Colonial Period

This fascinating audiobook is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time....

From the author of 1491—the best-selling study of the pre-Columbian Americas—a deeply engaging new history of the most momentous biological event since the death of the dinosaurs. More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two...

Set against the backdrop of the Age of Exploration, Black Flags, Blue Waters reveals the dramatic and surprising history of American piracy's "Golden Age" - spanning the late 1600s through the early 1700s - when lawless pirates plied the coastal waters of North America and beyond....

In 1528, a mission set out from Spain to colonize Florida. But the expedition went horribly wrong. Of the 300 men who had embarked on the journey, only four survived....

Apart from The Last of the Mohicans, most Americans know little of the French and Indian War, and yet it remains one of the most fascinating periods in our history....

America’s bestselling biographer reveals the origins of the most revolutionary sentence in the Declaration of Independence, the one that defines who we are as Americans—and explains how it should shape our politics today. “Isaacson uses a jeweler’s loupe to scan what gives his snappy...

Beginning in January 1692, Salem Village in colonial Massachusetts witnessed the largest and most lethal outbreak of witchcraft in early America....

Ben Franklin's own lively story of his early years is a unique, fascinating, and influential look....

Decades after witch-hunting had begun to die down in Europe, North America was about to witness its bloodiest witch hunt in history. The Massachusetts of 1692 was a very different one to the state we know today....

During the bitter winter of 1692/93, a group of young Puritan women in the colonial town of Salem, Massachusetts, accused more than 200 of their neighbors and fellow townspeople of using witchcraft to injure and torment them....

John Ferling has nearly 40 years of experience as a historian of early America. The author of acclaimed histories such as A Leap into the Dark and Almost a Miracle, he has appeared on many TV and film documentaries on this pivotal period of our history. In John Adams: A Life, Ferling offers a...

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. Benjamin Franklin was the American prototype: hard-working, inventive...

In The First Fleets, Benjamin C. Schaffer reveals how, contrary to widespread beliefs, the American colonies had a long tradition of independent naval defense decades before the Revolution. He demonstrates that Anglo-American governments established and maintained significant provincial naval...

The Settlers' Empire traces the first federal endeavor to build states wholesale out of the Northwest Territory....

Great Britain's forced transportation of convicts to colonial Australia is well known. Less widely known is Britain's earlier program of sending convicts - including women - to North America....

In Christian Slavery, Katharine Gerbner contends that religion was fundamental to the development of both slavery and race in the Protestant Atlantic world. Slave owners in the Caribbean and elsewhere established governments and legal codes based on an ideology of "Protestant Supremacy", which...

A culminating work on the American Founding by one of its leading historians, The Cause rethinks the American Revolution as we have known it. George Washington claimed that anyone who attempted to provide an accurate account of the war for independence would be accused of writing fiction. At the...

The French and Indian War was the world's first truly global conflict....

In the vaunted annals of America’s founding, Boston has long been held up as an exemplary “city upon a hill” and the “cradle of liberty” for an independent United States....

A fresh look at the American Revolution as a major global event At the time of the American Revolution (1765–83), the British Empire had colonies in India, Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific, Canada, Ireland, and Gibraltar. The thirteen rebellious American colonies accounted for half of the...

With over 19 million copies in print and a remarkable record of #1 New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly bestsellers, Bill O'Reilly's Killing series is the most popular series of narrative histories in the world. Killing the Witches revisits one of the most...

Over the last generation, historians have broadened our understanding of colonial America by adopting both a trans-Atlantic and a trans-continental perspective....

American History, Volume 1 surveys the broad sweep of American history. Drawing on a deep range of research and years of classroom teaching experience, Thomas S. Kidd offers students an engaging overview of the first half of American history....

In this sweeping history, leading Haitian intellectual Jean Casimir argues that the story of Haiti should not begin with the usual image of Saint-Domingue as the richest colony of the 18th century. Rather, it begins with a reconstruction of how individuals from Africa, in the midst of the golden...

Americans seldom deify their Founding Fathers any longer, but they do still tend to venerate the Constitution and the republican government that the founders created. Strikingly, the founders themselves were far less confident in what they had wrought, particularly by the end of their lives. In...