Thanks Argent Towers! I’ll read that link.
Jamestown was founded in the first decade of the 17th century in Virginia. The Mayflower came to Massachusetts in 1620. You live in one of the few areas in the U.S. where you can still see a significant amount of buildings, artifacts, and recreations from that time. You could go to Salem, MA and see the witch museum or to the Plymouth plantation. It has some decent history from that time in a form that is easy to take in and fun. There are a number of 17th century houses still around as well for touring. National Geographic has done some good summaries of Jamestown in magazine and documentary form (Netflix on Demand). That will give you some English/American history from the early people that left England but still had English culture.
You read faster than I - took me closer to 3 months.
I’m not sure how to score the *Baroque Cycle * for realism. I didn’t notice any obvious clangers but lets just say it’s no ordinary tale. Oh and the books start in Boston, and also include excursions to India, North Africa and Qwghlm.
Well, the main characters we follow in the books are fictional and do fictional things and have fictional adventures. But they do them alongside real people from history, in real places (except Qwghlm) during real events like wars.
Yeah a lot of pages are dedicated to not-Europe. You could probably skip those and not miss anything.
IMHO they are historically accurate but I think 90% of what I know about that era came from me reading the series 
It makes me good at trivia tho! OpalCat you should Google it, see what “the Internet” thinks about the accuracy.
Really? Amazing how the Geneva bible has somehow fallen out of history.
A recommendation for The Pyrates by George MacDonald Fraser. Yes, it’s a novel about pirates (with a lot of the book set in England) but Fraser is a meticulous historian - he made sure he knew all the real history of the period before making up whatever he wanted. So the book will give you a good feel for the period even though you wouldn’t want to use it as a cite. Plus it’s highly entertaining.
Everyday Life in Elizabethan Times
One thing you’ll want to address in a vampire novel set in this period is witch hunting. The peak of this phenomena ran from about the middle of the sixteenth to the middle of the seventeenth centuries. Tens of thousands of people were executed for allegedly practicing witchcraft during this period.
In areas around Hungary or Transylvania, there was vampire-hunting instead of witch-hunting
It obviously didn’t work judging by the vampire/witch ratio in popular press these days.
“Turn her loose. We only got the vampire hunting license.” 
Our notion of the witch as a crone with a flying broom and beat up pointy hat actually comes from a specific case, the Pendle/Lancashire Witches. James I & VI, who had written (or had written) a book on Dæmonologie was fascinated by the case; some biographers and historians theorize that the witches in Macbeth were beefed up if not added to it altogether to reflect the witch trials. (Macbeth premiered before the Pendle trials but was performed numerous times at court and in London.)
The most important development in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales in the 17th century was of course their merger into one land. The merger of the Scottish & English thrones was a huge event; James VI’s of Scotland’s mother and great-grandfather had both died at the hands of English monarchs and his grandfather spent his short life fighting them.
Northern Ireland had unbelievable shake-ups due to the backlash of decades of wars with the English and the Flight of the Earls. James settled Scots and Yorkshire families by the fleetload onto the lands that had been depopulated by force in northeastern Ireland; they became known as the Ulster Scots, or, in America, the Scots Irish.
Then of course there’s the English Civil War which also had arms in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. All in all a topsy turvy century for the monarchs: first they get a Scotsman, then mid century they see a king deposed and beheaded without a successor for the first time ever. Then ‘Calvinism gone wild’ was replaced by Stuarts gone wild with the restoration- if you’re writing about 1660 then it’s a way different world than 1616 because suddenly “sin was in and her name was Gwynne”, and that lasted until the English king was deposed- uhgain- with James II (a devout Catholic but every bit as big a horndog and playboy as his “Old Rowdy” brother Charles) being chased out by his daughter and (gay)son-in-law/nephew.
If there’s a theater element this is really a complex era: you catch the end of Shakespeare’s time, then see it really smashed under the Protectorate of Cromwell, then brought back booming by Charles II (with actualy genuine live women on the stage). Commedia dell arte (sp) begins to arrive in England, along with huge elaborate horny masked balls.
And through the entire century of course there’s America. The settlement of Jamestown was huge news (few if any outside the highest ups at the Virginia Company offices realized what a nightmare the place was- Auschwitz had lower death rates). Pocahontas became a superstar and pin-up of sorts in the 1610s- speaking of theater she was lodged in a tavern popular with actors and caught the illness that killed her there. As Virginia and then Plimoth slowly stabilize, the emigration from all over Britain to the New World escalates tremendously with people leaving from all ports to try their hand in America. (Interesting thing: many actually didn’t have a particular destination selected so much as they went where the ships were headed.)
Meanwhile science and mathematics and astronomy are being revolutionized and the economy is going haywire several times and it’s the dawn of the golden age of piracy by the end of the century and then there’s some Continental affairs that have major repercussions in Britain. Oh, and Catholics tried to blow up Parliament early on and there are all manner of Protestant v. Catholic and Protestant v. Other Protestant skirmishes and wars.
So, short answer, A LOT was happening.
Vampire hunting never really caught on. The problem was that all the suspects were corpses and you just couldn’t get the same satisfaction executing somebody who was already dead.
Speak for yourself.
The novel is set in present day. Just one of the main characters is that old and I want to have a feel for his back story.
Nitpick. England and Scotland, despite the merger of the thrones, did not actually become one land until the beginning of the 18th century (the Acts of Union passed by England in 1706 and Scotland in 1707).
You also have the industrial revolution kicking off big time towards the end of the 17th century which is a pretty signficant thing in itself.
I would also recommend the Baroque Cycle books by Neal Stephenson as they give a great impression of what London was like at the time and he really does cover all the major developments of the period.
Keep in mind while looking at early America, though, that the small bands of people who began settling here in the wilderness took something of a step backwards technologically. At least at first, the living here was considerably more primitive than it was back home in Europe.
You might be interested in A Journal of the Plague Year by Defoe. He wrote it about 50 years after the plague, but it’s a very meticulous account of the plague in London, and certainly gives you a feel for the impact on the ordinary citizen. Plus, if you’re writing about vampires, your character may have a professional interest in that many deaths…