By the time William Penn was planning the colony that would come to be called Pennsylvania, with Philadelphia at its heart, Europeans on both sides of the ocean had long experience with the hazards of city life, disease the most terrifying among them. Drawing from those experiences, colonists hoped to create new urban forms that combined the commercial advantages of a seaport with the health benefits of the country. The Contagious City details how early Americans ...

**In a riveting, groundbreaking narrative, Russell Shorto tells the story of New Netherland, the Dutch colony which pre-dated the Pilgrims and established ideals of tolerance and individual rights that shaped American history.UPDATED EDITION WITH A NEW PREFACE AND POSTSCRIPT"Astonishing . . . A book that will permanently alter the way we regard our collective past." --The New York Times**When the British wrested New Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1664, the tru...

**PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • ANISFIELD-WOLF AWARD WINNER • A revelatory study of the ways in which slavery both destabilized and created American politics.“Vivid and provocative; [Lepore] evokes eighteenth-century New York in all its moral and physical messiness.” —The New Yorker“A historical study that is both intellectually rigorous and broadly accessible. . . . The type of book that we need to read and historians need to write, more often.” —Newsday**

*Includes 17 works about science and medicine. Hippocrates (460-370 B.C.) is one of the best known of the Ancient Greeks, and his Hippocratic Oath is still in use today. An ancient Greek physician of the Age of Pericles and the Golden Age of Athens, Hippocrates is considered one of the most outstanding figures in the history of medicine, known simply as the Father of Western medicine in recognition of his lasting contributions to the field as the founder of the Hippocratic School of medici...

Mac Griswold's The Manor is the biography of a uniquely American place that has endured through wars great and small, through fortunes won and lost, through histories bright and sinister—and of the family that has lived there since its founding as a Colonial New England slave plantation three and a half centuries ago.In 1984, the landscape historian Mac Griswold was rowing along a Long Island creek when she came upon a stately yellow house and a garden guarded by looming bo...

From Slave Ship to Harvard is the true story of an African American family in Maryland over six generations. The author has reconstructed a unique narrative of black struggle and achievement from paintings, photographs, books, diaries, court records, legal documents, and oral histories. From Slave Ship to Harvard traces the family from the colonial period and the American Revolution through the Civil War to Harvard and finally today.Yarrow Mamout, the first of the family in America...

From peglegged Peter Stuyvesant to CBGB’s, the story of the Bowery reflects the history of the city that grew up around it.It was the street your mother warned you about—even if you lived in San Francisco. Long associated with skid row, saloons, freak shows, violence, and vice, the Bowery often showed the worst New York City had to offer. Yet there were times when it showed its best as well.The Bowery is New York’s oldest street and Manhattan’s broadest boule...

In the early morning of September 8, 1755, a force of French Regulars, Canadians and Indians crouched unseen in a ravine south of Lake George.Under the command of French general Jean-Armand, Baron de Dieskau, the men ambushed the approaching British forces, sparking a bloody conflict for control of the lake and its access to New York's interior. Against all odds, British commander William Johnson rallied his men through the barrage of enemy fire to send the French ...

Fort William Henry, America’s early frontier fort at the southern end of Lake George, New York, was a flashpoint for conflict between the British and French empires in America. The fort is perhaps best known as the site of a massacre of British soldiers by Native Americans allied with the French that took place in 1757. Over the past decade, new and exciting archeological findings, in tandem with modern forensic methods, have changed our view of life at the fort prior to the massacre, by p...

Through an intensive study of party origins in the state of New York, this volume reexamines and reevaluates the whole of the Democratic Republican movement. It will compel changes in present concepts of anti-Federalist and Republican connections with banking, mercantile, land-speculation, and manufacturing interests.Originally published in 1967.A UNC Press Enduring Edition — UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from...

In 1755, Major General Edward Braddock and two army regiments set out from Alexandria with the objective of capturing Fort Duquesne, near present-day Pittsburgh. To transport their sizable train of artillery and wagons, they first had to build a road across the rugged Appalachian Mountains. It was almost 289 treacherous miles from Alexandria, Virginia, by way of Fort Cumberland in Maryland and on to the French fort; the road they built was one of the most impressive military engineering ac...