Also of interest...in visions of early America

Before the Revolution

by Daniel K. Richter

(Harvard/Belknap, $35)

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Historians in recent decades have uncovered a precolonial America “more complicated—and more interesting”—than previously imagined, said Charles C. Mann in The Wall Street Journal. This bold new book focuses on how the collisions between an array of native cultures and several waves of adventurers—from conquistadores to planters—shaped our early history. Though the book is weak on economic factors, including the effects of slavery, it “invites intelligent argument.”

A Reforming People

by David D. Hall

(Knopf, $30)

David Hall’s revelatory look at the Puritans reminds us that “we have inherited more than a few of our forefathers’ growing pains,” said Molly Young in The Boston Globe. Hall positions these reformers somewhere between our conceptions of them as either religious rebels or authoritarians in “funny hats.” They still “have much to teach us” about citizenship: A typical Puritan “petitioned, composed leaflets, showed up at town meetings in full bluster, and simply ignored unsatisfactory laws.”

The Idea of America

by Gordon S. Wood

(Penguin, $30)

“Gordon Wood has been writing brilliantly on the American Revolutionary era since at least the 1960s,” said Dennis Drabelle in The Washington Post. This collection of 11 essays reaffirms his standing among American historians. Wood’s strongest essays include “The American Revolutionary Tradition,” which does much to explain our global ambitions, and “The Legacy of Rome in the American Revolution,” which reveals, among other things, toga-wearing forefathers.

Caleb’s Crossing

by Geraldine Brooks

(Viking, $27)

Geraldine Brooks’s intricate new novel fictionalizes the life of Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck, a Wampanoag Indian who graduated from Harvard in 1665. Told from the perspective of a Massachusetts colonist who befriends Caleb, the story is a richly imagined look at two characters trying to merge different worlds, said Robin Vidimos in The Denver Post. Brooks, who won a Pulitzer for her novel about Sherman’s March, proves again her “solid ability to breathe life into a kernel of history.”