Where can someone begin studying if they're seriously interested in American Colonial history?

Hi there!

Your question is a good one, but the breadth of it means there are many avenues you could pursue. You said you're interested in both culture and politics, so that's a good start. But there is so much really excellent scholarship on the subject, even then you could be reading for years.

My main clarifying question to you would be, "what type of people are you interested in learning about?" Like you, I really love learning about the experiences of everyday people; I think it's a fascinating way to see how colonial policies, international events, etc, actually changed the way people lived.

So, to that effect, here are some more suggestions for you.

If you're interested in reading about relationships between Indigenous peoples and European explorers and settlers, there are a few classics. I recommend people start with Richard White's The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815, because it has influenced so many other academics since it initially appeared in 1991. White argued that in a particular time and place, Indigenous peoples and explorers/settlers had roughly proportionate military capacities, and so they were forced to compromise, which produced a fair degree of mutuality between societies generally considered (even in the scholarship at the time) to be fairly oppositional. If you are interested in exploring even further the ideas of Indigenous people not only having equal political and military might as Europeans, but in fact having the upper hand, Pekka Hamalainen's book The Comanche Empire might be of interest.

If gender is more interesting to you than Native-newcomer relations, I would recommend Kathleen Brown's Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. The book remains very important in the field, especially for what it shows about how the discourse of gender served to also construct ideas about race, emphasizing gender's oppressive power.

Scholars have also spent a lot of time discussing religious change in the colonial Americas. Should that interest you, I would say you might want to check out Allan Greer's Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits. This example is north of the current border, but the book's depiction of the spiritual cosmologies circulating in New France is fascinating enough to be of interest to readers regardless.

Another great book, for those interested in the history of slavery, is Mechal Sobel's The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia. Sobel demonstrates that, contrary to some earlier assumptions, the history of interactions between Blacks and whites means that there was a co-creation of a shared culture (so it wasn't just that whites influenced Blacks, but that Black people also powerfully shaped white society as well).

You'll likely have noticed that I haven't included anything specifically focusing on class or economics; these are not my areas of specialty, so perhaps others will chime in if that is something you're looking for. That said, I hope this answer was helpful!