Early America

The Protestant conviction that believers would rise again, in bodily form, after death, shaped their attitudes towards personal and religious identity, community, empire, progress, race, and the environment. In To Walk the Earth Again, Christopher Trigg explores the political dimension of Anglo-American Protestant writing about the future resurrection of the dead, examining texts written between the seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries.

From the Stono Rebellion in 1739 to the Haitian Revolution of 1791 to Nat Turner's Rebellion in 1831, slave insurrections have been understood as emblematic rejections of enslavement, the most powerful and, perhaps, the only way for slaves to successfully challenge the brutal system they endured. In The World That Fear Made, Jason T. Sharples orients the mirror to those in power who were preoccupied with their exposure to insurrection.

The early years of English settlement in America were characterized by catastrophe: starvation, disease, extreme violence, and ruinous ignorance. Seasons of Misery offers a provocative reexamination of the British colonies' chaotic and profoundly unstable beginnings, placing crisis at the center of the story. At the outposts of a fledgling empire and disconnected from the social order of their home society, English settlers were both physically and psychologically estranged from their European identities.

In a work that fundamentally recasts the history of colonial America, Wendy Warren shows how the institution of slavery was inexorably linked with the first century of English colonization of New England. While most histories of slavery in early America confine themselves to the Southern colonies and the Caribbean, New England Bound forcefully widens the historical aperture to include the entirety of English North America.

In 1779, Shawnees from Chillicothe, a community in the Ohio country, told the British, "We have always been the frontier." Their statement challenges an oft-held belief that American Indians derive their unique identities from longstanding ties to native lands. By tracking Shawnee people and migrations from 1400 to 1754, Stephen Warren illustrates how Shawnees made a life for themselves at the crossroads of empires and competing tribes, embracing mobility and often moving willingly toward violent borderlands.

Although many Americans consider the establishment of the colonies as the birth of this country, in fact early America existed long before the arrival of the Europeans. From coast to coast, Native Americans had created enduring cultures, and the subsequent European invasion remade much of the land and society. In New Worlds for All, Colin G. Calloway explores the unique and vibrant new cultures that Indians and Europeans forged together in early America.

What would you find in a time capsule of the Jamestown Colony? Perhaps a portrait of John Smith, glass beads, or skeletal remains? Listeners examine artifacts like these as they explore the history of the first permanent English settlement in North America in this Time Capsule History book.

Joanah's journey of love and self-discovery is beautifully portrayed in this historical romance, capturing the complexities of relationships and the power of following one's heart. Listeners will be drawn into the emotional turmoil and moral dilemmas faced by Joanah as she navigate her feelings for Thomas and Andrew, ultimately learning valuable lessons about love, loyalty, and personal growth.

American Indians remain familiar as icons, yet poorly understood as historical agents. In this ambitious book that ranges across Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, and eastern California (a region known as the Great Basin), Ned Blackhawk places Native peoples squarely at the center of a dynamic and complex story as he chronicles two centuries of Indian and imperial history that profoundly shaped the American West.

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.

Debates over paper money and banking are older than the United States of America itself. Eighteenth and 19th century Americans were deeply ambivalent about paper money and central banks, and political fights over these issues were among the bitterest in American history. In fact, controversies over the country’s central bank birthed both the first (1792-1824) and second (1828-1852) party systems. Frequently, policymakers crafted responses to the crisis at hand, and as a result, they implemented policies that were inadequate to the challenges the country faced in the future.

No sport has been more associated with America’s sense of itself, with its identity, than baseball. No sport has been so inextricably bound with America’s traditions—with its notions of democracy and fair play—than baseball. And no professional sport in America has been as dramatically connected to social change as Major League Baseball when it became racially integrated the moment Jackie Robinson took the field with the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947.

In his 2005 book, The Long Emergency, James Howard Kunstler described the global predicaments that would pitch the USA into political and economic turmoil in the 21st century - the end of affordable oil, climate irregularities, and flagging economic growth, to name a few. Now, he returns with a book that takes an up-close-and-personal approach to how real people are living now - surviving The Long Emergency as it happens.

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.

Special delivery: Danger! When Stanley's mother needs the secret ingredient for a special recipe, Stanley mails himself to Mexico to track down its mysterious maker. But when a band of spies threatens to steal the secret, Stanley's simple trip becomes a race against an opponent that even a flat boy like himself can't slip past!!

Well past his prime, Robert Fallon now fights the battles of politics to save the country he cherishes from civil war. It is 1832, and the high tariffs that protect northern industry are crippling the South. President Andrew Jackson thinks force is the answer to the South's threats of secession. Robert must pay a final-hour visit to Washington, as an appeal to Jackson and Congress to pass a compromise tariff before the country is torn apart.

In 1765, Michael Fallon, an Irishman on the run from brutal English overlords, makes his way to Charleston, South Carolina, as an indentured servant. Bound over to Thomas Carver, a successful merchant, he quickly shows a knack for trade—and a disturbing attraction to Carver's beautiful, sensual daughter, Elizabeth. With luck and intelligence—and not without bloodshed—he rises into the rice-planting aristocracy of the Carolina Lowcountry, where a frontier spirit pulses beneath the superficial trappings of an agrarian society that is heading rapidly toward revolution.

In the 18th century, Bridgetown, Barbados, was heavily populated by both enslaved and free women. Marisa J. Fuentes creates a portrait of urban Caribbean slavery in this colonial town from the perspective of these women whose stories appear only briefly in historical records. Combining fragmentary sources with interdisciplinary methodologies that include black feminist theory and critical studies of history and slavery, Dispossessed Lives demonstrates how the construction of the archive marked enslaved women's bodies, in life and in death.

John Jacob Astor was the best-known and most important American businessman for more than a half-century. His career encompassed the country's formative economic years from the precarious days following the American Revolution to the emergence of an urban-centered manufacturing economy in the late 1840s.

Throughout his presidency at the beginning of the 19th century, Thomas Jefferson had worried about the future of the western US, seeing that settlements in the Ohio Valley and lower South relied upon the Mississippi River. France’s controls over the region, in his estimation, put the US at a severe disadvantage.