Builders of the Bay Colony

By Samuel Eliot Morison

Book Overview

1930. Sketches of some of the individuals who came out of Old England to begin the New, written by Morison, Pulitzer Prize-winning Professor of History in Harvard. Contents: Promoters and Precursors:... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0930350227
• ISBN13: 9780930350222
• Release Date: January 1982
• Publisher: Northeastern Univ Pr
• Length: 420 Pages
• Weight: 1.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 1.0" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Well written book on the early Massachusetts colony

Samuel Eliot Morison paints a pretty detailed and accurate picture of what life was like during the first few decades of settlement in Massachusetts in the 1600s. He does this by presenting biographies of about a dozen important figures during that time and place, representing a cross-section of the colony: Governor John Winthrop, goldsmith and businessman John Hull, first president of Harvard Henry Dunster, theologian Thomas Shepard, missionary to the Indians and Bible translator into Algonkin John Eliot, poetess Anne Bradstreet, and lawmaker Nathaniel Ward are a few. Morison breaks with the revisionist view of 1930 when the book was first published and as presented by historian J. Truslow Adams that few of the earliest settlers were actually Puritans; he sides with the earlier view that indeed most were. Morison quotes heavily from the original Puritan documents, many of which are highly entertaining as well as being informative. Morison is of an older school of historical writing where scholarship is, of course, important, but so is literary skill: he is authoritative and able to relate a clever or witty observation at the same time. He is, therefore, a pleasure to read. I recommend the 2nd edition in that it adds a profile of fur trader and frontier official William Pynchon not found in the 1st edition.