Showing titles in Colonial Period

Set against the backdrop of the Age of Exploration, Black Flags, Blue Waters reveals the dramatic and surprising history of American piracy's "Golden Age" when lawless pirates plied the coastal waters of North America and beyond. Best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin illustrates how American colonists at first supported these outrageous pirates in an early display of solidarity against the Crown, and then violently opposed them. Upending popular misconceptions and cartoonish stereotypes, Dolin provides this wholly original account of these seafaring outlaws.

In 1528, a mission set out from Spain to colonize Florida. But the expedition went horribly wrong: Delayed by a hurricane, knocked off course by a colossal error of navigation, and ultimately doomed by a disastrous decision to separate the men from their ships, the mission quickly became a desperate journey of survival. Of the 300 men who had embarked on the journey, only four survived - three Spaniards and an African slave.

Killing the Witches revisits one of the most frightening and inexplicable episodes in American history: the events of 1692 and 1693 in Salem Village, Massachusetts. What began as a mysterious affliction of two young girls who suffered violent fits and exhibited strange behavior soon spread to other young women. Rumors of demonic possession and witchcraft consumed Salem. Soon three women were arrested under suspicion of being witches—but as the hysteria spread, more than 200 people were accused. Thirty were found guilty, twenty were executed, and others died in jail or their lives were ruined.

Apart from The Last of the Mohicans, most Americans know little of the French and Indian War, also known as the Seven Years' War, and yet it remains one of the most fascinating periods in our history. In January 2006, PBS will air The War That Made America, a four-part documentary about this epic conflict. Fred Anderson, the award-winning and critically acclaimed historian, has written the official tie-in to this exciting television event.

More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed radically different suites of plants and animals. When Christopher Columbus set foot in the Americas, he ended that separation at a stroke. Driven by the economic goal of establishing trade with China, he accidentally set off an ecological convulsion as European vessels carried thousands of species to new homes across the oceans.

In John Adams: A Life, Ferling offers a compelling portrait of one of the giants of the Revolutionary era. Drawing on extensive research, Ferling depicts a reluctant revolutionary, a leader who was deeply troubled by the warfare that he helped to make, and a fiercely independent statesman. Bringing to life an exciting time, an age in which Adams played an important political and intellectual role. this book is a singular biography of the man who succeeded George Washington in the presidency and shepherded the fragile new nation through the most dangerous of times.

The First American Cookbook: A Facsimile of "American Cookery," 1796 by Amelia Simmons is a historic culinary landmark, recognized as the first cookbook written and published in America. Originally released in 1796, this work provides a fascinating glimpse into early American cooking, blending traditional English recipes with indigenous ingredients such as cornmeal, squash, and turkey. Notably, it includes the earliest recorded recipe for pairing turkey with cranberries and introduces the use of pearlash, a precursor to modern baking powder, revolutionizing baking techniques of the time.

The first book to appear in the illustrious Oxford History of the United States, this critically-acclaimed volume - a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize - offers an unsurpassed history of the Revolutionary War and the birth of the American republic.

For thousands of years, we have set out sailing for all kinds of reasons - for battle, for infinite wealth, for the excitement of exploring the unknown, and for escape from the mundane. We have always had a primal relationship with the sea - even those who have never been to sea remain fascinated by the seafaring life and tales of salty adventure. Now in a brand–new series collection, The Best Sailing Stories Ever Told brings together such diverse authors as Charles Dickens, Jack London, John Masefield, Stephen Crane, Herman Melville, and dozens more.

Ben Franklin's own lively story of his early years is a unique, fascinating, and influential look at this American founding father. It has been taught in schools as a moral tract, as a guide to self-improvement, and as the Great American Success Story. It also is relished both for its insight into colonial life and the mind of the man who most affected the development of our democratic form of government.

In the frontier town of Springfield, in 1651, peculiar things begin to happen. Precious food spoils, livestock ails and property vanishes. People suffer fits and are plagued by strange visions and dreams. Children sicken and die. As tensions rise, rumours spread of witches and heretics, and the community becomes tangled in a web of spite, distrust and denunciation. The finger of suspicion falls on a young couple struggling to make a home and feed their children: Hugh Parsons, the irascible brickmaker, and his troubled wife, Mary. It will be their downfall.

This fascinating audiobook is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time.

Washington's rise constitutes one of the greatest self-reinventions in history. In his mid-20s, this third son of a modest Virginia planter had ruined his own military career thanks to an outrageous ego. But by his mid-40s, that headstrong, unwise young man had evolved into an unassailable leader chosen as the commander in chief of the fledgling Continental Army. By his mid-50s, he was unanimously elected the nation's first president. How did Washington emerge from the wilderness to become the central founder of the United States of America?

Left unfinished at the time of his death, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin has endured as one of the most well-known and influential autobiographies ever written. From his early years in Boston and Philadelphia to the publication of his Poor Richard's Almanac to the American Revolution and beyond, Franklin's autobiography is a fascinating, personal exploration into the life of America's most interesting founding father.

Author Carol F. Karlsen reveals the social construction of witchcraft in 17th-century New England and illuminates the larger contours of gender relations in that society and attempts to answer the question why some women were vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft and possession.

Beginning in January 1692, Salem Village in colonial Massachusetts witnessed the largest and most lethal outbreak of witchcraft in early America. Villagers - mainly young women - suffered from unseen torments that caused them to writhe, shriek, and contort their bodies, complaining of pins stuck into their flesh and of being haunted by specters. Believing that they suffered from assaults by an invisible spirit, the community began a hunt to track down those responsible for the demonic work.

In this gripping chronicle of America's struggle for independence, award-winning historian John Ferling transports listeners to the grim realities of that war, capturing an eight-year conflict filled with heroism, suffering, cowardice, betrayal, and fierce dedication. As Ferling demonstrates, it was a war that America came much closer to losing than is now usually remembered. General George Washington put it best when he said that the American victory was "little short of a standing miracle."

In this narrative history of the Mohawk River Valley and surrounding region from 1713 to 1794, Professor Richard Berleth charts the passage of the valley from a fast-growing agrarian region streaming with colonial traffic to a war-ravaged wasteland. The valley's diverse cultural mix of Iroquois Indians, Palatine Germans, Scots-Irish, Dutch, English, and Highland Scots played as much of a role as its unique geography in the cataclysmic events of the 1700s - the French and Indian Wars and the battles of the American Revolution.

From the author of The Last Testament comes the true love of Bonnie Prince Charlie, her adventures in America, and her lasting legacy. In the popular genre trail-blazed by Antonia Fraser and Phillippa Gregory, The Pretender's Lady, Alan Gold's meticulously researched novel, accurately opens history's pages on a peerless woman who helped change the course of history and whose legend lives on in Scotland today - Flora MacDonald.

This epic work tells the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president had been systematically expunged from American history until very recently. Now, historian and legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed traces the Hemings family from its origins in Virginia in the 1700s to the family's dispersal after Jefferson's death in 1826. It brings to life not only Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson but also their children and Hemings's siblings, who shared a father with Jefferson's wife, Martha.