5 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
American historian at UC Davis who has won two Pulitzer Prizes — William Cooper's Town and The Internal Enemy — and whose American Colonies provides the most comprehensive single-volume history of colonial American history, including the Spanish, French, and British colonies.
David Hackett Fischer's 1989 magnum opus arguing that four distinct British regional cultures (Puritans from East Anglia to Massachusetts, Cavaliers from south/west England to Virginia, Quakers from North Midlands to Delaware, Borderland Scots-Irish to the Backcountry) brought their specific folkways to America — and that these four cultures still fundamentally structure American regional differences.
Alan Taylor's 2001 comprehensive history of colonial North America — covering the Spanish, French, Dutch, and British colonies as well as Native American societies — the most geographically complete account of pre-Revolutionary American history.
American historian at Harvard who won two Pulitzer Prizes — The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and Voyagers to the West — and who fundamentally transformed understanding of the American Revolution by demonstrating the centrality of the republican tradition (Country ideology) in Revolutionary thought.
Bernard Bailyn's 2012 account of the brutal first decades of English settlement in North America — depicting the violence, starvation, disease, and mutual brutality of the 17th century encounter between English settlers and Native Americans.