Colonial America

Lawrence Hill’s novel Someone Knows My Name was first published in Canada in 2007 under the title The Book of Negroes. This work of historical fiction was published with its new title in the United States in 2008. The novel won the 2007 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.Inspired by the historical document the “Book of Negroes,” a record of escaped African slaves who found freedom in Canada, Hill set... Read Someone Knows My Name Summary

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The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation, originally published in 2003 by Oxford University Press, is a popular history book by American cultural historian Jim Cullen. As an overview and critical analysis of the American Dream, this book adds some meat to the bones of a traditionally ambiguous concept. Cullen maintains an optimistic outlook about the usefulness of the various American Dreams and about the promise of America, despite... Read The American Dream Summary

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The Crucible is a Tony Award-winning play by Arthur Miller. The play is a partially fictionalized dramatization of the Salem witch trials, which took place from February 1692 to May 1693. Premiering in 1953 at the height of the McCarthy trials, Miller wrote The Crucible as an allegory for the paranoia, fear-mongering accusations, and circumstantial evidence he witnessed. Accused of being a communist himself, Miller faced questioning by the House of Representatives’ Committee on Un-American... Read The Crucible Summary

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The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (First Mariners Books edition 2017) by Andrés Reséndez, a Mexican historian working at the University of California Davis, won the 2017 Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. In this book, Reséndez dispels the myth that only African slaves faced enslavement in the Americas. He focuses on Indigenous slaves in the Caribbean, central and northern Mexico, and the American Southwest... Read The Other Slavery Summary

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The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (1958) is a work of history by Edmund S. Morgan. The Puritan Dilemma is a biographical study of the first governor of colonial Massachusetts, John Winthrop. Morgan examines Winthrop’s work and life, presenting him as a man of high ideals who understood how to lead as a model of moderation and practical flexibility. Though many Puritans chose to withdraw from the world into little cells of self-righteousness... Read The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop Summary

The Scarlet Letter is an 1850 novel by writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. The work, Hawthorne’s first full-length novel, is a classic of the American Romantic era. More specifically, its treatment of topics like sin, insanity, and the occult make it a work of Dark Romanticism—a movement related to the Gothic genre that includes works by Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville. The Scarlet Letter is also a piece of historical fiction; it is set in the... Read The Scarlet Letter Summary

“The Wives of the Dead,” a short story published in 1832 by American dark-romantic author Nathaniel Hawthorne, tells of sisters-in-law in colonial Massachusetts whose husbands die at the same time and details their attempts to help each other cope with the loss. The eerily surreal story touches on several of Hawthorne’s literary obsessions, including Gothic horror, Puritan guilt, love and devotion, Early American history, and feminism. The story later appeared in an 1851 collection, The... Read The Wives of the Dead Summary

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