More than 150,000 books were published this year; in 1709, in the British colonies of North America, that number was just 31. Out of those, the historian Jill Lepore gives us her Top 10. Unsurprisingly, New Englanders, the likes of Increase Mather and his son Cotton, dominate the list. Virginia, after all, was “one of the poorest, miserablest, and worst countries in all of America.”

IMAGE: Increase Mather, 1688