Anyone know any good non-fiction about the lives of Colonial American religious settlers? I’m just interested in learning about what their communities were like besides the strict religious lives you normally hear about.
I don’t know of any but if you put your key words in on Amazon you’d probably find a list of them to sort through. Good luck with it.
The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell, i LOVED this book!
mc
It could be best to search by denomination + fiction + USA.
Apart from Mormons, there would be very little specific, say, Baptist or Congregationalist fictive works set after the 19th century. The main exception are the Quakers, who have a vast interest in themselves.
So I put in quaker fiction usa and found pages such as this recommending mostly historical fiction, such as** The Peaceable Kingdom**, by Jan de Hartog and J. A. Michener’s
Chesapeake.
Unortunately a medical condition stops me from reading Michener ( known translated from the Latin, as Desire-Not-To-Keel-Over-From-Boredom ).
I found a free Google book also
The Quaker City, Or, The Monks of Monk-Hall: A Romance of Philadelphia Life 1845
And was expecting to find one, passed over a 100 times at jumble sales in my youth called something with the utterly ridiculous title of Every Man A King — one can only have one King or president holding the imperium in a territory — but for that all I found was a motto of Huey Long and a song on that by Randy Newman.
Annnd here’s old Huey, singing his song.
Huey P. Long forces a crooner to play a song on the piano, then hovers over him and twitches his approval in the background.
The most interesting reading about that period is the Jesuit Relations. These are reports and accounts of life in early 17th century century North America by Jesuit missionaries living among the Native Americans.
Dip into these accounts here and there, and you’ll find plenty of interest:
http://moses.creighton.edu/kripke/jesuitrelations/
The movie based on these, which I highly recommend, is “Black Robe” set in Canada in 1634.
It’s historically highly accurate, and definitely not just another standard Hollywood movie.
Not specifically dealing with a religious community but Ivor Noel Hume’s Martin’s Hundred is a detailed archaeological and historical look at one small community from the early 1600s.
It will give you lots of context about the material lives of the British in North America, the social and intellectual baggage they brought with them and how they managed to live and die in someone else’s country.
I give it three chefs hats.
Try Jill LePore’s The Name of War (King Phillips War 1675) or Stacy Schiff’s The Witches (Salem Witch Trials 1692)
Alice Morse Earle is your girl. She wrote extensively about everyday life in Colonial America. Even better, she wrote so long ago that almost all her stuff is public domain. Her titles include Home Life in Colonial Days, Child Life in Colonial Times, Stagecoach and Tavern Days, Sabbath in Puritan New England, Customs and Fashions in Old New England, and Curious Punishments of Bygone Days.
A little broader in timeframe/narrower in scope than you might be looking for, but I’m currently reading Bill Bryson’s "Made in America," and it has tons of juicy tidbits about Colonial life. So does his book “At Home,” though that is broader by spending equal time talking about English customs.
Lakai,
My you have opened a massive subject there! I have my Ph.D. in Colonial American History (my dissertation was focused on late 17th C Maryland). And there are a ton of great books on the Subject.
The books mentioned already are great (I received a copy of Martin’s Hundred in fourth grade and literally read the thing to pieces–it is still one of my favorite books, and it was geared by Noel Hume towards the mass market and is eminently accessible, and it shows much about the material life (it is an archaeological study after all) of the very Early Virginians (1620s). Similarly, Lepore’s The Name of War is also a favorite, and forms the basis of my lectures on King Philip’s War. It is an academic book for an academic audience, but it totally transformed my understanding of the events of 1675-76. A great book, but it can be a difficult book to read. The Sot-Weed Factor is a contemporary poem (1680s) that is a scathing attack on the degeneracy and crushing poverty of the the Virginian Settlers–it was meant to be an attack and indictment of colonials, and as such is more than a little skewed. It is archaic in its language, and also not very good poetry.)
If you want THE books on New England Religious ideology–and if you are a VERY good reader (they are more than a little dense) read Perry Miller’s 3-part The New England Mind. It is well over 60 years in print–and despite its age it is still the standard read by Grad Students in the field. It will give you a comprehensive understanding of Puritan Theology and how it evolved over the course of the entire colonial period. But I warn you, it is slow going, even for someone trained as a professional historian.
Another great book that touches on the religious world of the colonials is John Krugler’s English and Catholic: The Lords Baltimore in the Seventeenth Century A good and insightful book.
As for day-to-day life, there’s two great books, both rather short, on life in New England. John Demos’ The Little Commonwealth which details daily life in the family. And Bruce Daniels’ Puritans at Play about leisure time in New England.
For the Chesapeake, I recommend Robert Cole’s World which is a detailed examination of the life of a small to middling plantation in late-mid seventeenth century Maryland. It is a detailed analysis of the economic life, production, labor, legal system, marriage, orphanage, foodways, drinkways, etc. etc., of Chesapeake planters in the period It is full of detailed charts and analysis.
While we are on the Chesapeake, you simply have to read Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom" The Ordeal of Virginia. I cannot emphasize this one enough. If it were up to me, every one would read how, what would become the USA, adopted slavery and the creation of the ideological underpinnings of our original sin. If you do nothing else, READ THIS.
You might also like the 1686 travelogue of a french Huguenot Durand of Dauphine (a pseudonym) who went to England’s colonies looking for a potential new home for his fellow protestants in France. He landed in South Carolina (well, actually was put of his ship because he was so sick they thought he was dying–lucky for him, shortly thereafter the ship sank with all hands!), and traveled up to Virginia–and in his book he details pretty much everything he saw. You need to remember when reading that, whoever he was (we still don’t know) he was gentry-- i.e. of very high status and his wring reflects this (he is rather contemptuous of the poor, and not everyone got to dine with Governors). But because of his status, we get a glimpse into the lives of both the poor and the elite. This is a primary source, there are no historians who will digest this for you and draw out the interesting bits, or help you understand the references or point out the things you are missing as someone who has not read thousands of books and articles on the subject. But it is a ‘straight from the horses mouth’ account of what life was like in the 1680s. You will need to get a librarian’s help for this one–or go to an academic (university) library. It is obscure to say the least.
Hope this helps-- and good luck!