Showing titles in Colonial Period

The Forgotten Pages of the American Revolutionary War: Interesting and Lesser Known Facts of the American Revolutionary War offers a captivating journey into the untold stories and hidden details that shaped one of the most pivotal conflicts in history. While the American Revolution is often remembered through famous battles and well-known figures, this book delves deeper into the lesser-known events, surprising strategies, and overlooked heroes who played critical roles in the fight for independence.

For perspective on our own times and how we got here, it helps to listen to wise guides from other eras. In An Infinite Fountain of Light, the renowned American historian George Marsden illuminates the landscape with wisdom from one such mentor: Jonathan Edwards. Drawing on his deep expertise on Edwards and American culture, Marsden explains where Edwards stood within his historical context and sets forth key points of his complex thought.

In this, the third iteration of the author's memoir, he recounts how he came to live and raise a family on Beacon Hill. In historical asides he recounts the myriad events that shaped colonial Boston so that the city's path and his life would converge at a building on Phillips Street on the North Slope of Beacon Hill more than three centuries after the city's founding in 1630.

The English settlement at Plymouth has usually been seen in isolation. Indeed, the colonists gain our admiration in part because we envision them arriving on a desolate, frozen shore, far from assistance and forced to endure a deadly first winter alone. Yet Plymouth was, from its first year, a place connected to other places. Going beyond the tales we learned from schoolbooks, Carla Gardina Pestana offers an illuminating account of life in Plymouth Plantation.

In this harrowing narrative first published in 1682, the author tells the story of her capture and being held for ransom after an attack by Native Americans during an attack on Lancaster in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Everyone knows Benjamin Franklin—the thrifty inventor-statesman of the Revolutionary era—but not about his love life. Poor Richard’s Women reveals the neglected voices of the women Ben loved and lost during his lifelong struggle between passion and prudence. The most prominent among them was Deborah Read Franklin, his common-law wife and partner for 44 years. Long dismissed by historians, she was an independent, politically savvy woman and devoted wife who raised their children, managed his finances, and fought off angry mobs at gunpoint while he traipsed about England.

Beginning with a skirmish involving inexperienced British officer George Washington, the Iroquois chief, and the ill-fated French emissary in the backwoods of Pennsylvania, a chain of events culminated in what would effectively become the First World War. The French and Indian War, as it is known in North America, was part of a larger conflict called the Seven Years' War, which involved nations on three continents.

From 1764-1775, a chain of events that included lightning rods like the Townshend Acts led to bloodshed in the form of the Boston Massacre, while the Boston Tea Party became a symbol of nonviolent protest.

Here within is a collection of 57 accounts of firsthand narratives of people captured by Indians in colonial times who lived to tell their story of the lives, customs, kindness, and cruelties of Native Americans. Indian raids on small farming communities were bloody and gruesome events, with young and old stripped, clubbed, and scalped. While many were treated harshly by the Indians, some were treated with much kindness by their captors. They were only able to endure these torments through their unwavering belief that God would see them through their terrible ordeal.

According the New York Times’ “1619 Project”, America was not founded in 1776, with a declaration of freedom and independence, but in 1619 with the introduction of African slavery into the New World. Ever since then, the “1619 Project” argues, American history has been one long sordid tale of systemic racism.

In Detestable and Wicked Arts, Paul B. Moyer places early New England's battle against black magic in a transatlantic perspective. Moyer provides an accessible and comprehensive examination of witch prosecutions in the Puritan colonies that discusses how their English inhabitants understood the crime of witchcraft, why some people ran a greater risk of being accused of occult misdeeds, and how gender intersected with witch-hunting.

The first Thanksgiving at Plymouth in 1621 was a powerfully symbolic event and not merely the pageant of abundance that we still reenact today. In these early encounters between Indians and English in North America, food was also symbolic of power: The venison brought to Plymouth by the Indians, for example, was resonant of both masculine skill with weapons and the status of the men who offered it. These meanings were clearly understood by Plymouth's leaders, however weak they appeared in comparison.

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.

Of Plymouth Plantation is a journal written by William Bradford, leader of the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts, between 1630 and 1651. Bradford’s journal is regarded as the most authoritative account of the Pilgrims and the early years of the colony which they founded. It gives an account of the Pilgrims from 1608 when they settled in the Dutch Republic through the 1620 Mayflower voyage to North America, until the year 1647. Bradford did not write with publication in mind, so his entries are candid and colorful.

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.

Every American is taught a pristine narrative of the life and legacy of George Washington and can easily recite the highlights of the "father of our country". The remarkable Virginian led an under-resourced ragtag army to ultimate victory in the American Revolution before becoming the nation's first president, setting it on its path toward superpower status.

In these transcripts of her American Atheist Radio programs, Dr. Madalyn Murray O'Hair tells us about Freedom of Religion in Colonial America, American Deism, Rewriting of History by Christians, The Christianity of our Founding as a Nation, Free thought in American Historical Documents, Free thought Organizations in the Early U.S., Thomas Paine - American Deist and Freethinker, Colonel Ethan Allen, James Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, Jefferson's Idea of Religious Freedom, and Jefferson on Christianity.

It was an age of fascinating leaders and difficult choices, of grand ideas eloquently expressed and of epic conflicts bitterly fought. Now comes a brilliant portrait of the American Revolution, one that is compelling in its prose, fascinating in its details, and provocative in its fresh interpretations.

