Sharpening the debate over the values that formed America's founding political philosophy, Barry Alan Shain challenges us to reconsider what early Americans meant when they used such basic political concepts as the public good, liberty, and slavery. We have too readily assumed, he argues, that eighteenth-century Americans understood these and other terms in an individualistic manner. However, by exploring how these core elements of their political thought were employed in Revolutionary-era...

"In God We Trust?" The separation of church and state is a widely contested topic in the American political arena. Whether for or against, debaters frequently base their arguments in the Constitution and the principles of the American founding. However, Americans' perception of the founding has narrowed greatly over the years, focusing on a handful of eminent statesmen.By exploring the work of nine founding fathers, including often overlooked figures like John Carroll and George Ma...

Eight thrilling tales from the writer of Brothers in Law, featuring courtroom cases, legal wranglings, conspiracy and blackmailBarrister and county court judge, Henry Cecil wrote numerous comic stories set in the legal world, most famously Brothers in Law. Collected here are eight vintage dramas based on his works, beginning with an adaptation of his debut novel, The Painswick Line, a tale of a judge and his somewhat unco...

Two of J M Synge’s remarkable plays and an exploration of the man, his work and his life on the Aran IslandsJ M Synge was one of the giants of Irish theatre, and a leading dramatist of the Irish Literary Renaissance. Together with W B Yeats and others, he co-founded Dublin’s famous Abbey Theatre in 1904, and was a director there until his death in 1909. He is best known for his comic masterpiece The Playboy of the Western World, which appears here alongsid...

**“Exceptional... a remarkable study of the key chapter of American history and its ongoing influence on American character.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the Founding Era reflects on the birth of American nationhood and explains why the American Revolution remains so essential to our identity and culture.**For Gordon S. Wood, the American Revolution is the most important event in our history, bar none. Since American id...

How did African-American slaves view their white masters? As demons, deities or another race entirely? When nineteenth-century white Americans proclaimed their innate superiority, did blacks agree? If not, why not? How did blacks assess the status of the white race? Mia Bay traces African-American perceptions of whites between 1830 and 1925 to depict America's shifting attitudes about race in a period that saw slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction, and urban migration. Much has been writte...

The idea that American conservatism is identical to "classical" liberalism—widely held since the 1960s—is seriously mistaken.The award-winning political theorist Yoram Hazony argues that the best hope for Western democracy is a return to the empiricist, religious, and nationalist traditions of America and Britain—the conservative traditions that brought greatness to the English-speaking nations and became the model for national freedom for the entire world.Conservatism:...

Viewing the Civil War as a major turning point in American religious thought, Mark A. Noll examines writings about slavery and race from Americans both white and black, northern and southern, and includes commentary from Protestants and Catholics in Europe and Canada. Though the Christians on all sides agreed that the Bible was authoritative, their interpretations of slavery in Scripture led to a full-blown theological crisis.

Religious life in early America is often equated with the fire-and-brimstone Puritanism best embodied by the theology of Cotton Mather. Yet, by the nineteenth century, American theology had shifted dramatically away from the severe European traditions directly descended from the Protestant Reformation, of which Puritanism was in the United States the most influential. In its place arose a singularly American set of beliefs. In America's God, Mark Noll has written a biography of this new Am...

Women's history emerged as a genre in the waning years of the eighteenth century, a period during which concepts of nationhood and a sense of belonging expanded throughout European nations and the young American republic. Early women's histories had criticized the economic practices, intellectual abilities, and political behavior of women while emphasizing the importance of female domesticity in national development. These histories had created a narrative of exclusion that legitimated the...

Sam Haselby offers a new and persuasive account of the role of religion in the formation of American nationality, showing how a contest within Protestantism reshaped American political culture and led to the creation of an enduring religious nationalism. Following U.S. independence, the new republic faced vital challenges, including a vast and unique continental colonization project undertaken without, in the centuries-old European senses of the terms, either "a church" or "a state." Amid ...

Among the most enduring themes in American history is the idea that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. A pervasive narrative in everything from school textbooks to political commentary, it is central to the way in which many Americans perceive the historical legacy of their nation. Yet, as Steven K. Green shows in this illuminating new book, it is little more than a myth. In Inventing a Christian America, Green, a leading historian of religion and politics, explo...