Showing titles in Colonial Period

Extensively researched and told through alternating fiction and nonfiction chapters, this book illuminates a shocking truth: contrary to popular opinion, the witch hunts never ended. Alice shares research that suggests tens of thousands of witch hunt-related deaths have happened all over the world in the last thirty years. The Once & Future Witch Hunt also features tantalizing glimpses into Alice's ancestors' lives and reimagines the trials through fact-based fiction.

Andrew Jackson: The Republic’s Iron Fist traces the full arc of one of the most polarizing figures in U.S. history. From his muddy birth on the Carolina frontier to the battlefield at New Orleans, from the dueling grounds of Tennessee to the Oval Office, Jackson’s life was war—and he never stopped swinging. This audiobook doesn’t glorify. It doesn’t condemn.

In July 1776 a pair of Franciscan friars, Francisco Atanasio Dominguez and Silvestre Velez de Escalante, were charged by the governor of New Mexico with discovering a route across the unknown Southwest to the new Spanish colony in California. They had other goals as well, some of them secret: converting the indigenous natives along the way to the true faith, discovering a semi-mythical paradise known as Teguayo, hunting for sources of gold and silver, and paving the way for Spanish settlements from Santa Fe to Monterey. In strict terms, the expedition failed.

From early slave rebels to radical reformers of the Civil War era and beyond, the struggle to end slavery was a diverse, dynamic, and ramifying social movement. In this succinct narrative, Richard S. Newman examines the key people, themes, and ideas that animated abolitionism in the 18th and 19th centuries in the United States and internationally. Filled with portraits of key abolitionists - including Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Anthony Benezet, Toussaint L'Ouverture, Elizabeth Heyrick, Richard Allen, and Angelina Grimke - the book highlights abolitionists' focus on social and political action.

This classic work explains the evolution of American political thought from the Declaration of Independence to the ratification of the Constitution. In so doing, it greatly illuminates the origins of the present American political system. 

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.

The importance of the volume in the American Nation series is that it includes colonies of the three types which persisted down to the Revolution—the crown colonies, the proprietary colonies, and the three New England charter colonies. On one side the volume emphasizes the variety of conditions and experiments in government. On the other side, it brings out that characteristic that gives the volume its name, the steady determination of the colonists in all three types of colonies to enjoy self-government in internal affairs.

In 1631, when the Dutch tried to develop plantation agriculture in the Delaware Valley, the Lenape Indians destroyed the colony of Swanendael and killed its residents. The natives and Dutch quickly negotiated peace, avoiding an extended war through diplomacy and trade. The Lenapes preserved their political sovereignty for the next 50 years as Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, and English colonists settled the Delaware Valley.

In the beginning, North America was Indian country. But only in the beginning. After the opening act of the great national drama, Native Americans yielded to the westward rush of European settlers. Or so the story usually goes. Yet, for three centuries after Columbus, Native people controlled most of eastern North America and profoundly shaped its destiny. In Facing East from Indian Country, Daniel K. Richter keeps Native people center-stage throughout the story of the origins of the United States.

America’s relationship with alcohol is a fraught and inconsistent one. While many other nations and cultures have stable attitudes toward drinking, the American perspective on alcohol has been volatile, vacillating wildly from the gallon-a-day beer rations on the Mayflower to nationwide prohibition and back again. Why are Americans so ambivalent about alcohol? What can we learn about the past and the American character through these extreme fluctuations between alcoholism and sobriety across the centuries?

Most people have heard about the French and Indian War, but you will find that most history classes have “forgotten” to explore some of the most interesting and important facets of this conflict. Its little-told stories and often underrated importance in world history have begun to be buried over the centuries. Was this epic struggle simply another war among many others in history?

For perspective on our own times and how we got here, it helps to listen to wise guides from other eras. In An Infinite Fountain of Light, the renowned American historian George Marsden illuminates the landscape with wisdom from one such mentor: Jonathan Edwards. Drawing on his deep expertise on Edwards and American culture, Marsden explains where Edwards stood within his historical context and sets forth key points of his complex thought.

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.

Winner of the the 1998 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award of the Phi Beta Kappa Society King Philip's War, the excruciating racial war--colonists against Indians--that erupted in New England in 1675, was, in proportion to population, the bloodiest in American history. Some even argued that the massacres...

At least one‑third of the colonial population were neutrals during the American Revolution, yet they have rarely featured in narratives that shape our ideas about the conflict. By following a single transatlantic family, the Crugers, historian Travis Glasson puts neutrals—the "nobody men"—at the center of this tumultuous period's history.

In a landmark work of history, Russell Shorto presents astonishing information on the founding of our nation and reveals in riveting detail the crucial role of the Dutch in making America what it is today. In the late 1960s, an archivist in the New York State Library made an astounding discovery...

Jules Drinkwater’s Empire’s Last Brew takes you on a wild journey through the dramatic and tumultuous eras where tea and coffee were far more than mere drinks—they were symbols of power, rebellion, and cultural identity. Each chapter reveals the intense confrontations and hidden intrigues that defined a pivotal period, from the American colonies’ uprising against British tyranny to the revolutionary fervor that percolated in European societies.

The story of the Mayflower is one of adventure, courage, and destiny. Leaving England in September of 1620, the ship carried 102 English Separatists to a new life, one that came with the freedom to practice their religious beliefs as they saw fit. These Pilgrims had the courage of their convictions. They had already potentially faced execution for practicing their beliefs, and now they were willing to uproot their lives, their families, and their homes, to sign contracts of indentured servitude - all to find what they called freedom in a foreign land.

The untold story of how America’s beloved first president, George Washington, borrowed, leveraged, and coerced his way into masterminding the key land purchase of the American era, which lead to the creation the nation’s capital city.

In the winter of 1692 something terrible and frightening began in Salem Village. It started with several villagers having strange fits, screaming, and unnaturally contorting themselves and ended with almost 200 people in jail and at least 25 dead. Witchcraft accusations - claims that some inhabitants had forsaken God to become servants of the Devil - spread from Salem Village across Massachusetts, ensnaring innocent people from all strata of society under a burden of assumed guilt. One of the most significant and unlikely accusations was against 71-year-old grandmother Rebecca Nurse.