The result of a perfect storm of factors that culminated in a great moral catastrophe, the Salem witch trials of 1692 took a breathtaking toll on the young English colony of Massachusetts. Over 150 people were imprisoned, and nineteen men and women, including a minister, were executed by hanging. The colonial government, which was responsible for initiating the trials, eventually repudiated the entire affair as a great "delusion of the Devil."In Satan and Salem, Benjamin R...

The bestselling author of In the Heart of the Sea, Mayflower, and In the Hurricane's Eye tells the story of the Boston battle that ignited the American Revolution, in this "masterpiece of narrative and perspective." (Boston Globe)**In the opening volume of his acclaimed American Revolution series, Nathaniel Philbrick turns his keen eye to pre-Revolutionary Boston and the spark that ignited the American Revolution. In the aftermath of the Boston T...

In 1783 and 1784, some fifty thousand Americans felt that they could not support the revolution against Britain. They were called Loyalists – and there would be no place for them in the new United States.As they streamed into the Canadian colonies to the north, they changed forever the face of settlement there. Their arrival would eventually lead to the formation of the provinces of New Brunswick and Ontario.First published in hardcover in 1984, the bicentenary of the migra...

The contrarian historian and analyst upends the conventional reading of the American RevolutionIn 1775, iconoclastic historian and bestselling author Kevin Phillips punctures the myth that 1776 was the watershed year of the American Revolution. He suggests that the great events and confrontations of 1775—Congress’s belligerent economic ultimatums to Britain, New England’s rage militaire, the exodus of British troops and expulsion of royal governor...

In this provocative account of colonial America, William R. Polk explores the key events, individuals, and themes of this critical period. With vivid descriptions of the societies that people from Europe came from and with an emphasis on what they believed they were going to, Polk introduces the native Indians encountered in the New World and the black Africans who were brought across the Atlantic.With insightful analysis, he also discusses the dual truths of colo...

"The Story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith" is a novel about Pocahontas, a Native American woman, belonging to the Powhatan people, notable for her association with the colonial settlement at Jamestown, Virginia. She was the daughter of Powhatan, the paramount chief of a network of tributary tribes in the Tsenacommacah, encompassing the Tidewater region of Virginia.In a well-known historical anecdote, she is said to have saved the life of an Indian captive, Englishman John Smi...

*Includes pictures*Includes excerpts from the journals of two of the Mayflower's passengers*Includes a Table of Contents. “By God's providence, upon the ninth of November following, by break of the day we espied land which was deemed to be Cape Cod, and so afterward it proved. And the appearance of it much comforted us, especially seeing so goodly a land, and wooded to the brink of the sea. It caused us to rejoice together, and praise God that had given us once again to see land.” Edward Win...

A gritty look at the French and Indian War through the lens of the bloody skirmish of Hodges' Scout, the heretofore untold story of a lost patrol.In September 1756, fifty American soldiers set off on a routine reconnaissance near Lake George, determined to safeguard the upper reaches of the New York colony. Caught in a devastating ambush by French and native warriors, only a handful of colonials made it back alive. Toward the end of the French and Indian War, anoth...

Based on a sweeping range of archival, visual, and material evidence, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians examines perceptions of Indians in French colonial Louisiana and demonstrates that material culture—especially dress—was central to the elaboration of discourses about race.At the heart of France's seventeenth-century plans for colonizing New France was a formal policy—Frenchification. Intended to turn Indians into Catholic subjects of the king, it also carried with...

Drawing on a gold mine of primary documents--including letters, diary entries, personal narratives, political speeches, broadsides, trial transcripts, and contemporary newspaper articles--The Boisterous Sea of Liberty brings the past to life in a way few histories ever do. Here is a panoramic look at early American history as captured in the words of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe a...

Indian peoples made some four hundred 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 c...

A fur trader and explorer, Peter Pond (1740–1807) became one of the first English-speaking men to see much of North America, traveling its rivers and lakes from Long Island Sound to Great Slave Lake in Canada’s Northwest Territories.At sixteen Pond joined the provincial army to fight in the Seven Years’ War. He tried his hand at seafaring, before turning his attention to the Great Lakes fur trade, exchanging British manufactured goods, tobacco, and rum for furs and skins hunted by ...