Showing titles in Colonial Period

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.

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Eastern North America, Natives and newcomers alike understood the close relationship between political power and control of trade and land, but they did so in very different ways. For Native Americans trade was a collective act. The alliances that made a people powerful became visible through material exchanges that forged connections among kin groups, villages, and the spirit 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.

New Hampshire was founded through land grants issued to John Mason and Fernando Gorges in 1622. Unable to create a formal government for several years, the colony was split in two, each with its own governor. However, the divided usually fall and realizing their weakness, they sought protection from Massachusetts. Although New Hampshire was governed by Massachusetts, the Massachusetts legislature allowed New Hampshire some self-government.

All Americans are familiar with the story of the Pilgrims--persecuted for their religion in the Old World, they crossed the ocean to settle in a wild and dangerous land. But for most of us, the story ends after their brutal first winter at Plymouth, with a supposedly peaceful encounter with the Native Americans and a happy Thanksgiving.

James Oglethorpe and the “Georgia Trustees” founded the Georgia colony as a haven for Britain's poor and unskilled, where they could live, learn a skill, and become productive members of society. However, the best of intentions often do not come to fruition, and the Georgia colony was no exception. Rather than a debtor's haven, Georgia became a military stronghold, involved in border wars, wars with Native Indians, other colonies, and France and Spain.

Adventures in Colonial America is a 13-part series focusing on the history of each of the original 13 American colonies from their founding, through expansion, the American Revolution and ultimately the ratification of the U.S. Constitution.

Indian peoples made some 400 treaties with the United States between the American Revolution and 1871, when Congress prohibited them. They signed nine treaties with the Confederacy, as well as countless others over the centuries with Spain, France, Britain, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, Canada, and even Russia, not to mention individual colonies and states. In retrospect, the treaties seem like well-ordered steps on the path of dispossession and empire. The reality was far more complicated.

Why the American Revolution, of all the great revolutions, was the only enduring success. Through the Founders' own voices - and in the homes they designed and built to embody the ideal of domestic happiness they fought to achieve - we come to understand why the American Revolution, of all great revolutions, was the only enduring success. The Founders were vivid, energetic men, with sophisticated worldviews, and this magnificent reckoning of their successes draws liberally from their own eloquent writings on their actions and well-considered intentions.

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.

In 1779, Shawnees from Chillicothe, a community in the Ohio country, told the British, "We have always been the frontier." Their statement challenges an oft-held belief that American Indians derive their unique identities from longstanding ties to native lands. By tracking Shawnee people and migrations from 1400 to 1754, Stephen Warren illustrates how Shawnees made a life for themselves at the crossroads of empires and competing tribes, embracing mobility and often moving willingly toward violent borderlands.

At dawn on September 22, 1711, more than five hundred Tuscarora, Core, Neuse, Pamlico, Weetock, Machapunga, and Bear River Indian warriors swept down on the unsuspecting European settlers living along the Neuse and Pamlico Rivers of North Carolina. During the following days, they destroyed hundreds of farms, killed at least 140 men, women, and children, and took about 40 captives. So began the Tuscarora War, North Carolina's bloodiest colonial war and surely one of its most brutal.

Benjamin Franklin's wide range of activities and interests opened the doors of the world to him. Printer, inventor, philosopher, ambassador, champion of liberty - his influence has been felt by every American generation. And to everything he touched, including this autobiography, Franklin brought originality and wit.

Over a few weeks in 1741, 10 fires blazed across Manhattan. With each new fire, panicked whites saw more evidence of a slave uprising. Tried and convicted before the colony's Supreme Court, 13 black men were burned at the stake and 17 were hanged. Four whites, the alleged ringleaders of the plot, were also hanged, and seven more were pardoned on condition that they never set foot in New York again.

In the popular imagination the picture of slavery, frozen in time, is one of huge cotton plantations and opulent mansions. However, in over a hundred years of history detailed in this book, the hard reality of slavery in Mississippi's antebellum world is strikingly different from the one of popular myth. It shows that Mississippi's past was never frozen, but always fluid. It shows too that slavery took a number of shapes before its form in the late antebellum mold became crystalized for popular culture.

Even compared to his fellow founders, George Washington stands tall. Our first president has long been considered a stoic hero, holding himself above the rough-and-tumble politics of his day. Now John Ferling peers behind that image, carefully burnished by Washington himself, to show us a leader who was not only not above politics but a canny infighter---a master of persuasion, manipulation, and deniability.

In the dramatic few years when colonial Americans were galvanized to resist British rule, perhaps nothing did more to foment anti-British sentiment than the armed occupation of Boston. As If an Enemy's Country is Richard Archer's gripping narrative of those critical months between October 1, 1768 and the winter of 1770 when Boston was an occupied town.

From the Townshend Duties to the Boston Massacre, AudioLearn is your complete study guide to the Pre-Revolution America. Download AudioLearn to your MP3 player and study at the gym. Review key terms in the car. With its convenient format, AudioLearn fits your busy lifestyle, enabling you to study anywhere, anytime.

In American History, 1877 to the Present, all main events are covered, including Reconstruction, industrialization, U.S. emergence as a world power, World Wars I and II, the Great Depression, Cold War politics, racial and sexual equality issues, Vietnam, Watergate, and threats to America at the start of the 21st century. Also covered are major personages, from George Armstrong Custer to Osama bin Laden, and much more.

The journals of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark remain the single most important document in the history of American exploration. This compact volume of their journals, compiled by American Book Award nominee Landon Y. Jones, includes all of the most riveting tales of their adventure, in their own words.