The Homestead Book Club gets together quarterly for informal discussions about history & books.

THANK YOU TO OUR PROGRAM SPONSORS!
North Country Federal Credit Union
M&T Bank
AARP Vermont

Upcoming book club meetings…

Sunday February 11, 3:00-4:00pm

Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War by Nathaniel Philbrook
From the perilous ocean crossing to the shared bounty of the first Thanksgiving, the Pilgrim settlement of New England has become enshrined as our most sacred national myth. Yet, as best-selling author Nathaniel Philbrick reveals in his spellbinding new book, the true story of the Pilgrims is much more than the well-known tale of piety and sacrifice; it is a 55-year epic that is at once tragic, heroic, exhilarating, and profound.
The Mayflower‘s religious refugees arrived in Plymouth Harbor during a period of crisis for Native Americans as disease spread by European fishermen devastated their populations. Initially the two groups, the Wampanoags, under the charismatic and calculating chief Massasoit, and the Pilgrims, whose pugnacious military officer Miles Standish was barely five feet tall, maintained a fragile working relationship. But within decades, New England would erupt into King Philip’s War, a savagely bloody conflict that nearly wiped-out English colonists and natives alike and forever altered the face of the fledgling colonies and the country that would grow from them.
With towering figures like William Bradford and the distinctly American hero Benjamin Church at the center of his narrative, Philbrick has fashioned a fresh and compelling portrait of the dawn of American history, a history dominated right from the start by issues of race, violence, and religion.

Sunday May 5, 3:00-4:00pm

The Fort: A Novel of the Revolutionary War by Bernard Cornwell
While the major fighting of the war moves to the south in the summer of 1779, a British force of fewer than a thousand Scottish infantry, backed by three sloops-of-war, sails to the desolate and fog-bound coast of New England. Establishing a garrison and naval base at Penobscot Bay, in the eastern province of Massachusetts that would become Maine, the Scots – the only British troops between Canada and New York – harry rebel privateers and give shelter to American loyalists.
In response, Massachusetts sends a fleet of more than 40 vessels and some 1,000 infantrymen to “captivate, kill or destroy” the foreign invaders. Second in command is Peleg Wadsworth, a veteran of the battles at Lexington and Long Island, once aide to General Washington, and a man who sees clearly what must be done to expel the invaders.
But ineptitude and irresolution lead to a mortifying defeat – and have stunning repercussions for two men on opposite sides: an untested 18-year-old Scottish lieutenant named John Moore, who will begin an illustrious military career; and a Boston silversmith and patriot named Paul Revere, who will face court-martial for disobedience and cowardice.
Grounded firmly in history, inimitably told in Cornwell’s thrilling narrative style, The Fort is the extraordinary novel of this fascinating clash between a superpower and a nation in the making.

Sunday August 11, 3:00-4:00pm

John Adams Under Fire: The Founding Father’s Fight for Justice in the Boston Massacre Murder Trial by Dan Abrams & David Fisher
History remembers John Adams as a Founding Father and our country’s second president. But in the tense years before the American Revolution, he was still just a lawyer, fighting for justice in one of the most explosive murder trials of the era—the Boston Massacre, where five civilians died from shots fired by British soldiers.
Drawing on Adams’s own words from the trial transcript, Dan Abrams and David Fisher transport readers to colonial Boston, a city roiling with rebellion, where British military forces and American colonists lived side by side, waiting for the spark that would start a war.

Sunday November 10, 3:00-4:00pm
Zoom-only; click here to register.

The Hornet’s Nest by Jimmy Carter
This novel follows a cast of characters and their loved ones on both sides of this violent conflict—including some who are based on the author’s ancestors.
At the heart of the story is Ethan Pratt, who in 1766 moves with his wife, Epsey, from Philadelphia to North Carolina and then to Georgia in 1771, in the company of Quakers. On their homesteads in Georgia, Ethan and his wife form a friendship with neighbors Kindred Morris and his wife, Mavis. Through Kindred and his young Indian friend Newota, Ethan learns about the frontier and the Native American tribes who are being continually pressed farther inland by settlers. As the eight-year war develops, Ethan and Kindred find themselves in life-and-death combat with opposing forces.
With its moving love story, vivid action, and the suspense of a war fought with increasing ferocity and stealth, The Hornet’s Nest is historical fiction at its best, in the tradition of such major classics as The Last of the Mohicans.