In early Pennsylvania, translation served as a utopian tool creating harmony across linguistic, religious, and ethnic differences. Patrick Erben challenges the long-standing historical myth — first promulgated by Benjamin Franklin — that language diversity posed a threat to communal coherence. He deftly traces the pansophist and Neoplatonist philosophies of European reformers that informed the radical English and German Protestants who founded the “holy experiment.” Their belief in hidden ...

William Penn was an instrumental and controversial figure in the early modern transatlantic world, known both as a leader in the movement for religious toleration in England and as a founder of two American colonies, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. As such, his career was marked by controversy and contention in both England and America. This volume looks at William Penn with fresh eyes, bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines to assess his multifaceted life and career. Contribu...

Francis Daniel Pastorius was one of the first German settlers to Pennsylvania and a touchstone figure of German-American cultural heritage. This monumental anthology presents a selection of his many writings in one volume.Pastorius sailed to North America as a Pietist but found a unique home among the Quakers in Pennsylvania. Within this early modern religious context, he was a lawyer, educator, and community leader; a polymath; and a prolific writer and collector of knowledge. At ...

**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**

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...

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...

John Fiske was an American philosopher and historian who wrote letters to Charles Darwin and became a voluminous writer of histories near the end of his life. The largest part of his life was devoted to the study of history, but at an early age inquiries into the nature of human progress led him to a careful study of the doctrine of evolution, and it was through the popularization of Charles Darwin's work that he first became known to the public. He applied himself to the philosophical int...

"Part historical narrative, part genealogical detective work," this is t he true story of an African American family in Maryland over six generations ( Library Journal).Using diaries, court records, legal documents, books, paintings, photographs, and oral histories, From Slave Ship to Harvard traces a family—from the colonial period and the American Revolution through the Civil War to Harvard and finally today—forming a unique nar...

The true story of a friendship between two very different men: Founding Father Ben Franklin and famed preacher of the Great Awakening George Whitefield.They were the most famous men in America. They came from separate countries, followed different philosophies, and led dissimilar lives. But they were fast friends. No two people did more to shape America in the mid-1700s.Benjamin Franklin was the American prototype: hard-working, inventive, practical, funny, w...

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 ...