In Frontier Country, Patrick Spero addresses one of the most important and controversial subjects in American history: the frontier. Countering the modern conception of the American frontier as an area of expansion, Spero employs the eighteenth-century meaning of the term to show how colonists understood it as a vulnerable, militarized boundary. The Pennsylvania frontier, Spero argues, was constituted through conflicts not only between colonists and Native Americans but also among neighboring British colonies.

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.

In this one-hour history book, discover the US Presidents from the 18th century. It all started with Georges Washington, the first American President and John Adams, the second US President. Discover how these Founding Fathers of the U.S.A. became presidents, the main events of their presidency, and their impact on America and World’s history!

Deep within the bayous and swamps of Louisiana resides a population descended from an exodus. These people, called Cajuns or Acadians, were expelled from their homelands. Persecuted and homeless, they traveled hundreds of miles south in search of a new home and ultimately settled in the Pelican State, where they made new lives for themselves free from their British conquerors. Though not always warmly welcomed, they were accepted, allowing them to practice their different culture amid their new neighbors.

The first successful American colony in North America was settled in 1607 at Jamestown, Virginia. Though the Virginian colonists had difficulty in the beginning, by the late 1620s the Chesapeake area was thriving, having become a haven for those seeking economic opportunity in the new world.

Among the pressing concerns of Americans in the first century of nationhood were day-to-day survival, political harmony, exploration of the continent, foreign policy, and - fixed deeply in the collective consciousness - hell and eternal damnation. The fear of fire and brimstone and the worm that never dies exerted a profound and lasting influence on Americans' ideas about themselves, their neighbors, and the rest of the world.

This compelling counter-narrative to the familiar story of the Puritans combines a rich understanding of the period with a close reading of early texts to bring the contentious Morton to life. This volume sheds new light on the tumultuous formative decades of the American experience.

A groundbreaking look at the strange friendship between George Whitefield and Benjamin Franklin, who together defined what it means to be an American. They were the most famous men in America. They came from separate countries, followed different philosophies, and led dissimilar lives. But they were fast friends. No two people did more to shape America in the mid-1700s.

Warm, humid, salty air hovered over the city like a blanket. The unsuspecting small coastal community was bustling with energy and possibility; the town was alive with the sound of creaking ship masts, and vendors, and on Market Street, new shops and businesses were settling in as the economy began to show signs of life. One reason for the growth and prosperity was trading routes from faraway lands. Ships came from Europe, the Caribbean, and even China, carrying cargos filled with lumber, tobacco, rice, and flour, as international trade expanded.

Georgia, the last of Britain's American mainland colonies, began with high aspirations to create a morally sound society based on small family farms with no enslaved workers. But those goals were not realized, and Georgia became a slave plantation society, following the Carolina model. But looking at the Salzburgers, who emigrated from Europe as part of the original plan, provides a very different story.

Who were the first three U.S. presidents, and how did they shape American independence? Learn about the lives of George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson through 21 colorful illustrations. To use as a teaching aid, reference the appendix of notable events and glossary.

In 1664, England decided to invade the Dutch-controlled city of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island. Charles II and his brother, the Duke of York, had dreams of empire, and their archrivals, the Dutch, were in the way. But Richard Nicolls, who led the English flotilla bent on destruction, changed his strategy once he began parleying with Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch leader on Manhattan.

El 12 de octubre de 1492 el almirante Cristóbal Colón, al mando de tres navíos y un puñado de aventureros, soldados y clérigos, descubría la realidad de un nuevo continente que recibiría más tarde el nombre de América.

So whether you're looking to unravel the mysteries of America's past or just want to learn more about our country's presidents, U.S. History 101 has all the answers--even the ones you didn't know you were looking for.

American schoolchildren have long learned about Squanto, the welcoming Native who made the First Thanksgiving possible, but his story goes deeper than the holiday legend. Born in the Wampanoag-speaking town of Patuxet in the late 1500s, Squanto was kidnapped in 1614 by an English captain, who took him to Spain. From there, Englishmen brought him to London and Newfoundland before sending him home in 1619, when Squanto discovered that most of Patuxet had died in an epidemic. A year later, the Mayflower colonists arrived at his home and renamed it Plymouth.

To the period between 1689 and 1740 has been applied the term “The Forgotten Half-Century.” Most of the writers on colonial history in detail give special attention to the seventeenth century, the period of upbuilding; and general historians like Bancroft and Hildreth sweep rather lightly over the epoch between the English Revolution and the forerunners of the American Revolution.

John Jay served as the inaugural president of a pioneering antislavery society. His descendants, especially his son William and his grandson John Jay II, embraced radical abolitionism in the nineteenth century, the cause most likely to rend the nation. The scorn of their elite peers—and racist mobs—did not deter their commitment to end southern slavery and to combat northern injustice. This remarkable family story forces us to grapple with what we mean by patriotism, conservatism, and radicalism. Their story speaks directly to our own divided times.

In Washington's Heir, Gerard N. Magliocca gives us the first published biography of Bushrod Washington, one of the most underrated Founding Fathers. Born in 1762, Justice Washington fought in the Revolutionary War, served in Virginia's ratifying convention for the Constitution, and was Chief Justice John Marshall's partner in establishing the authority of the Supreme Court.