An investigation of how the trauma of shipwreck affected American values and behaviorA Sea of Misadventures examines more than one hundred documented shipwreck narratives from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century as a means to understanding gender, status, and religion in the history of early America. Though it includes all the drama and intrigue afforded by maritime disasters, the book's significance lies in its investigation of how the trauma of shi...

**The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the #1 national bestseller Cleopatra unpacks the mystery of the Salem Witch Trials.“The Witches is the fullest and finest story ever told about Salem in 1692, and no one else could tell it with the otherworldly flair of Stacy Schiff.” ―Joseph J. Ellis, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Quartet**It began in 1692, over an exceptionally raw Massachusetts winter, when a minister's daughter began to scream and ...

**From the author of Alexander Hamilton, the New York Times bestselling biography that inspired the musical, comes a gripping portrait of the first president of the United States.Winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Biography“Truly magnificent . . . [a] well-researched, well-written and absolutely definitive biography” —Andrew Roberts, The Wall Street Journal“Until recently, I’d never believed that there could be such a thing as a truly gripping b...

**"Vivid and remarkably fresh...Philbrick has recast the Pilgrims for the ages."--**The New York Times Book ReviewFinalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History**New York Times Book Review Top Ten books of the YearWith a new preface marking the 400th anniversary of the landing of the Mayflower.**How did America begin? That simple question launches the acclaimed author of In the Hurricane's Eye and V...

From the author of Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, The Wordy Shipmates is New York Times bestselling author Sarah Vowell's exploration of the Puritans and their journey to America to become the people of John Winthrop's "city upon a hill," a shining example, a "city that cannot be hid."To this day, America views itself as a Puritan nation, but Vowell investigates what that means? and what it should mean. What was this great political ente...

An award-winning author chronicles the settling of the Ohio River Valley, home to the defiant Shawnee Indians, who vow to defend their land against the seemingly unstoppable.They came on foot and by horseback, in wagons and on rafts, singly and by the score, restless, adventurous, enterprising, relentless, seeking a foothold on the future. European immigrants and American colonists, settlers and speculators, soldiers and missionaries, fugitives from justice and fro...

Winner of the Bancroft PrizeIn this brilliantly original book, written for the general reader, the American past becomes richly meaningful to the present.

Award-winning historian Mary Beth Norton reexamines the Salem witch trials in thisstartlingly original, meticulously researched, and utterly riveting study.In 1692 the people of Massachusetts were living in fear, and not solely of satanic afflictions. Horrifyingly violent Indian attacks had all but emptied the northern frontier of settlers, and many traumatized refugees—including the main accusers of witches—had fled to communities like Salem. Meanwhile the colony’s leaders, defens...

BANCROFF PRIZE WINNER • King Philip's War, the excruciating racial war—colonists against Indigenous peoples—that erupted in New England in 1675, was, in proportion to population, the bloodiest in American history. Some even argued that the massacres and outrages on both sides were too horrific to "deserve the name of a war."The war's brutality compelled the colonists to defend themselves against accusations that they had become savages. But Jill Le...

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

A fascinating profile of two generals who shaped history.In 1759, after the battle on the Plains of Abraham outside Quebec City, the English general James Wolfe and the French general, Louis-Joseph Montcalm lay mortally wounded, each hit by a sniper's bullet. Neither could know that the outcome on the Plains of Abraham would shape the history of both the United States and Canada.After researching letters and journals and reading dozens of books, Joy Carroll has wri...

One of the most famous revolutions in history, the American Revolution (1775-1783) was the political upheaval in which 13 distinct colonies in North America banded together to cast off British rule, forming the United States of America. After the shot heard round the world on April 19, 1775, at the Battle of Lexington, the colonies sent representatives to the Second Continental Congress, the new states joined together at first to defend their respective self-governance and manage the armed co...