Colonial Life

When it comes to the Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Alexander Hamilton are generally considered the great minds of early America. George Washington, instead, is toasted with accolades regarding his solid common sense and strength in battle. Indeed, John Adams once snobbishly dismissed him as "too illiterate, unlearned, unread for his station and reputation." Yet Adams, as well as the majority of the men who knew Washington in his life, were unaware of his singular devotion to self-improvement.

Anne Bradstreet was born into an unusual family that, in the early years of the 17th century, believed in educating daughters as well as sons. She then moved to the American wilderness as a young bride and proceeded to produce children and poetry at nearly equal speed in the years that followed. She was the first published poet from the North American colonies, beating out the men who would follow her by a number of years. Anne Bradstreet: The Life and Legacy of the Famous Puritan Poet in the American Colonies examines Bradstreet’s influential work.

Alexander Hamilton did not rise to public prominence as an austere New Englander or a gentlemanly Virginian. He was not born in the colonies at all. He was born in the West Indies, the son of a woman of French descent who had left her husband for another man. As an illegitimate child, Hamilton could not be educated in the local church school, so businessmen, impressed by his remarkable intelligence, sent him to America for his schooling.

The long-awaited biography of the frontier Founding Father whose heroic actions and neglected writings inspired an entire generation, from Paine to Madison. On May 10, 1775, in the storm-tossed hours after midnight, Ethan Allen, the Revolutionary firebrand, was poised for attack. With only two boatloads of his scraggly band of Vermont volunteers having made it across the wind-whipped waters of Lake Champlain, he was waiting for the rest of his Green Mountain boys to arrive....

Through a granddaughter’s narrative, peek into the phenomenal triumphs that led to a “Gratitude Celebration”, a Thanksgiving tradition. The story centers on William Brewster, ancestor to many, father of the pilgrims and the nation, who perseveres through dividing issues of his era. Living in an oppressive state that deems him an outlaw, he must hide before indenturing himself to servitude. Knowing the suffering endured by the tiny fraction who lived to tell of the horrific sacrifices it took to survive in the New World, he shepherded his family onto the Mayflower.

Benjamin Franklin: Cultural Protestant follows Franklin's remarkable career through the lens of the trends and innovations that the Protestant Reformation started (both directly and indirectly) almost two centuries earlier. His work as a printer, civic reformer, institution builder, scientist, inventor, writer, self-help dispenser, politician, and statesmen was deeply rooted in the culture and outlook that Protestantism nurtured.