The Founding of New England was published by Atlantic Monthly Press in 1921, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for History — launching Adams’s career as one of America’s most successful popular historians. The book challenged the dominant narrative of New England’s origins: the idea that the region was founded primarily by religious idealists seeking freedom of worship.
Adams argued that economic motives — the desire for land, trade, and profit — were at least as important as religious conviction in driving settlement, and that the Puritan theocracy was not a noble experiment in religious freedom but an authoritarian regime that persecuted dissenters as ruthlessly as the Anglican establishment they had fled. This revisionist interpretation infuriated New England’s intellectual establishment (which had invested heavily in the Puritan-origins myth) but was largely vindicated by subsequent scholarship.
The book’s strength lies in its use of primary sources — Adams went back to the original colonial records, letters, and legal documents — and in its willingness to treat the Puritans as complex, often contradictory human beings rather than as cardboard saints or villains. His Puritans are simultaneously devout and greedy, principled and hypocritical, visionary and cruel — in short, human.
Collecting The Founding of New England
First edition (Atlantic Monthly Press, Boston, 1921): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $60–$150
- Without jacket: $15–$40