New England History

The Northumbrians have been overlooked by British and global history, but they’ve made astonishing contributions to both. Dan Jackson sets out to recover this lost history, exploring the deep roots of Northumbrian culture - hard work and heavy drinking, sociability and sentimentality, militarism and masculinity - through centuries of border warfare and dangerous industry. He explains what we can learn about Northumbria’s people from its landscape and architecture and revisits the Northumbrian Enlightenment that gave the world the locomotive and the lightbulb.

In this rich, absorbing tale, Gail Avery Halverson continues the remarkable saga of Lady Catherine Abbott and Simon McKensie that began with the multiple award-winning novels, The Boundary Stone and The Skeptical Physick. Sweeping us from a quaint village in England to Colonial Boston and to the beautiful evils of 17th century Barbados, Gail Avery Halverson has once again written a truly compelling and unforgettable novel. After a wrenching, heartbreaking tragedy, Catherine yearns for the safety and familiarity England, but when a free, black woman attempts to accomplish the unthinkable, ...

In the spring of 1621, Plymouth Colony sent Stephen Hopkins to make the first visit to Wampanoag sachem Massasoit to present a red horsemans coat as a gift and sign of friendship. For most ordinary Englishmen, venturing off into the depths of unexplored America would have been a once in a lifetime adventure - but not for Stephen.

In A Giant Win, Coach Tom Coughlin reveals the intricacies of football, sharing details only a coach would know. He also details relationships with some of the most iconic players from the Giants, including Eli Manning and Michael Strahan. A Giant Win provides a frame for Coach Coughlin to discuss his life in football—including his years with the Giants as an assistant coach in the late 1980s and 1990, when he helped win a Super Bowl working under Hall of Fame Head Coach Bill Parcells and alongside the coach he’d oppose in Super Bowl XLII: Bill Belichick.

During the bleak winter of 1692 in the rigid Puritan community of Salem Village, Massachusetts, a group of young girls began experiencing violent fits, allegedly tormented by Satan and the witches who worshipped him. From the girls' initial denouncing of an Indian slave, the accusations soon multiplied. In less than two years, 19 men and women were hanged, one was pressed to death, and over a hundred others were imprisoned and impoverished. This evenhanded and now-classic history illuminates the horrifying episode with visceral clarity.

The opening of the pioneering Liverpool & Manchester Railway in 1830 marked the beginning of the railway network's vital role in changing the face of Britain. Fire & Steam celebrates the vision of the ambitious Victorian pioneers who developed this revolutionary transport system and the navvies who cut through the land to enable a country-wide railway to emerge.

Part biography, part cultural history, The Creation of Anne Boleyn is a fascinating reconstruction of Anne’s life and an illuminating look at her afterlife in the popular imagination. Why is Anne so compelling? Why has she inspired such extreme reactions? What did she really look like? Was she the flaxen-haired martyr of Romantic paintings or the raven-haired seductress of twenty-first-century portrayals? (Answer: Neither.) And perhaps the most provocative questions concern Anne’s death more than her life.

New York - July 1976 - in a world in which New England remains the sparkling jewel in the crown of the British Empire. It is the day before Empire Day - July 4 - the day each year when the British Empire marks the brutal crushing of the rebellion dignified by the treachery of the 56 delegates to the Continental Congress who were so foolhardy as to sign the infamous Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia on that day of infamy in 1776.

David Attenborough. Marcus Rashford. Diana Dors. Winston Churchill. Elizabeth David. Bob Geldof. Zaha Hadid. Frank Crichlow. Quentin Crisp. Dusty Springfield. Captain Tom. Who made modern Britain the country it is today? How do we sum up the kind of people we are? What does it mean to be the new Elizabethans? In this wonderfully told history, spanning back to when Queen Elizabeth became queen in 1953, Andrew Marr traces the people who have made Britain the country it is today.

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.

From raw politics to religious divisions, civil wars to witch trials, plague to press freedoms, The Blazing World is the story of a strange but fascinating century, told in sparkling detail. Drawing on vast archives, Jonathan Healey refreshes our understanding of public figures while simultaneously taking us into the lives of ordinary people to illuminate a revolutionary society that forged a new world.

Isaac Fielding knows exactly where he stands: Things were not looking good. Upon that, at least, everybody could agree. The other thing that everybody seemed to agree about was that when, eventually, I had my day in court it was likely to be a short, bittersweet experience and that the main topic of discussion would be the manner of my subsequent execution.

It is the late spring of 1978 in a world in which the American Revolution failed in 1776 after George Washington was killed and the Continental Army was destroyed at the Battle of Long Island. The rumbling aftershocks of the Empire Day atrocities which reverberated through Two Hundred Lost Years are threatening to come to the boil. While in Philadelphia the politics become ever more fractious in Spain the Royal Alcazar is a citadel besieged in a country which might as well still be stuck in the 19th century.

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.

The British Empire has sleepwalked, unprepared into war with the Triple Alliance, the Spanish colonies of the Caribbean and Central America. But this is not to be a war like those which have gone before it; wars decided by crushing British sea power and eventually, on land by the superiority of the logistics and tactics of relatively small colonial armies in the South Western badlands. Remember Brave Achilles becomes the call to arms.

Over the long span of its history, England faced many enemies but by the strength of itself as a nation, it would continue to prevail. Considering its legacy and impact on the world, it comes as no surprise that stories about it are abundant.

In A Constitutional Culture, Adrian Chastain Weimer uncovers the story of how more than a hundred years before the American Revolution, colonists pledged their lives and livelihoods to the defense of local political institutions against arbitrary rule.

In 1769, Captain James Cook’s historic expedition in the region would lead to an English claim on Australia, but before he reached Australia, he sailed near New Zealand and spent weeks mapping part of New Zealand’s coast. Thus, he was also one of the first to observe and take note of the indigenous peoples of the two islands.

For Alissa, life was once sweet, wrapped in the loving kindness of her mother, Alice, and innocent play with cousins. But a deadly epidemic and her mother’s false witchcraft conviction ended her childhood abruptly. She survived by leaning on her Aunt Rhody and forgetting the dark details that changed everything. However, as ugly rumors of another “witch” emerged in Windsor, Alissa could no longer hide from the past or herself. Through friendship and the support of her husband and later, her children, she confronts disturbing dreams and tragic events which unlock memories, reveal ...

Shortly after the first Europeans arrived in seventeenth-century New England, they began to import Africans and capture the area's indigenous peoples as slaves. By the eve of the American Revolution, enslaved people comprised only about 4 percent of the population, but slavery had become instrumental to the region's economy and had shaped its cultural traditions. This story of slavery in New England has been little told. In this concise yet comprehensive history, Jared Ross Hardesty focuses on the individual stories of enslaved people, bringing their experiences to life.