New Books In Native American Studies

Agnès Delahaye’s new book, Settling the Good Land: Governance and Promotion in John Winthrop’s New England (Brill, 2020), is the story of John Winthrop’s tenure as governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630’s. In a correction to the prevailing narrative of Puritans alone in the New England wilderness, Professor Delahaye shows the colonists’ commercial connections to the Old England and the Atlantic World and how earnestly the magistrates of the Massachusetts Bay Company maintained these through promotional writing, where their particular, innovative project of permanent settlement can be traced and contextualized. John Winthrop’s Journal reveals a deep desire for economic independence, or “competency,” born of his frustrations with his limited options in a cramped England, which he played out in a New World—a Promised Land—that he considered to be boundlessly fertile with possibility. Always expanding, Winthrop competed ruthlessly with the indigenous Americans in a “continuous process of rumors, int