Author Sarah Vowell has written several bestsellers about American history. Her work challenges dominant celebratory narratives and provides a more truthful account of the violent past. In The Wordy Shipmates, she reinterprets the Puritan world of the Massachusetts Bay colony and the enduring legacy they left behind—a legacy that generations of Americans have distorted and adapted to evolving political aims. While she analyzes historical figures within the context of their time, she also regularly offers her own often wryly humorous commentary on their actions, crediting them with achievements or condemning them for stupidity and cruelty.

Some of Vowell’s other celebrated books are Assassination Vacation, about histories and sites of presidential assassinations in the US, The Partly Cloudy Patriot, a humorous memoir, and Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, about General Lafayette and the American Revolution.

The central historical figure of the book, John Winthrop was an English religious and political leader who emigrated to Massachusetts Bay in the fleet led by the flagship Arbella in 1630. Born into wealth and formally trained as a lawyer, he became influential in non-Separatist Puritanism and in Boston’s growing civil and religious communities.