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I was always interested in history but didn’t pay much attention to the American Revolution because I thought I knew the story. When I began to read more on the topic, I found it was far more complex and more interesting than I’d realized. Eventually I wanted to go beyond the standard storyline of Lexington-Concord-Bunker Hill-Washington’s road to victory at Yorktown. I started researching the Revolution, looking at original documents, including British materials that historians did not often consult. I found a treasure trove of fascinating stories and perspectives that I hadn’t been aware of. I’ve been researching and writing on the topic ever since.
This is the book that sparked my interest in the American Revolution. I’d been taught in school and always heard that the Americans rebelled because of high taxes imposed by the British government, but Bailyn showed this wasn’t the case. I was surprised to learn that the various taxes were quite small and that it was the mindset of the colonists, influenced by British writers, that caused them to see the taxes as signs of a larger effort to take away their liberty.
By the time I finished the book, I was convinced that the author had found the key to colonial opposition. I loved the way he laid out the colonists’ political beliefs, and I reread this book often.
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, awarded both the Pulitzer and the Bancroft prizes, has become a classic of American historical literature. Hailed at its first appearance as "the most brilliant study of the meaning of the Revolution to appear in a generation," it was enlarged in a second edition to include the nationwide debate on the ratification of the Constitution, hence exploring not only the Founders' initial hopes and aspirations but also their struggle to implement their ideas in constructing the national government.
Now, in a new preface, Bernard Bailyn reconsiders salient features of the book and isolates…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I was always interested in history but didn’t pay much attention to the American Revolution because I thought I knew the story. When I began to read more on the topic, I found it was far more complex and more interesting than I’d realized. Eventually I wanted to go beyond the standard storyline of Lexington-Concord-Bunker Hill-Washington’s road to victory at Yorktown. I started researching the Revolution, looking at original documents, including British materials that historians did not often consult. I found a treasure trove of fascinating stories and perspectives that I hadn’t been aware of. I’ve been researching and writing on the topic ever since.
After having read so much on George Washington and the Continental Army, I found this book on the British army to be a refreshing change as well as highly informative. I was impressed with how the author humanized British soldiers, challenging the stereotype that they were the dregs of British society who only fought because of the brutal discipline imposed on them by their officers.
Spring shows that most British soldiers were patriotic, skilled fighters who fought very well despite a host of hardships. They quickly adapted to American conditions and achieved much success in battle, even though they were usually outnumbered. I was pleased with the author’s perspective on a subject that hasn’t received much attention.
The image is indelible: densely packed lines of slow-moving Redcoats picked off by American sharpshooters. Now Matthew H. Spring reveals how British infantry in the American Revolutionary War really fought.
This groundbreaking book offers a new analysis of the British Army during the ""American rebellion"" at both operational and tactical levels. Presenting fresh insights into the speed of British tactical movements, Spring discloses how the system for training the army prior to 1775 was overhauled and adapted to the peculiar conditions confronting it in North America.
First scrutinizing such operational problems as logistics, manpower shortages, and poor intelligence, Spring then…
I was always interested in history but didn’t pay much attention to the American Revolution because I thought I knew the story. When I began to read more on the topic, I found it was far more complex and more interesting than I’d realized. Eventually I wanted to go beyond the standard storyline of Lexington-Concord-Bunker Hill-Washington’s road to victory at Yorktown. I started researching the Revolution, looking at original documents, including British materials that historians did not often consult. I found a treasure trove of fascinating stories and perspectives that I hadn’t been aware of. I’ve been researching and writing on the topic ever since.
I loved the author’s conversational style, which made me feel as if I was accompanying him on his journey to Revolutionary War sites. I also enjoyed the way he presented events, his witty commentary, and the way he made people of the past come alive.
Another aspect of this book that I thought was great was how the author showed that American victory in the fight for independence wasn’t a sure thing—one different decision here or one minor mistake there could have completely changed the outcome.
Even though I’m very familiar with the people and events of this era, the author’s fresh approach meant that I was never bored when I read this book.
In the ride-along tradition of Sarah Vowell, Tony Horwitz and Bill Bryson, this insightful history revisits the pivotal figures and key turning points of the American Revolutionary War.
