The Founding of New England
by James Truslow Adams
Summary
The Founding of New England is the first volume in James Truslow Adams's three part history of New England, tracing the region from its earliest English settlement through the formative decades of Puritan Massachusetts and its neighboring colonies. Adams came to the subject after a career shift: trained in investment banking before he turned to writing history in 1912, he brought a working outsider's clarity rather than a career academic's specialist vocabulary to a period usually left to New England's own historical societies to narrate.
The book covers the colonies' founding generations, the religious convictions that drove settlement, the practical struggle to build a working society an ocean away from England, and the political and social patterns that took root before the trilogy's later volumes carry the story into the Revolutionary era and beyond. Adams wrote the New England trilogy as three connected books published across the 1920s, of which this founding volume covers by far the earliest and, for many readers, the most foundational ground: the years when New England was still deciding what kind of place it would become.
Adams interrupted his own writing career to serve in the First World War, working with Colonel Edward House on the American commission that prepared background material for the Paris Peace Conference, and returned to historical writing with the scholarly seriousness that experience reinforced. Reading the book means following a historian working at the start of what became a defining career, before Adams turned to the broader American history that made him a household name. It suits a reader who wants New England's founding treated as the start of a larger American story rather than as regional history alone.
Historical Context & Significance
The Founding of New England won the 1922 Pulitzer Prize for History, the first installment of what would grow into Adams's full New England trilogy, completed with Revolutionary New England in 1923 and New England in the Republic, 1776 to 1850, in 1926. Adams returned to the colonial period again in Provincial Society, 1690 to 1763, a social history of the American colonies that drew particular praise for connecting daily life to the political history that followed it.
Adams became far better known for a book published nearly a decade later, The Epic of America, where he popularized the phrase the American Dream in describing a land where life would be better and richer for everyone regardless of birth. Despite the shared surname, Adams was not related to the presidential Adams family whose own history he wrote about in other works, a coincidence that has confused readers of his prolific output for a century.