Showing titles in Colonial Period

Alabama endured warfare, slave trading, squatting, and speculating on its path to becoming America’s 22nd state, and Daniel S. Dupre brings its captivating frontier history to life in Alabama's Frontiers and the Rise of the Old South. Dupre’s vivid narrative begins when Hernando de Soto first led hundreds of armed Europeans into the region during the fall of 1540. Although this early invasion was defeated, Spain, France, and England would each vie for control over the area’s natural resources.

History, location, and culture continue to link New Orleans to France while distancing it culturally and symbolically from the US. This audiobook explores the traces of French language, history, and artistic expression that have been present there over the last 300 years. This volume focuses on the French, Spanish, and American colonial periods to understand the imprint that French sociocultural dynamic left on the Crescent City.

Copper mining is as ubiquitous to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan as the automobile industry is to the Lower. Centuries before the first white man set foot in the New World, local natives used rocks to pound copper free from the earth, shaping it into goods traded across the continent. It was not long before European settlers followed up on the natives’ work, and when industry came to Copper Country, mines sprung up, quickly dominating the economy and lives of the Upper Peninsula’s residents.

The most important and influential source of information about the Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony, this landmark account was written between 1630 and 1647. It vividly documents the Pilgrims' adventures: their first stop in Holland, the harrowing transatlantic crossing aboard the Mayflower, the first harsh winter in the new colony, and the help from friendly Native Americans that saved their lives. No one was better equipped to report on the Plymouth community than William Bradford. Revered for his patience, wisdom, and courage, Bradford was elected to the office of governor.

By 1787, it became evident that the Articles of Confederation were inadequate for the new nation. With these problems hampering the national government under the Articles of Confederation and the threat of default on the nation's massive war debt looming, plans began being made to fix the problems of the Articles of Confederation. Thus, that summer, a Constitutional convention was called, and each state sent delegates to Philadelphia. Among the delegates were prominent patriots and former members of the Continental Congress, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.

Anne Bradstreet was born into an unusual family that, in the early years of the 17th century, believed in educating daughters as well as sons. She then moved to the American wilderness as a young bride and proceeded to produce children and poetry at nearly equal speed in the years that followed. She was the first published poet from the North American colonies, beating out the men who would follow her by a number of years. Anne Bradstreet: The Life and Legacy of the Famous Puritan Poet in the American Colonies examines Bradstreet’s influential work.

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.

The conflict that historians have called King Philip’s War still ranks as one of the bloodiest per capita in American history. An Indian coalition ravaged much of New England, killing 600 colonial fighting men (not including their Indian allies), obliterating 17 white towns, and damaging more than 50 settlements. The version of these events that has come down to us focuses on Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay - the colonies whose commentators dominated the storytelling. But because Connecticut lacked a chronicler, its experience has gone largely untold.

Twelve-year-old Peter Hulbert is left an orphan in Leyden, Holland, as the rest of the Pilgrims sail for the New World. A merchant of the West India Company takes him to New Amsterdam as his servant. Here Peter's adventures begin in this historically accurate tale of life in old New York.

Known to history as "Dunmore's War", the 1774 campaign against a Shawnee-led Indian confederacy in the Ohio Country marked the final time an American colonial militia took to the field in His Majesty's service and under royal command. Led by John Murray, the fourth Earl of Dunmore and royal governor of Virginia, a force of colonials including George Rogers Clark, Daniel Morgan, Michael Cresap, Adam Stephen, and Andrew Lewis successfully enforced the western border established by treaties in parts of present-day West Virginia and Kentucky.

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.

In 1607, three small ships - the Discovery, Godspeed, and Susan Constant - arrived on the shores of the eastern North American coast and established the first successful British settlement at Jamestown, Virginia. For two centuries, colonists faced the challenges of life in a new world - weather, Native Indian attacks, starvation, and disease - to establish the strongest economy in the American colonies.

The purpose of this book is to provide background information for The Leatherstocking Series of novels written by James Fenimore Cooper. The work includes biographical information about the author, his place of residence and his social position. It also provides information concerning the history and geography of Central New York during the period.

The narrative of American history is incomplete without the inclusion of the Native Americans that lived on the continent before European settlers arrived in the 16th and 17th centuries. Among these groups, one of the most famous is the Mohawk, who refer to themselves as Kanien'kehá:ka ("People of the Place of Flint"), but pop culture has a very different image in mind when it comes to the Mohawk. Those unfamiliar with the group associate them with the conspicuous Mohawk haircut, and images of a warlike people who scalp their enemies are still evoked.

This is a brief highly digestable history of the Catholic experience in British America, which shaped the development of the colonies and the nascent republic in the 17th and 18th centuries. Historian Robert Emmett Curran begins his account with the English reformation, which helps us to understand the Catholic exodus from England, Ireland, and Scotland that took place over the nearly two centuries that constitute the colonial period.

The story of Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys is one of those delightful tales that American schoolchildren hear about in school, but it is also one that is much more interesting to listen to in older age. Unlike revered founding fathers such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who came from Virginian plantations, Allen was a rough and tumble frontiersman, more likely to fight than talk. And yet, he was in no way a dullard, but instead as well-read as many of his contemporaries and more so than the average man of his day.

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.

Northeast Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley was truly a dark and bloody ground, the site of murders, massacres, and pitched battles. The valley's turbulent history was the product of a bitter contest over property and power known as the Wyoming controversy.

At a time when surveys reveal that Americans know less and less about our past, Tony Williams provides entertaining and informative descriptions of 50 of the most important and dramatic events from the colonial and Revolutionary period - some known and some forgotten - from the Mayflower Compact to the Annapolis Convention.

The Settlers' Empire traces the first federal endeavor to build states wholesale out of the Northwest Territory, a process that relied on overlapping colonial rule over Euro-American settlers and the multiple Indian nations in the territory. In the Northwest Territory, diverse populations of newcomers and natives struggled over the region's geographical and cultural definition in areas such as religion, marriage, family, gender roles, and economy.