**Alan Taylor is featured in THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, a film by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt on PBS"Excellent…deserves high praise. Mr. Taylor conveys this sprawling continental history with economy, clarity, and vividness." —Brendan Simms, Wall Street Journal**The American Revolution is often portrayed as a high-minded, orderly event whose capstone, the Constitution, provided the nation its democratic framework. Alan Taylor, a two-time Pulitzer Pri...

A multicultural, multinational history of colonial America from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Internal Enemy and American RevolutionsIn the first volume in the Penguin History of the United States, edited by Eric Foner, Alan Taylor challenges the traditional story of colonial history by examining the many cultures that helped make America, from the native inhabitants from milennia past, through the decades of Western colonization and co...

The Nat Turner rebellion of August 1831, the iconic uprising of enslaved people in the United States, was much more extensive than we have understood. This powerful exploration of a Tidewater Virginia plantation reveals how the daily resistance of the enslaved was heightened by spiritual beliefs to seek the divine overthrow of a wicked world.Tower Hill draws on a previously untapped family archive to reveal the routines of daily life and the fraught family...

In the early nineteenth century, Britons and Americans renewed their struggle over the legacy of the American Revolution, leading to a second confrontation that redefined North America. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Alan Taylor’s vivid narrative tells the riveting story of the soldiers, immigrants, settlers, and Indians who fought to determine the fate of a continent. Would revolutionary republicanism sweep the British from Canada? Or would the British contain, divide, and ruin the shak...

This searing story of slavery and freedom in the Chesapeake by a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian reveals the pivot in the nation’s path between the founding and civil war.Frederick Douglass recalled that slaves living along Chesapeake Bay longingly viewed sailing ships as "freedom’s swift-winged angels." In 1813 those angels appeared in the bay as British warships coming to punish the Americans for declaring war on the empire. Over many nights, hundreds of slaves paddled out to th...

Discover the people and places of colonial Boston during the tumultuous years of rebellion—illustrations included.In 1764, a small town in the British colony of Massachusetts ignited a bold rebellion. When Great Britain levied the Sugar Act on its American colonies, Parliament was not prepared for Boston's backlash.For the next decade, Loyalists and rebels harried one another as both sides revolted and betrayed, punished and murdered. But the rebel leaders ...

The story of a Scottish city as seen by its residents and visitors: "It's a fine treasure-house—and even Glaswegians may learn something new from it." — ScotsmanThis is the story of the fabled former Second City of the British Empire, from its origins as a bucolic village on the rivers Kelvin and Clyde, through the Industrial Revolution to the dawning of the second millennium. Arranged chronologically and introduced by journalist and Glasgowphile Alan Taylo...

A man returns to France to unravel the truth about his father's actions during WWII in "a novel of scope, substance and strength all too rare today" ( Spectator).Widely acclaimed as Allan Massie's finest novel, A Question of Loyalties explores the complexities of loyalty, nationality, and family legacy after the horrors of World War II. Rife with the anguish of hindsight and the irony of circumstance, this powerful book is "addictively narrated . ...

Offers a vivid portrait of Edinburgh's evolution, capturing its historical significance, cultural shifts, and the diverse lives of its people. Relive the history of Edinburgh through the eyes of those who witnessed it. From one of the earliest mentions of its name in the sixth century to the Covid lockdowns of the twenty-first, this is a magnificent portrait of one of the world's great cities in its many iterations, from 'Edinburgh, the sink of abomination' to the Athens of the North and e...

**A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2024A masterful history of the Civil War and its reverberations across the continent by a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner.**In a fast-paced narrative of soaring ideals and sordid politics, of civil war and foreign invasion, the award-winning historian Alan Taylor presents a pivotal twenty-year period in which North America’s three largest countries—the United States, Mexico, and Canada—all transformed themselves into nations. The Amer...

In the traditional narrative of American colonial history, early European settlements, as well as native peoples and African slaves, were treated in passing as unfortunate aberrations in a fundamentally upbeat story of Englishmen becoming freer and more prosperous by colonizing an abundant continent of "free land." Over the last generation, historians have broadened our understanding of colonial America by adopting both a trans-Atlantic and a trans-continental perspective, examining the in...

A Scottish journalist offers rare insight into the life and mind of the renowned expat author in this "beguiling, fascinating memoir" ( The Guardian, UK).In 1990, Alan Taylor traveled to Arezzo, Italy, to interview one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century. That interview evolved into a close friendship between Taylor and Muriel Spark that lasted until her death in 2006. In this intimate, anecdotal, admiring and indiscreet memoir, Taylor charts the...