Showing titles in Revolution & Founding

The American Revolution is often portrayed as a high-minded, orderly event whose capstone, the Constitution, provided the ideal framework for a democratic, prosperous nation. Alan Taylor, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, gives us a different creation story in this magisterial history of the nation's founding. Rising out of the continental rivalries of European empires and their native allies, Taylor's Revolution builds like a ground fire overspreading Britain's mainland colonies, fueled by local conditions, destructive, hard to quell.

Known to generations of Americans for his stirring call to arms, “Give me liberty or give me death,” Patrick Henry is all but forgotten today as the first of the Founding Fathers to call for independence, the first to call for revolution, and the first to call for a bill of rights. If Washington was the “Sword of the Revolution” and Jefferson, “the Pen,” Patrick Henry more than earned his epithet as “the Trumpet” of the Revolution for rousing Americans to arms in the Revolutionary War.

In volume six, Washington finally returns to Mt. Vernon for his long-awaited and well-deserved retirement from public service. But fate has other plans for him. As Washington concentrates on restoring the fortunes of his beloved Virginia estate, he keeps a nervous eye on the political developments unfolding in Philadelphia. Meanwhile, debt incurred by the Continental Congress during the war weighed heavily on the states. Convinced that the states must be bound together with a firm federal hand, Washington pushes for reform.

The drama of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson is the foundational story of America - courage, loyalty, hope, fanaticism, greatness, failure, forgiveness, love. Agony and Eloquence is the story of the greatest friendship in American history and the revolutionary times in which it was made, ruined, and finally renewed. In the wake of Washington's retirement, longtime friends Thomas Jefferson and John Adams came to represent the opposing political forces struggling to shape America's future.

Central to America's idea of itself is the character of Benjamin Franklin. We all know him, or think we do: In recent works and in our inherited conventional wisdom, he remains fixed in place as a genial polymath and self-improver who was so very American that he is known by us all as the first American.

The purpose of this book is twofold: first, to elucidate the logic, principles, and significance of the Declaration of Independence as the embodiment of the American mind; and, second, to shed light on what John Adams once called the "real American Revolution"; that is, the moral revolution that occurred in the minds of the people in the 15 years before 1776.

Alabama endured warfare, slave trading, squatting, and speculating on its path to becoming America’s 22nd state, and Daniel S. Dupre brings its captivating frontier history to life in Alabama's Frontiers and the Rise of the Old South. Dupre’s vivid narrative begins when Hernando de Soto first led hundreds of armed Europeans into the region during the fall of 1540. Although this early invasion was defeated, Spain, France, and England would each vie for control over the area’s natural resources.

The tragic history of an African-American soldier, a Polish revolutionary, and a flawed statesman who betrayed a friend and failed a nation. Friends of Liberty tells the remarkable story of three men whose lives were braided together by issues of liberty and race that fueled revolutions across two continents.

The story of history is a ceaseless conversation between past and present, and in American Dialogue, Joseph J. Ellis focuses the conversation on the often-asked question "What would the Founding Fathers think?" He examines four of our most seminal historical figures through the prism of particular topics, using the perspective of the present to shed light on their views and, in turn, to make clear how their now centuries-old ideas illuminate the disturbing impasse of today's political conflicts.

George Washington was famously unknowable, but Robert Middlekauff penetrates the mystique to reveal the fears, values, and passions that drove him. Rich in psychological details regarding Washington's temperament, idiosyncrasies, and experiences, this audiobook shows us a self-conscious Washington who grew in confidence and experience as a young soldier, businessman, and Virginian gentleman; and was transformed into an American patriot by the revolutionary ferment of the 1760s and 70s.

It was 1778, and the recent American victory at Saratoga had netted the US a powerful ally in France. Many, including General George Washington, presumed France’s entrance into the war meant independence was just around the corner. Meanwhile, having lost an entire army at Saratoga, Great Britain pivoted to a 'southern strategy'. The army would henceforth seek to regain its southern colonies, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, a highly profitable segment of its prewar American empire.

Volume Four opens as the British abandoned Boston in March 1776. They moved their troops to Long Island and their fleet to New York Harbor. Washington, anticipating such a strategy, came out to face the Redcoats in Brooklyn, but was driven back to the city. More British troops arrived, forcing Washington to withdraw north. As the winter of 1777 approached with Redcoats occupying Philadelphia, Washington restricted the British army's supply line. But almost nobody believed the British could be defeated and few believed Washington's army could survive.

The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War by historian J. L. Bell reveals a new dimension to the start of America’s War for Independence by tracing the spark of its first battle back to little-known events beginning in September 1774. The author relates how radical Patriots secured those four cannon and smuggled them out of Boston, and how Gage sent out spies and search parties to track them down.

A Revolutionary Friendship captures the dramatic, challenging, and poignant reality that there was no single founding ideal-only compromise between friends and sometime rivals.

During the summer of 1776, a British incursion from Canada loomed. In response, citizen soldiers of the newly independent nation mounted a heroic defense. Patriots constructed a small fleet of gunboats on Lake Champlain in northern New York and confronted the Royal Navy in a desperate three-day battle near Valcour Island. Their effort surprised the arrogant British and forced the enemy to call off their invasion.

During the brutal winter of 1775-1776, an untested Boston bookseller named Henry Knox commandeered an oxen train hauling 60 tons of cannons and other artillery from Fort Ticonderoga near the Canadian border. He and his men journeyed some 300 miles south and east over frozen, often treacherous terrain to supply George Washington for his attack of British troops occupying Boston. The result was the British surrender of Boston and the first major victory for the Colonial Army.

In the spring of 1676, Nathaniel Bacon, a hotheaded young newcomer to Virginia, led a revolt against the colony's Indian policies. Bacon's Rebellion turned into a civil war within Virginia - and a war of extermination against the colony's Indian allies - that lasted into the following winter, sending shock waves throughout the British colonies and into England itself. James Rice offers a colorfully detailed account of the rebellion, revealing how Piscataways, English planters, slave traders, Susquehannocks, colonial officials, plunderers and intriguers were all pulled into an escalating conflict whose outcome, month by month, remained uncertain.

The urgent need to honor the 56 Signers of the Declaration of Independence came to Douglas MacKinnon, fittingly enough, on the Fourth of July. While doing research for a column meant to remind the American people of that date’s critical importance, he came across example after example of those from the left and the far left—be they in the mainstream media, activists, or anarchists—calling for not only the “canceling” of the Fourth of July, but the continued smearing, censorship, and canceling of our Founding Fathers.

Over the course of his life, James Madison changed the United States three times: First, he designed the Constitution, led the struggle for its adoption and ratification, then drafted the Bill of Rights. As an older, cannier politician, he cofounded the original Republican party, setting the course of American political partisanship. Finally, having pioneered a foreign policy based on economic sanctions, he took the United States into a high-risk conflict, becoming the first wartime president and, despite the odds, winning.

On July 9, 1755, British and colonial troops under the command of General Edward Braddock suffered a crushing defeat to French and Native American enemy forces in Ohio Country. Known as the Battle of the Monongahela, the loss altered the trajectory of the Seven Years' War in America, escalating the fighting and shifting the balance of power. An unprecedented rout of a modern and powerful British army by a predominantly Indian force, Monongahela shocked the colonial world.