Early America

National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward takes James Baldwin's 1963 examination of race in America, The Fire Next Time, as a jumping-off point for this groundbreaking collection of essays and poems about race from the most important voices of her generation and our time.

The bitter and public court battle waged between Nina and James Walker of Newport, Rhode Island, from 1909 to 1916 created a sensation throughout the nation with lurid accounts of - and gossip about - their marital troubles. The ordeal of this high-society couple, who wed as much for status as for love, is one of the prime examples of the growing trend of women seeking divorce during the early 20th century.

The powers-that-be in auto racing in the 1920s, namely the American Automobile Association's Contest Board, prohibited everyone who wasn't a White male from the sport. Dewey Gaston, a Black man who went by the name Rajo Jack, broke into the epicenter of racing in California, refusing to let the pervasive racism of his day stop him from competing against entire fields of White drivers. In The Brown Bullet, Bill Poehler uncovers the life of a long-forgotten trailblazer and the great lengths he took to even get on the track.

In The Dictionary Wars, Peter Martin recounts the patriotic fervor in the early American republic to produce a definitive national dictionary that would rival Samuel Johnson's 1755 Dictionary of the English Language. But what began as a cultural war of independence from Britain devolved into a battle among lexicographers, authors, scholars, and publishers, all vying for dictionary supremacy and shattering forever the dream of a unified American language.

On November 26, 1791, George Washington convened his department secretaries - Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Henry Knox, and Edmund Randolph - for the first cabinet meeting. Why did he wait two and a half years into his presidency to call his cabinet? Because the US Constitution did not create or provide for such a body. Washington was on his own.

In a tragic tale of heroism and perservereance, follow the Sager orphans as they take the Oregon Trail in the hopes of finding a new life. When the seven children's parents perish on the journey, how will they survive? This account remains one of the most authentic firsthand accounts of the journeys and hardships of the pioneers in the early West.

This particular volume (Volume One) begins with the period in the early 1600s when two very different English societies were established in the New World, one in Virginia and one in New England. The Virginia society simply re-created the rigidly class-based feudal society of the times. The New England society was a most unusual democracy of social equals, covenanted to live under God's—not man's—personal rule. These two American social types would find themselves in rather constant struggle....

In the 1920s, the burgeoning movie industry was starting to come into its own, and virtually no actor was as famous - or infamous - as John Barrymore. Like many other film stars his age, Barrymore’s career had started in other forms of entertainment, in his case theater. By the time movies were becoming popular, Barrymore was one of the world’s foremost Shakespearean actors.

The recent Hollywood film Hidden Figures presents a portrait of how African American women shaped the US effort in aerospace during the height of Jim Crow. In Storming the Heavens, Gerald Horne presents the necessary back story to this account and goes further to detail the earlier struggle of African Americans to gain the right to fly.

In a small village in Italy at the turn of the 20th century, Jane chafes at stifling routine and tradition. So when an opportunity presents itself to immigrate to America, her hunger for escape compels her to leave everything behind. Far away, in Henry Ford's factories in Michigan, a new kind of life is taking shape, and it offers gleaming promise for Jane and her young husband.

¡Descubra la fascinante historia de las primeras guerras estadounidenses en África! A través de este libro conocerá las guerras berberiscas de 1801 a 1805 y de 1815, las primeras guerras estadounidenses fuera de Norteamérica. Los enemigos eran los piratas berberiscos musulmanes de la costa norteafricana. Descubra cómo los marineros estadounidenses fueron capturados y convertidos en esclavos en Marruecos, Argel, Túnez y Trípoli. ¿Por qué ocurrió esto?

History of the Early Settlement and Indian Wars of Western Virginia is an account of the various expeditions that took place in the region up to 1795. It also includes biographical sketches of Col. Ebenezer Zane, Major Samuel M'Collach, and other pioneers.

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.

With the same ability to make personalities and events come alive that characterizes his classic Skid Road, Murray Morgan here tells the colorful story of Tacoma, "the City of Destiny," and southern Puget Sound, where many major events of Washington's history took place. Drawing upon original journals and reports, Morgan builds Puget's Sound around individuals, interweaving portraits of well-known historical figures with a raucous parade of saloonkeepers, politicians, union organizers, schemers, and swindlers.

An Independent Empire shows how foreign policy and diplomacy constitute a truly national story, necessary for understanding the history of the United States. In this lively and well-written book, episodes in American history - such as the writing and ratification of the Constitution, Henry Clay's advocacy of an American System, Pinckney's Treaty with Spain, and the visionary but absurd Congress of Panama - are recast as elemental aspects of United States foreign and security policy.

The settlement of North America was the beginning of a new era in human history. The oppressive laws, habits, and customs of the Old World no longer held such power over those who had made the treacherous journey across the Atlantic. No reigning monarch or dictatorial power ever stepped onto the ground of North America. Yet, despite this, the men and women of the 13 colonies of North America were still not free until they threw off the shackles of England's government and asserted their own rights.

The American Revolution conjures a series of iconographic images of defiant Patriots fighting against British Redcoats for freedom and democracy, while a unified citizenry rallies behind them and the American cause. But the lived experience of the Revolution was a more complex matter, filled with uncertainty, fear, and discord. In The American Revolution Reborn, editors Patrick Spero and Michael Zuckerman compile essays from a new generation of multidisciplinary scholars that render the American Revolution as a time of intense ambiguity and frightening contingency.

In the spring of 1621, Plymouth Colony sent Stephen Hopkins to make the first visit to Wampanoag sachem Massasoit to present a red horsemans coat as a gift and sign of friendship. For most ordinary Englishmen, venturing off into the depths of unexplored America would have been a once in a lifetime adventure - but not for Stephen.

Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, and James Madison, "Father of the Constitution," were two of the most important Founders of the United States as well as the closest of political allies. Yet historians have often seen a tension between the idealistic rhetoric of the Declaration and the more pedestrian language of the Constitution. Moreover, to some, the adoption of the Constitution represented a repudiation of the democratic values of the Revolution.

John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle, two leading experts on the nation’s roadside landscape, examine the crucial role that small- to mid-sized city hotels played in American life during the early decades of the 20th century, a time when the automobile was fast becoming the primary mode of transportation. Before the advent of the interstate system, such hotels served as commercial and social anchors of developing towns across the country. America’s Main Street Hotels provides a thorough survey of the impact these hotels had on their communities and cultures.