The enthralling story of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, an innovative, highly regarded, and successful woman plantation owner during the Revolutionary eraEliza Lucas Pinckney (1722'Äì1793) reshaped the colonial South Carolina economy with her innovations in indigo production and became one of the wealthiest and most respected women in a world dominated by men. Born on the Caribbean island of Antigua, she spent her youth in England before settling in the American South and enriching herself t...

Surprisingly, no previous book has ever explored how family life shaped the political careers of America's great Founding Fathers—men like George Mason, Patrick Henry, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. In this original and intimate portrait, historian Lorri Glover brings to life the vexing, joyful, arduous, and sometimes tragic experiences of the architects of the American Republic who, while building a nation, were also raising families.The costs and consequen...

An authoritative assessment of the early American republic through the lens of genderWhat does it mean to study early American history through gender? The essays in this collection, written by the best emerging and established historians in the field, bring together women’s history with masculinity studies to showcase the transformative impact of gender history on our understanding of the early American republic. In addition to state-of-the-field historiographical ...

The history of the 1788 Virginia Ratification Convention explores the Constitutional debates that decided the nation's fate and still resonate today.In May 1788, elected delegates from every county in Virginia gathered in Richmond where they would either accept or reject the highly controversial United States Constitution. The rest of the country kept an anxious vigil, keenly aware that without Virginia—the young Republic's largest and most populous state—the Const...

"A rip-snortin' story of shipwreck, intrigue, horror, courage, risk, luck and will . . . The authors have brought the drama in the Chesapeake alive." — Publishers WeeklyThe English had long dreamed of colonizing America, especially after Sir Francis Drake brought home Spanish treasure and dramatic tales from his raids in the Caribbean. Ambitions of finding gold and planting a New World colony seemed within reach when in 1606 Thomas Smythe extended overseas...

America’s War for Independence dramatically affected the speed and nature of broader social, cultural, and political changes including those shaping the place and roles of women in society. Women fought the American Revolution in many ways, in a literal no less than a figurative sense. Whether Loyalist or Patriot, Indigenous or immigrant enslaved or slave-owning, going willingly into battle or responding when war came to their doorsteps, women participated in the conflict in complex and va...

Between the generations of Thomas Jefferson and Jefferson Davis, the culture of white Southerners experienced significant changes, including the establishment of a normative male identity that exuded confidence, independence, and power. Southern Sons, the first work in masculinity studies to concentrate on the early South, explores how young men of the southern gentry came of age between the 1790s and the 1820s. Lorri Glover examines how standards for manhood came about, how young...

This rich collection of original essays illuminates the causes and consequences of the South's defining experiences with death. Employing a wide range of perspectives, while concentrating on discrete episodes in the region's past, the authors explore topics from the seventeenth century to the present, from the death traps that emerged during colonization to the bloody backlash against emancipation and civil rights to recent canny efforts to commemorate - and capitalize on - the region's de...

“Vivid with a Mesozoic bestiary” (Tom Holland), this on-the-ground, page-turning narrative weaves together the chance discovery of dinosaurs and the rise of the secular age.When the twelve-year-old daughter of a British carpenter pulled some strange-looking bones from the country’s southern shoreline in 1811, few people dared to question that the Bible told the accurate history of the world. But Mary Anning had in fact discovered the “first” ichthyosaur, and over t...

**“Sattin is a terrific storyteller.” —David Farley, New York TimesThe remarkable story of how nomads have fostered and refreshed civilization throughout our history.**Moving across millennia, Nomads explores the transformative and often bloody relationship between settled and mobile societies. Often overlooked in history, the story of the umbilical connections between these two very different ways of living presents a radical new view of human civilizatio...

**ONE OF THE ATLANTIC'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEARA NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW  EDITORS' CHOICE PICK AND 2024 NOTABLE BOOKAN NPR FAVORITE READ OF 2024“Peri’s joint biography is a thrilling, haunting yarn of the sort that the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson himself became famous for—and couldn’t have written without his wife.” —The AtlanticThe extraordinary story of the creative and romantic partnership between Robert Louis Stev...

"Riveting.…This book is required reading for anyone with even a passing interest in World War II and the Pacific Theater." —Bob Carden, Boston GlobeSeven minutes past midnight on March 10, 1945, nearly 300 American B-29s thundered into the skies over Tokyo. Their payloads of incendiaries ignited a firestorm that reached up to 2,800 degrees, liquefying asphalt and vaporizing thousands; sixteen square miles of the city were flattened and more than 100,000 me...