United States Revolution

In a sweeping account, Atlantic Wars explores how warfare shaped the experiences of the peoples living in the watershed of the Atlantic Ocean between the late Middle Ages and the Age of Revolution.

John Hancock's overnight transformation from British loyalist to fiery rebel and first governor of the independent state of Massachusetts is one of the least known stories of the American Revolution. Acclaimed author Harlow Giles Unger introduces us to the Founding Father whose name is as recognizable as George Washington's, but whose thrilling life story is all but untold. Applying his historical expertise and storytelling gift, Unger details the fascinating life of one of our most extraordinary business and political leaders—the first signer of the Declaration of Independence.

The half century extending from the imperial crisis between Britain and its colonies in the 1760s to the early decades of the new republic of the United States was the greatest and most creative era of constitutionalism in American history, and perhaps in the world. During these decades, Americans explored and debated all aspects of politics and constitutionalism - the nature of power, liberty, representation, rights, the division of authority between different spheres of government, sovereignty, judicial authority, and written constitutions.

The prize-winning historian’s fresh look at the people and events that decided America’s struggle for independence. Its suspenseful climax is the 500-mile march undertaken by General Washington to surround Cornwallis at Yorktown.

Today, Germantown is a busy neighborhood in Philadelphia. On October 4, 1777, it was a small village on the outskirts of the colonial capital whose surrounding fields and streets witnessed one of the largest battles of the American Revolution. The bloody battle represented George Washington's attempt to recapture Philadelphia but has long been overshadowed by better-known events like Brandywine, Saratoga, and Valley Forge.

The First Congress was the most important in US history, says prizewinning author and historian Fergus Bordewich, because it established how our government would actually function. Had it failed - as many at the time feared it would - it's possible that the United States as we know it would not exist today.

In this landmark work, acclaimed historian Joshua Freeman has created an epic portrait of a nation both galvanized by change and driven by conflict. Beginning in 1945, the economic juggernaut awakened by World War II transformed a country once defined by its regional character into a uniform and cohesive power and set the stage for the United States’ rise to global dominance. Meanwhile, Freeman locates the profound tragedy that has shaped the path of American civic life.

Received historical wisdom casts abolitionists as bourgeois, mostly white reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism. Manisha Sinha overturns this image, broadening her scope beyond the antebellum period usually associated with abolitionism and recasting it as a radical social movement in which men and women, black and white, free and enslaved, found common ground in causes ranging from feminism and utopian socialism to anti-imperialism and efforts to defend the rights of labor.

John Adams told Thomas Jefferson that “history is to ascribe the American Revolution to Thomas Paine.” Thomas Edison called him “the equal of Washington in making American liberty possible.” He was a founder of both the United States and the French Revolution. He invented the phrase, “The United States of America.” He rose from abject poverty in working-class England to the highest levels of the era’s intellectual elite. And yet, by the end of his life, Thomas Paine was almost universally reviled.

Central to America's idea of itself is the character of Benjamin Franklin. We all know him, or think we do: In recent works and in our inherited conventional wisdom, he remains fixed in place as a genial polymath and self-improver who was so very American that he is known by us all as the first American.

During the American Revolution and the border conflicts that followed, Simon Girty's name struck terror into the hearts of U.S. settlers in the Ohio Valley and the territory of Kentucky. Girty (1741-1818) had lived with the Natives most of his life. Scorned by his fellow white frontiersmen as an "Indian lover," Girty became an Indian agent for the British. He accompanied Native raids against Americans, spied deep into enemy territory, and was influential in convincing the tribes to fight for the British.

The acclaimed seven-book series chronicling the adventures of the generations of the Treegate family from the birth of the Revolutionary War through the War of 1812, ending at the Battle of New Orleans. Recommended by the Seton Home Study Guide for Grade 8 for American History. John Treegate's Musket (Book 1) An epic historical adventure that takes young readers from The Boston Massacre to the Battle of Bunker Hill. When young Peter Treegate is framed for murder while his father is away on business, Peter is forced to flee Boston on a smuggler's brig, sending him on a series of adventures ...

In Washington: A Life celebrated biographer Ron Chernow provides a richly nuanced portrait of the father of our nation. This crisply paced narrative carries the reader through his troubled boyhood, his precocious feats in the French and Indian War, his creation of Mount Vernon, his heroic exploits with the Continental Army, his presiding over the Constitutional Convention, and his magnificent performance as America's first president.

The number one New York Times best seller by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough rediscovers an important chapter in the American story that's "as resonant today as ever" (The Wall Street Journal) - the settling of the Northwest Territory by courageous pioneers who overcame incredible hardships to build a community based on ideals that would define our country.

This volume explores the variety of business enterprise in the United States and analyzes its presence in the country's economy, its evolution over time, and its meaning in society.

How George Washington Fleeced the Nation reveals the often hilarious, sometimes shocking, and always highly informative foibles of the great and the good. Einstein, the most brilliant man who lived, regularly forgot his shoes and never learned to drive. Hitler possibly has a Jewish ancestor. Picasso avoided paying restaurant bills by doodling on their napkins instead. Prepared to be shocked, amused, and outraged at what they didn’t teach you in high school.

Independence Lost reveals that individual motives counted as much as the ideals of liberty and freedom the Founders espoused: Independence had a personal as well as national meaning, and the choices made by people living outside the colonies were of critical importance to the war's outcome.

From the massively popular podcaster and New York Times best-selling author comes the story of the Marquis de Lafayette's lifelong quest to protect the principles of democracy, told through the lens of the three revolutions he participated in: the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Revolution of 1830.

Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us - an ambitious urban entrepreneur who rose up the social ladder, from leather-aproned shopkeeper to dining with kings. In best-selling author Walter Isaacson's vivid and witty full-scale biography, we discover why Franklin turns to us from history's stage with eyes that twinkle from behind his new-fangled spectacles. In Benjamin Franklin, Isaacson shows how Franklin defines both his own time and ours. The most interesting thing that Franklin invented, and continually reinvented, was himself.

In Old Man River, Paul Schneider tells the story of the river at the center of America's rich history - the Mississippi. Some fifteen thousand years ago, the majestic river provided Paleolithic humans with the routes by which early man began to explore the continent's interior. Since then, the river has been the site of historical significance, from the arrival of Spanish and French explorers in the 16th century to the Civil War. George Washington fought his first battle near the river, and Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman both came to President Lincoln's attention after their spectacular victories on the lower Mississippi.