This might be a different type of question from the rest of what r/AskHistorians gets. Lots of it's people wanting clarification or explanations on such and such but I just want to read.
Right now I am reading Flight of the Eagle by Conrad Black. The book delves into the rise of the USA as the global superpower, explaining events from 1754-1992. It mainly goes into various strategies, events, and individuals for its contents and explanations while leaving geography and demographics more to the side.
One thing I was disappointed by though is lack of information from prior to the French & Indian War. I know colonialism wasn't relevant to the book as an independent America only started to form once the French threat was gone and the British got cocky with their policies but I'd like to know more about the colonial period.
I really am interested in any book or articles that give information on the colonial period. Only thing I'm picking about is I'd prefer a general gist of the colonial period. I know jack about this era and while a 300 page book about the economics of New York tobacco in the 1670's may be interesting I just don't know enough about this period to understand that. I'd still be fine with some niche books being recommended. I'd love to learn about Spanish Texas, French Quebec, or something like King Phillip's War but it's not my preference.
I am interested in the broad things that would give me a good idea of colonial America. Culture, politics, economics, warfare, colonialism, notable individuals, religion/philosophy, and whatever else may be important to get the gist of this century and a half from Roanoke to independence.
I hope I can get some good books and thanks in advance to all you who give me some good reads.
Cheers.
I recommend Bernard Bailyn's The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675. Bailyn ( who died last year) was a very well-regarded historian of colonial America. I found this book to be a great correction to the common myth of the early colonists as heroic and the early colonies as utopian experiments. They were very fragile, hard-scrabble little settlements, beset by internal squabbles and external threats, and their colonists had a high death rate.
Bailyn's strengths were in colonial sources. However, he didn't do a much with Native Nations, and one reason why those fragile colonies managed to hang on to the Atlantic coast and grow was that the diseases brought by Europeans in the 16th c. had already wiped out many of the native residents who would have prevented it. Charles C. Mann's 1491 is a great introduction to the pre-Columbian and post Columbus Americas.