WINNER • 2022 PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORYFinalist • National Book Award for NonfictionBest Books of the Year • TIME, Smithsonian, Boston Globe, Kirkus ReviewsThe Pulitzer Prize-winning history that transforms a single event in 1722 into an unparalleled portrait of early America.In the winter of 1722, on the eve of a major conference between the Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee (also known as the Iroquois) and ...

One of the finest historians of her generation, Jan Ellen Lewis (1949-2018) transformed our understanding of the early U.S. Republic. Her groundbreaking essays defined the emerging fields of gender and emotions history and reframed traditional understandings of the founding fathers and the U.S. Constitution. As significant as her work was within each of these subfields, her most remarkable insights came from the connections she drew among them. Gender and race, slavery and freedom, feeling...

As military campaigns go, the War of 1812 was a disaster. By the time it ended in 1815, Washington, D.C., had been burned to the ground, the national debt had nearly tripled, and territorial gains were negligible. Yet the war gained so much popular support that it ushered in what is known as the "era of good feelings," a period of relative partisan harmony and strengthened national identity. Historian Nicole Eustace's cultural history of the war tells the story of how an expensive, unprodu...

At the outset of the eighteenth century, many British Americans accepted the notion that virtuous sociable feelings occurred primarily among the genteel, while sinful and selfish passions remained the reflexive emotions of the masses, from lower-class whites to Indians to enslaved Africans. Yet by 1776 radicals would propose a new universal model of human nature that attributed the same feelings and passions to all humankind and made common emotions the basis of natural rights. In Pass...

The War of 1812 was one of a cluster of events that left unsettled what is often referred to as the Revolutionary settlement. At once postcolonial and neoimperial, the America of 1812 was still in need of definition. As the imminence of war intensified the political, economic, and social tensions endemic to the new nation, Americans of all kinds fought for country on the battleground of culture. The War of 1812 increased interest in the American democratic project and elicited calls for na...

As military campaigns go, the War of 1812 was a disaster. By the time it ended in 1815, Washington, D.C., had been burned to the ground, the national debt had nearly tripled, and territorial gains were negligible. Yet the war gained so much popular support that it ushered in what is known as the "era of good feelings," a period of relative partisan harmony and strengthened national identity. Historian Nicole Eustace's cultural history of the war tells the story of how an expensive, unprodu...

On the eve of a major treaty conference between Iroquois leaders and European colonists in the distant summer of 1722, two white fur traders attacked an Indigenous hunter and left him for dead near Conestoga, Pennsylvania. Though virtually forgotten today, this act of brutality set into motion a remarkable series of criminal investigations and cross-cultural negotiations that challenged the definition of justice in early America.In Covered with Night, leading historian Nic...

**Named a Must Read by Ebony ∙ Boston Herald ∙ Book Riot ∙ Bookish ∙ Minneapolis Star-Tribune and more!A body falls from a town house window in Harlem, and it looks just like the newest singer at the Apollo...in this evocative, twisting new novel from the authorof Miss Aldridge Regrets.**Harlem, 1936: Lena Aldridge grew up in a cramped corner of London, hearing stories of the bright lights of Broadway. She always imagined that wh...

A neurologist regales readers with extraordinary stories of the brain under siege.Our brains are the most complex machines known to humankind, but they have an Achilles heel: the very molecules that allow us to exist can also sabotage our minds. Here are true accounts of unruly molecules and the diseases that form in their wake, from total loss of inhibitions to florid psychosis to compulsive lying.Cognitive neurologist Sara Manning Peskin demystifies the m...

Bob Marley's life is the stuff of legend. Raised in the slums of Kingston, Jamaica, Marley (1945–1981) wrote songs that inspired millions. So Much Things to Say tells Marley's life story like never before. Roger Steffens traveled with the Wailers, interviewed Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer extensively, and took iconic Marley photographs. Now, drawing on forty years of intimate interviews with band members, family, lovers, and confidants—many speaking publicly for the first time—Steff...

The heroic story of the founding of the US Navy during the Revolution has been told many times, yet largely missing from maritime histories of America's first war is the ragtag fleet of private vessels that truly revealed the new nation's character—above all, its ambition and entrepreneurial ethos.In Rebels at Sea, Eric Jay Dolin corrects that significant omission, and contends that privateers, as they were called, were in fact critical to the American victory. Privateers ...

“An absolutely essential addition to the history of the Catholic Church, whose involvement in New World slavery sustained the Church and, thereby, helped to entrench enslavement in American society.”—Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello and On JuneteenthNew York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie MedalA BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: ...