 years after the colonists' landing, Massasoit's heir, Philip, launched a confusing war on the English that, over 14 horrifying months, claimed 5,000 lives, a huge percentage of the colonies' population. Impeccably researched and expertly rendered, Philbrick's account brings the Plymouth Colony and its leaders, including William Bradford, Benjamin Church and the bellicose, dwarfish Miles Standish, vividly to life. More importantly, he brings into focus a gruesome period in early American history. For Philbrick, this is yet another award-worthy story of survival.
Publishers Weekly Review; February 2006.