Adams follows New England from the first claims of rival empires through Plymouth, the Great Migration and the rise of Massachusetts Bay, to the defeat of the Puritan theocracy and the reassertion of royal control. He is unsentimental about the founders, reading the colonies as an oligarchy, a frontier and a commercial venture as much as a religious refuge.
Winner of the 1922 Pulitzer Prize for History, and still a bracing corrective to pious accounts of the Puritans. Download the free EPUB.