Showing titles in Revolution & Founding

Benjamin Franklin was the oldest of the founding fathers—he was indeed a whole generation ahead of George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson—and yet he was the most forward-looking of the group and the most modern of the founders. The Greatest American shows just how much of an impact Benjamin Franklin had on American politics and daily life.

This Thomas Paine Classic Collection contains three of Thomas Paine's most notable books: Common Sense, The Age of Reason, and The Rights of Man. Born during the Age of Enlightenment and one of America’s Founding Fathers, Thomas Paine wrote incredible works that continue to resonate with people in the modern world. Inside this collection, you’ll find some of Thomas Paine’s most famous and influential works, from his arguments against the Church to the nature of government and revolution.

In The Story of America, Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore investigates American origin stories - from John Smith's account of the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to Barack Obama's 2009 inaugural address - to show how American democracy is bound up with the history of print. Over the centuries, Americans have read and written their way into a political culture of ink and type. Part civics primer, part cultural history, The Story of America excavates the origins of everything from the paper ballot and the Constitution to the I.O.U. and the dictionary.

Two Revolutions and the Constitution describes how the American Constitution secured the gains of the American Revolution. It tells the story of how the American constitutional system drew on both Americans' experience of partial self-government in colonial America and their understanding of the British constitution. It also tells how, when they were drafting the Constitution, the Framers used what they had learned about effective constitutions since independence. This audiobook describes how the English started that struggle, and the American Constitution completed it.

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2017 From the great historian of the American Revolution, New York Times-bestselling and Pulitzer-winning Gordon Wood, comes a majestic dual biography of two of America's most enduringly fascinating figures, whose partnership helped birth a nation...

Rough Crossings is the astonishing story of the struggle to freedom by thousands of African American slaves who fled the plantations to fight behind British lines in the American War of Independence. With gripping, powerfully vivid storytelling, Simon Schama follows the escaped blacks into the fires of the war and into freezing, inhospitable Nova Scotia, where many who had served the Crown were betrayed in their promises to receive land at the war's end.

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.

To the original text of what has become a classic of American historical literature, Bernard Bailyn adds a substantial essay, "Fulfillment", as a postscript. Here he discusses the intense nationwide debate on the ratification of the Constitution, stressing the continuities between that struggle over the foundations of the national government and the original principles of the Revolution.

From the award-winning historian and filmmakers of The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, The Roosevelts, and others: a human-centered history of America’s founding struggle—expanding on the landmark, six-part PBS series to be aired in November 2025 “From a small spark kindled in America, a flame...

The book features a great collection of America’s founding fathers and mothers, whose contribution to the fight for independence, human rights, democracy, and proper governance will never be forgotten!

The Battle of Kings Mountain was the most remarkable, unexpected, and unorthodox patriot victory of supreme importance that was fought during the course of the American Revolution. The victors of Kings Mountain were South Carolina, Virginia, and North Carolina Backcountry volunteers (including men from today’s Tennessee) of a ghost army that suddenly materialized practically out of thin air from both sides of the Appalachian Mountains on its own and without authorization from the Continental Congress or Continental officers.

George Rogers Clark (1752-1818) led four victorious campaigns against the Indians and British in the Ohio Valley during the American Revolution, but his most astonishing coup was recapturing Fort Sackville in 1779 when he was only 26. For 18 days, in the dead of winter, Clark and his troops marched through bone-chilling nights to reach the fort. With a deft mix of guile and violence, Clark led his men to triumph without losing a single soldier.

The #1 New York Times bestselling authors of The Heart of Everything That Is return with “a thorough, nuanced, and enthralling account” (The Wall Street Journal) about one of the most inspiring—and underappreciated—chapters in the American Revolution: the Continental Army’s six-month...

An acclaimed historian presents a sweeping new look at the Declaration of Independence, focusing not on the lofty principles of the preamble but on the list of grievances leveled against King George III. For the 250 years since it was written and proclaimed to the world, the Declaration of...

Douglas Brinkley takes us on the incredible journey of the United States - a nation formed from a vast countryside on whose fringes 13 small British colonies fought for their freedom, then established a democratic nation that spanned the continent and went on to become a world power. This book will be treasured by anyone interested in the story of America.

With Musket and Tomahawk is a vivid account of the American and British struggles in the sprawling wilderness region of the northeast during the Revolutionary War. Combining strategic, tactical, and personal detail, this book describes how the patriots of the recently organized Northern Army defeated England's massive onslaught of 1777, thereby all but ensuring America's independence.

“Let chaos come.” The violent election of 1872 that serves as a warning for today's divided politics. From CNN’s Chief Political Correspondent Dana Bash, the fast-paced story of the extraordinary election that led to hundreds of murders, warfare in the streets of New Orleans, two governors...

Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Jon Meacham offers a collection of inspiring words about how to be a good citizen, from Thomas Jefferson and others, and reminds us why our country’s founding principles are still so important today. Thomas Jefferson believed in the covenant between a...

Lee is remembered today for constantly defeating the Union’s Army of the Potomac in the Eastern theater from 1862-1865, considerably frustrating Lincoln and his generals. His leadership of his army led to him being deified after the war by some of his former subordinates, especially Virginians, and he came to personify the Lost Cause’s ideal Southern soldier. His reputation was secured in the decades after the war as a general who brilliantly led his men to amazing victories against all odds.

A major new history from our most trusted voice on the Revolutionary era, the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Founding Brothers and the National Book Award winner American Sphinx, and featured in THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, a film by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt, on PBS. An...