Showing titles in Colonial Period

After the siege of Boston forced the British to evacuate that city in March 1776, Continental Army commander George Washington suspected that the British would move by sea to New York City, the next logical target in an attempt to end a colonial insurrection. He thus rushed his army south to defend the city. Washington guessed correctly, but it would be to no avail.

Scars on the Land is the first comprehensive history of American slavery to examine how the environment fundamentally formed enslaved people's lives and how slavery remade the Southern landscape. Over two centuries, from the establishment of slavery in the Chesapeake to the Civil War, one simple calculation had profound consequences: Rather than measuring productivity based on outputs per acre, Southern planters sought to maximize how much labor they could extract from their enslaved workforce.

The early years of English settlement in America were characterized by catastrophe: starvation, disease, extreme violence, and ruinous ignorance. Seasons of Misery offers a provocative reexamination of the British colonies' chaotic and profoundly unstable beginnings, placing crisis at the center of the story. At the outposts of a fledgling empire and disconnected from the social order of their home society, English settlers were both physically and psychologically estranged from their European identities.

A revealing biography of Dr. Benjamin Rush - fiery signer of the Declaration of Independence, prominent physician, ardent politician, zealous social reformer, passionate humanitarian, and dedicated educator. Known primarily as America's most influential and leading physician, Rush was also among the first to call for the abolition of slavery, equal rights for women, free education and health care for the poor, slum clearance, citywide sanitation facilities, an end to child labor, and universal public education, among other causes.

For over 400 years, the mystery of Roanoke’s “Lost Colony” has puzzled historians and spawned conspiracies - until now. Hatteras native and amateur archaeologist Scott Dawson compiles what scholars know about the Lost Colony along with what scholars have found beneath the soil of Hatteras.

Francis J. Bremer focuses on the role of religion in the settlement of the Plymouth Colony and how those values influenced political, intellectual, and cultural aspects of New England life 150 years before the American Revolution. He traces the Puritans' persecution in early 17th-century England for challenging the established national church and the difficulties they faced as refugees in the Netherlands in the 1610s.

There were, Peter Thompson notes, some 150 synonyms for inebriation in common use in colonial Philadelphia and, on the eve of the Revolution, just as many licensed drinking establishments. Clearly, 18th-century Philadelphians were drawn to the tavern. In addition to the obvious lure of the liquor, taverns offered overnight accommodations, meals, and stabling for visitors. They also served as places to gossip, gamble, find work, make trades, and gather news.

In The Story of America, Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore investigates American origin stories - from John Smith's account of the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to Barack Obama's 2009 inaugural address - to show how American democracy is bound up with the history of print. Over the centuries, Americans have read and written their way into a political culture of ink and type. Part civics primer, part cultural history, The Story of America excavates the origins of everything from the paper ballot and the Constitution to the I.O.U. and the dictionary.

Once a year at Thanksgiving, we encounter Pilgrims as folksy people in funny hats before promptly forgetting them. In the centuries since America began, the Pilgrims have been relegated to folklore and children's stories, fairy-tale mascots for holiday parties and greeting cards. The true story of the Pilgrim fathers could not be more different.

Outside of the Midwest, the Chippewa are not as well known as other Native American tribes like the Sioux or Cherokee, but they have long been one of the biggest groups in all of North America. Not surprisingly their presence around the Great Lakes region made them especially important to early European explorers who sailed the St. Lawrence and came into contact with the natives as they continued searching for the Northwest Passage.

In this penetrating study, Carl Brasseaux looks beyond long-standing mythology to provide a critical account of early Acadian culture in Louisiana and the reasons for its survival. He convincingly dispels many received notions about the routes Acadians traveled from Nova Scotia to Louisiana, their original settlement sites, and the patterns of their subsequent migrations within the state, and closely examines the relations of Louisiana's Acadians with their black, Spanish, Indian, and Creole neighbors.

In Brethren by Nature, Margaret Ellen Newell reveals a little-known aspect of American history: English colonists in New England enslaved thousands of Indians. Massachusetts became the first English colony to legalize slavery in 1641, and the colonists' desire for slaves shaped the major New England Indian wars, including the Pequot War of 1637, King Philip's War of 1675-76, and the northeastern Wabanaki conflicts of 1676-1749.

Indian peoples made some 400 treaties with the United States between the American Revolution and 1871, when Congress prohibited them. They signed nine treaties with the Confederacy, as well as countless others over the centuries with Spain, France, Britain, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, Canada, and even Russia, not to mention individual colonies and states. In retrospect, the treaties seem like well-ordered steps on the path of dispossession and empire. The reality was far more complicated.

In 1779, Shawnees from Chillicothe, a community in the Ohio country, told the British, "We have always been the frontier." Their statement challenges an oft-held belief that American Indians derive their unique identities from longstanding ties to native lands. By tracking Shawnee people and migrations from 1400 to 1754, Stephen Warren illustrates how Shawnees made a life for themselves at the crossroads of empires and competing tribes, embracing mobility and often moving willingly toward violent borderlands.

Step into the rugged Rockies with Osborne Russell! Journey nine years through his trapper's journal, facing blizzards, bears, and bison while navigating life off the grid. Witness the clash of trappers and tribes, and glimpse the untamed beauty of a changing wilderness. This historical adventure unfolds in Russell's own words, offering a unique perspective on the early American West.

Rekindled is a historical fiction about how Roger Williams becomes the original architect of the separation of church and state. He must survive the men that intend to silence him in order to engineer and demonstrate a new society structure that will protect people voicing ideas and heartfelt convictions while keeping civil peace. If he fails, the tragedy of needless loss of life and livelihood will continue unabated on both sides of the Atlantic.

Carl Higbie, a former Navy SEAL and national news anchor of Carl Higbie Frontline on Newsmax TV, believes in REAL America and the need to remember the heroes who made this country great. In Profiles in Freedom, he reintroduces some of the Americans who made this great country what it is today.

Among other things, Franklin was a printer, philosopher, inventor, statesman, and not least, a writer. Franklin's autobiography captures the essence of his spirit. In it, we can see him as a product of the 18th century enlightenment, a type of Yankee statesman who could use the language of Addison, Steele, Swift, and Defoe. In his autobiography, Franklin asks himself, "Who am I, how did I come to be, and why am I a human being as I am?" And he answers with the honesty, wit, and charm.

At dawn on September 22, 1711, more than five hundred Tuscarora, Core, Neuse, Pamlico, Weetock, Machapunga, and Bear River Indian warriors swept down on the unsuspecting European settlers living along the Neuse and Pamlico Rivers of North Carolina. During the following days, they destroyed hundreds of farms, killed at least 140 men, women, and children, and took about 40 captives. So began the Tuscarora War, North Carolina's bloodiest colonial war and surely one of its most brutal.

Alexander Hamilton did not rise to public prominence as an austere New Englander or a gentlemanly Virginian. He was not born in the colonies at all. He was born in the West Indies, the son of a woman of French descent who had left her husband for another man. As an illegitimate child, Hamilton could not be educated in the local church school, so businessmen, impressed by his remarkable intelligence, sent him to America for his schooling.