Revolutionary Roads takes readers on a time-traveling adventure through the crucial places American independence was won and might have been lost. You'll ride shotgun with Bob Thompson as he puts more than 20,000 miles on his car, not to mention his legs; walks history-shaping battlefields from Georgia to Quebec; and hangs out with passionate lovers of revolutionary history whose vivid storytelling and deep knowledge of their subject enrich his own. Braiding these…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I was always interested in history but didn’t pay much attention to the American Revolution because I thought I knew the story. When I began to read more on the topic, I found it was far more complex and more interesting than I’d realized. Eventually I wanted to go beyond the standard storyline of Lexington-Concord-Bunker Hill-Washington’s road to victory at Yorktown. I started researching the Revolution, looking at original documents, including British materials that historians did not often consult. I found a treasure trove of fascinating stories and perspectives that I hadn’t been aware of. I’ve been researching and writing on the topic ever since.
I found this book to be a much-needed challenge to the myth that the American Revolution was not tarnished by unnecessary violence. I’ve done a lot of research on the Revolution and found that Alexander Hamilton’s claim that it was an orderly process free from the violence that characterized the French Revolution was flat wrong. That’s why I was happy to find this book.
Although I was familiar with some of the events Hoock describes, I still found some of these accounts of cruelty and viciousness painful to read. Nevertheless, I’m happy that the author has made readers aware of this overlooked dimension of the Revolution.
A magisterial new work that rewrites the story of America's founding
The American Revolution is often portrayed as an orderly, restrained rebellion, with brave patriots defending their noble ideals against an oppressive empire. It's a stirring narrative, and one the founders did their best to encourage after the war. But as historian Holger Hoock shows in this deeply researched and elegantly written account of America's founding, the Revolution was not only a high-minded battle over principles, but also a profoundly violent civil war—one that shaped the nation, and the British Empire, in…
I am a writer and editor living in Cork, Ireland. I have a PhD in history from University College Cork and am the author of four books, including two on the African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass. I have been fascinated by Douglass ever since I discovered he travelled through Ireland as a young man, a tour that coincided with the onset of the Great Irish Famine. Douglass will also appear in the book I am currently writing, ‘Freedom’s Exiles’: The Poets, Plotters and Rebels and Who Found Refuge in Victorian Britain.
Written at a time when the racist belief that Black authors could not be trusted to write African-American history was still prevalent even in the upper echelons of academia, this deft 1948 portrait of Douglass launched the career of Benjamin Quarles, the pioneering African-American historian whose body of work (including The Negro in the American Revolution and Lincoln and the Negro) transformed thinking about the role African-Americans played in the formation of the United States.
The son of a black slave and an unknown white father, Frederick Douglass (1817-1895) experienced first-hand the privations and brutality of America's "peculiar institution". Following his second, successful, attempt to escape, he went on to become a leading abolitionist and militant spokesman for African-American rights. A friend to Abraham Lincoln and other presidents, he held three major government offices and became a writer, orator and editor. This biography moves beyond Douglass' three autobiographies to explore his impact on the anti-slavery movement, the Civil War Reconstruction, women's suffrage, and the Republican Party during its first 40 years, and to look at…
I love to write stories about people who lived during pivotal times in history. I’m intrigued by what people were thinking and why they thought that way. People, just like us now, were a product of their time and circumstance. They had strong opinions about the issues of the day, and debated fiercely. It’s these conversations and opinions that help me make the past come alive. Being born and raised in Sweden, and having been a New Yorker for thirty years, I was awarded the 2021 Swedish Women’s Educational Association (SWEA) New York’s Scholarship for the artistic promotion of Swedish culture and history in New York.
Someone Knows My Name, is a poignant portrayal of the horrors of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the inhuman strength and perseverance of a woman who survived it.
As a writer and historian, I love when I find a writer who can put themselves inside the mind of a person from an earlier time. Lawrence Hill truly does, especially the way he describes how alien the new world was for someone who came from a different culture. How every detail is new, and how heart-wrenching it is to be torn from everything you know.
Kidnapped from Africa as a child, Aminata Diallo is enslaved in South Carolina but escapes during the chaos of the Revolutionary War. In Manhattan she becomes a scribe for the British, recording the names of blacks who have served the King and earned their freedom in Nova Scotia. But the hardship and prejudice of the new colony prompt her to follow her heart back to Africa, then on to London, where she bears witness to the injustices of slavery and its toll on her life and a whole people. It is a story that no listener, and no reader, will…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I’ve been studying dehumanization, and its relationship to racism, genocide, slavery, and other atrocities, for more than a decade. I am the author of three books on dehumanization, one of which was awarded the 2012 Anisfield-Wolf award for non-fiction, an award that is reserved for books that make an outstanding contribution to understanding racism and human diversity. My work on dehumanization is widely covered in the national and international media, and I often give presentations at academic and non-academic venues, including one at the 2012 G20 economic summit where I spoke on dehumanization and mass violence.
Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner David Brion Davis was an unequaled scholar of American slavery, and this is one of his most important works. It describes in galvanizing detail the full arc of North American slavery, the emergence of African American culture, the evolution of anti-Black racism, and the abolitionist movement. It is unique in explicitly focusing on White people’s dehumanization of enslaved Africans.
David Brion Davis has long been recognized as the leading authority on slavery in the Western World. His books have won every major history award-including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award-and he has been universally praised for his prodigious research, his brilliant analytical skill, and his rich and powerful prose. Now, in Inhuman Bondage , Davis sums up a lifetime of insight in what Stanley L. Engerman calls "a monumental and magisterial book, the essential work on New World slavery for several decades to come." Davis begins with the dramatic Amistad case, which vividly highlights the international character…
I am a writer and editor living in Cork, Ireland. I have a PhD in history from University College Cork and am the author of four books, including two on the African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass. I have been fascinated by Douglass ever since I discovered he travelled through Ireland as a young man, a tour that coincided with the onset of the Great Irish Famine. Douglass will also appear in the book I am currently writing, ‘Freedom’s Exiles’: The Poets, Plotters and Rebels and Who Found Refuge in Victorian Britain.
An evocative account of the young Douglass and the Maryland world into which he was born. Originally published in 1980 but recently re-released, this is a beautiful book that delivers much more than the title suggests. It is also the book that finally pinpointed the correct month and year in which Douglass was born – February 1818. Those who enslaved people often kept such precious, deeply personal information away from those they enslaved - it was a sign of power, one minor manifestation of the many inquities of slavery.
"No one working on Douglass should leave home without a copy of this book."-from the foreword by David W. Blight, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
Drawing on previously untapped sources, Young Frederick Douglass recreates with fidelity and in convincing detail the background and early life of the man who was to become "the gadfly of America's conscience" and the undisputed spokesman for nineteenth-century black Americans.
With a new foreword by renowned Douglass scholar David W. Blight, Dickson J. Preston's highly regarded biography traces the life and times of Frederick Douglass from his birth on Maryland's…
For a long time, I’ve been intrigued by the different ways that people reason about moral issues. Add to that a mystification about why smart people do unethical things and you have the basis for our book on ethical leadership. I’ve spent the better part of my career evaluating and coaching potential leaders and realized relatively recently that I wanted to work with people who did the “right thing.” Demonstrating the moral courage to speak up in the face of opposition has become increasingly difficult—hence my list of books on moral courage. I hope you enjoy it.
I’ll admit it—there is a theme here. One of the great eras for moral courage was the pre-Civil War United States, when slavery, women’s rights, immigration, and upheaval were constant.
William Lloyd Garrison was one of my heroes of the time. I love a voice that cries out, “I will be heard,” against the norms of society. Advocating for the immediate abolition of slavery, Garrison became the moral, vocal conscience of his times.
Widely acknowledged as the definitive history of the era, Henry Mayer's National Book Award finalist biography of William Lloyd Garrison brings to life one of the most significant American abolitionists. Extensively researched and exquisitely nuanced, the political and social climate of Garrison's times and his achievements appear here in all their prophetic brilliance. Finalist for the National Book Award, winner of the J. Anthony Lucas Book Prize, winner of the Commonwealth Club Silver Prize for Nonfiction.
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
In high school (the best time for doing this) I read the first two volumes of Carl Sandburg’s six-volume biography of Lincoln. A year or so later I made my first trip on an airplane (Saint Louis to Detroit) and an easily recognizable Sandburg was one of the few passengers on our small commercial prop-plane. I was too shy to approach him, but I did sidle up the aisle to see what he was reading or writing (nothing that I could make out). He had boarded the plane alone, but there was a small party meeting him when we landed. I suppose it was Sandburg’s poetic approach to Lincoln that made me alert to the President’s astonishing feel for the English language.
Some people assume that Lincoln at first faintly disapproved of slavery but did not think of abolishing it until the chance was almost forced upon him. Oakes argues, rather, that he hated slavery from the outset and held that the Constitution viewed it as temporary, something deplorable and to be disparaged. Armed with this knowledge, he was able in practice to strike at it whenever opportunity made that possible.
The long and turning path to the abolition of American slavery has often been attributed to the equivocations and inconsistencies of anti-slavery leaders, including Lincoln himself. But James Oakes's brilliant history of Lincoln's anti-slavery strategies reveals a striking consistency and commitment extending over many years. The linchpin of anti-slavery for Lincoln was the Constitution of the United States.
Lincoln adopted the anti-slavery view that the Constitution made freedom the rule in the United States, slavery the exception. Where federal power prevailed, so did freedom. Where state power prevailed, that state determined the status of slavery and the federal government could…
