The Jamestown colony is one of the great survival stories of American history, and this book brings it fully to life for the first time. Drawing on extensive original documents, David A. Price paints intimate portraits of the major figures from the formidable monarch Chief Powhatan, to the resourceful but unpopular leader John Smith. Author…
With meticulous research and page-turning suspense, Patriots brings to life the American Revolutionthe battles, the treacheries, and the dynamic personalities of the men who forged our freedom. Author A.J. “Jack” Langguth is Professor Emeritus of the the School of Journalism at the University of Southern California and an American author and journalist. In addition to…
Alexis de Tocqueville is more quoted than read; commentators across the political spectrum invoke him as an oracle who defined America and its democracy for all times. But in fact his masterpiece, Democracy in America, was the product of a young man’s open-minded experience of America at a time of rapid change. In Tocqueville’s Discovery…
In the 1630s, visitors to the prosperous trading cities of the Netherlands noticed that normally sober, hardworking Dutch citizens were caught up in a frenzy of buying and selling. The object of this speculation was the tulip, an import that had bewitched horticulturists, noblemen, and tavern owners alike. Rare bulbs changed hands for ever-increasing sums,…
For six hundred years, the Ottoman Empire swelled and declined. Islamic, martial, civilized, and tolerant, it advanced in three centuries from the dusty foothills of Anatolia to rule on the Danube and the Nile; at its height, Indian rajahs and the kings of France beseeched the empire’s aid. In its last three hundred years the…
Scholar A. Roger Ekirch illuminates the aspects of life most often overlooked by other historiansthose that unfold at night. Author A. Roger Ekirch (1950) is University Distinguished Professor of history at Virginia Tech in the United States. He was a Guggenheim fellow in 1998. He is internationally known for his pioneering research into pre-industrial sleeping…
The former French colony of Acadia—permanently renamed Nova Scotia by the British when they began an ambitious occupation of the territory in 1710—witnessed one of the bitterest struggles in the British empire. Author Geoffrey Plank is Professor of Early Modern History at University of East Anglia. He previously taught at the University of Cincinnati.
In 1830 the U.S. government shifted its policy from one of trying to assimilate American Indians to one of relocating them and proceeded to drive seventeen thousand Cherokee people west of the Mississippi. Authors THEDA PERDUE is a professor of history at the University of Kentucky. She is the author or editor of eight books,…
How a group of greatly gifted but deeply flawed individuals—Hamilton, Burr, Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, Adams, and Madison—confronted the overwhelming challenges before them to set the course for our nation. Author Joseph J. Ellis is Ford Foundation Professor of History at Mount Holyoke and author of the National Book Award-winning American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas…
The story of how Europe evolved from the classical age of Rome to the medieval era. Without Ireland, the transition could not have taken place. Not only did Irish monks and scribes maintain the very record of Western civilization — copying manuscripts of Greek and Latin writers, both pagan and Christian, while libraries and learning…
