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The first twenty-one months of the American Revolution—which began at Lexington and ended at Princeton—was the story of a ragged group of militiamen and soldiers fighting to forge a new nation. By the winter of 1777, the exhausted Continental Army could claim only that it had escaped annihilation by the world’s most formidable fighting force. Two years into the war, George III is as determined as ever to bring his rebellious colonies to heel.

A major new history from the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Founding Brothers and the National Book Award winner American Sphinx, on how America’s founders—Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams—regarded the issue of slavery as they drafted the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. In this daring and important work, our most trusted voice on the founding era reckons with the realities and regrets of our founding and the tragedy of its two great failures: the failure to end slavery and the failure to avoid Indian removal

Despite the key part he played in the country's founding, few Americans today have heard of John Dickinson. Early chroniclers and historians, seeking to create a patriotic narrative and taking their cues from his political enemies, cast him as a coward and Loyalist for not signing the Declaration. Many later historians have simply accepted and echoed this distorted and dismissive view. Jane Calvert's fascinating, authoritative, and accessible biography restores him to a place of prominence in the nation's formative years.

In Pride and Pleasure, Amanda Vaill draws on deep archival research and never published letters to uncover the stories of these two remarkable women, following both from their childhoods as colonial aristocrats through their marriages to unconventional men and divergent paths in adulthood—Eliza’s first as helpmeet to the prodigious Alexander Hamilton and then as a philanthropist and political lobbyist, and Angelica’s as a socialite and confidante of powerful men such as Thomas Jefferson, the Marquis de Lafayette, and, scandalously, her own sister’s husband.

For more than 150 years between their first encounters with the English in the 1670s and forced removal along the Trail of Tears, the Cherokees negotiated mounting pressures. As their world was convulsed by the spread of European diseases, competition for guns, furs, and deerskins, and imperial powers’ unrelenting pursuit of “savage” allies, Cherokee communities responded by creating new solidarities.

In the bestselling tradition of Rinker Buck’s The Oregon Trail and Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic, The Road That Made America is a lively, epic account of one of the greatest untold stories in our nation’s history—the eight-hundred-mile long Great Wagon Road that 18th-century American settlers forged from Philadelphia to Georgia that expanded the country dramatically in the decades before we ventured west.

Timed for the 250th anniversary of one of America’s most famous founding events: Paul Revere’s legendary ride, newly told with fresh research into little-known aspects of the myth that every American learns in school.

The stories of politicos and historic events are often turned into snooze-worthy lectures that even Benjamin Franklin would reject. This guide cuts out all the boring details and instead provides you with a thrilling lesson in U.S. history. From Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence to Barack H. Obama and the Great Recession, every second takes you on an unforgettable journey through the moments that completely changed this country. You'll also uncover hundreds of entertaining historical facts and stories that you won't be able to find anywhere else.

The revolutions that raged across Europe and the Americas over seven decades, from 1760 to 1825, created the modern world. Revolutionaries shattered empires, toppled social hierarchies, and birthed a world of republics. But old injustices lingered on and the powerful engines of revolutionary change created new and insidious forms of inequality. In The Age of Revolutions, historian Nathan Perl-Rosenthal offers the first narrative history of this entire era.

A contemporary of Samuel Adams, John Adams, George Washington, and the Marquis de Lafayette, Hancock’s contacts read like a who’s who of the American Revolution. But shockingly little has been written about the man himself—and current biographies tend to over-rely on critical portrayals by his political opponents. John Hancock is the story of a man who deserves far more acknowledgment for his involvement in the American Revolution than previously credited—and award-winning scholar Willard Sterne Randall is determined to give him his due at last.

In James Madison's Constitution, Eric T. Kasper and Howard Schweber have assembled a roster of ten prominent contributors to excavate Madison's thinking about key concepts and issues over questions of what the Constitution requires, permits, and prohibits. Madison's key role at the Constitution's drafting was instrumental in forging the document into what it is today.

The Undiscovered Country strips away the layers of myth to reveal the true story of the American West. From the forests of Pennsylvania and Kentucky to the snow-crested California Sierras, and from the harsh deserts of the Southwest to the buffalo range of the Great Plains, Paul Andrew Hutton masterfully chronicles a story that defined America and its people. From Braddock’s 1755 defeat to the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre, he unfolds a grand narrative steeped in romantic impulses and tragic consequences.