Showing titles in Colonial Period

From 1764-1775, a chain of events that included lightning rods like the Townshend Acts led to bloodshed in the form of the Boston Massacre, while the Boston Tea Party became a symbol of nonviolent protest.

"Common Sense" was published anonymously on January 10, 1776, at the beginning of the American Revolution, and became an immediate sensation. Written in clear and persuasive prose, Thomas Paine marshaled moral and political arguments to encourage common people in the Colonies to fight for egalitarian government. "Common Sense" made public a persuasive and impassioned case for independence, which before the pamphlet had not yet been given serious intellectual consideration.

Enslaved Black people took up arms and fought in nearly every colonial conflict in early British North America. They sometimes served as loyal soldiers to protect and promote their owners' interests in the hope that they might be freed or be rewarded for their service. But for many Black combatants, war and armed conflict offered an opportunity to attack the chattel slave system itself and promote Black emancipation and freedom.

The story of Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys is one of those delightful tales that American schoolchildren hear about in school, but it is also one that is much more interesting to listen to in older age. Unlike revered founding fathers such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who came from Virginian plantations, Allen was a rough and tumble frontiersman, more likely to fight than talk. And yet, he was in no way a dullard, but instead as well-read as many of his contemporaries and more so than the average man of his day.

Adventures in Colonial America is a 13-part series focusing on the history of each of the original 13 American colonies from their founding, through expansion, the American Revolution and ultimately the ratification of the U.S. Constitution.

From early slave rebels to radical reformers of the Civil War era and beyond, the struggle to end slavery was a diverse, dynamic, and ramifying social movement. In this succinct narrative, Richard S. Newman examines the key people, themes, and ideas that animated abolitionism in the 18th and 19th centuries in the United States and internationally. Filled with portraits of key abolitionists - including Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Anthony Benezet, Toussaint L'Ouverture, Elizabeth Heyrick, Richard Allen, and Angelina Grimke - the book highlights abolitionists' focus on social and political action.

Though Americans would be able to look back in hindsight at 1777 as the year the American Revolution reached a turning point in favor of the colonists, the winter of 1777 was still considered a miserable point for the cause at the time. Although Benedict Arnold and Horatio Gates were victorious at Saratoga, George Washington and his Continental army had been less successful.

On the night of December 16, 1773, a group of 30 to 130 men boarded the tea ship Dartmouth and two other ships and dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor over the span of three hours in protest of the Tea Act of 1773. Agreement over what exactly happened ends there, but a number of legends have since popped up and become part of the common narrative. The urban legend that the people who boarded the ship dressed as Mohawks is not entirely true.

Dangerous Economies is a history of New York culture and commerce in the first two thirds of the eighteenth century, when Britain was just beginning to catch up with its imperial rivals, France and Spain. In that sparsely populated city on the fringe of an empire, enslaved Africans rubbed elbows with white indentured servants while the elite strove to maintain ties with European genteel culture.

The early years of English settlement in America were characterized by catastrophe: starvation, disease, extreme violence, and ruinous ignorance. Seasons of Misery offers a provocative reexamination of the British colonies' chaotic and profoundly unstable beginnings, placing crisis at the center of the story. At the outposts of a fledgling empire and disconnected from the social order of their home society, English settlers were both physically and psychologically estranged from their European identities.

Benjamin Franklin is renowned for his landmark inventions, including bifocals, the Franklin stove, and the lightning rod. Yet his own favorite invention is unknown to the general public. The glass armonica, the first musical instrument invented by an American, was constructed of stacked glass bowls and played by rubbing one's fingers on the rims. It was so popular in the late 18th and early 19th centuries that Mozart, Beethoven, Handel, and Strauss composed for it. In Angelic Music, Corey Mead describes how Franklin's instrument fell out of popular favor.

This book surveys the colonial and revolutionary history of the Pennsylvania colony from the day William Penn founded the colony, through decades of political disagreement among members of the Penn family, and between the Pennsylvania government and its citizens. Those disputes resulted in groundbreaking political principles, many of which became the foundation of the new federal government when the US became independent.

While the battle had a profound impact, it has also been romanticized and mythologized beyond even epic proportions. Though often forgotten today (more than 250 years after the battle), the Battle of the Plains of Abraham was the culmination of a long siege, and the decisive action itself was an incredibly short affair at less than half an hour. Despite that brevity, both commanding generals were mortally wounded in the exchange, making British General James Wolfe a national hero on both sides of the Atlantic and French General Louis-Joseph de Montcalm a convenient scapegoat.

Warm, humid, salty air hovered over the city like a blanket. The unsuspecting small coastal community was bustling with energy and possibility; the town was alive with the sound of creaking ship masts, and vendors, and on Market Street, new shops and businesses were settling in as the economy began to show signs of life. One reason for the growth and prosperity was trading routes from faraway lands. Ships came from Europe, the Caribbean, and even China, carrying cargos filled with lumber, tobacco, rice, and flour, as international trade expanded.

In 1607, three small ships - the Discovery, Godspeed, and Susan Constant - arrived on the shores of the eastern North American coast and established the first successful British settlement at Jamestown, Virginia. For two centuries, colonists faced the challenges of life in a new world - weather, Native Indian attacks, starvation, and disease - to establish the strongest economy in the American colonies.

Great Britain's forced transportation of convicts to colonial Australia is well known. Less widely known is Britain's earlier program of sending convicts - including women - to North America. Many of these women were assigned as servants in Maryland. Contemporary readers and scholars will be fascinated by Ziegler's explanation of how gender-influenced punishments were meted out to women and often ensnared them in Britain's system of convict labor.

From 1754 to 1755, the slave ship Hare completed a journey from Newport, Rhode Island, to Sierra Leone and back to the United States - a journey that transformed more than 70 Africans into commodities, condemning some to death and the rest to a life of bondage in North America. In this engaging narrative, Sean Kelley painstakingly reconstructs this tumultuous voyage, detailing everything from the identities of the captain and crew to their wild encounters with inclement weather, slave traders, and near-mutiny.

On January 29, 1774, Benjamin Franklin was called to appear before the Privy Council--a select group of the king's advisors--in an octagonal-shaped room in Whitehall Palace known as the Cockpit. Spurred by jeers and applause from the audience in the Cockpit, Solicitor General Alexander Wedderburn unleashed a withering tirade against Franklin. Though Franklin entered the room as a dutiful servant of the British crown, he left as a budding American revolutionary.

Among other things, Franklin was a printer, philosopher, inventor, statesman, and not least, a writer. Franklin's autobiography captures the essence of his spirit. In it, we can see him as a product of the 18th century enlightenment, a type of Yankee statesman who could use the language of Addison, Steele, Swift, and Defoe. In his autobiography, Franklin asks himself, "Who am I, how did I come to be, and why am I a human being as I am?" And he answers with the honesty, wit, and charm.

Wright's long imperial career delicately balanced dual loyalties to Crown and colony and offers a new perspective on loyalism and the American Revolution. Through this lens, Greg Brooking connects several important contexts in recent early American and British scholarship, including imperial and Atlantic history, Indigenous borderlands, race and slavery, and popular politics.