English Revolution Historical

Ben Franklin is the most lovable of America's founding fathers. His wit, his charm, his inventiveness - even his grandfatherly appearance - are legendary. But this image obscures the scandals that dogged him throughout his life. In The Loyal Son, award-winning historian Daniel Mark Epstein throws the spotlight on one of the more enigmatic aspects of Franklin's biography: his complex and confounding relationship with his illegitimate son, William.

A sudden change in Council leadership puts not only the Crosses but the timeline itself at risk. The new Council no longer wants to protect time, they want to reshape it - starting with the birth of America during the Revolutionary War. However, that isn't the only birth they plan on stopping. For their ultimate plan to work, Charlotte Cross must never be born. Friends old and new join forces to save Elizabeth and Charlotte and keep the world they know from being erased from history.

Thea Hope longs to be an alchemist out of the shadow of her famous mother. The two of them are close to creating the legendary Philosopher’s Stone — whose properties include immortality and can turn any metal into gold — but just when the promise of the Stone’s riches is in their grasp, Thea’s mother destroys the Stone in a sudden fit of violent madness.

From 1775 through 1777, George Washington and Benedict Arnold were America's two most celebrated warriors. Their earlier lives had surprisingly parallel paths. They were strong leaders in combat, they admired and respected each other, and they even shared common enemies. Yet one became our greatest hero and the other our most notorious traitor. Why? Author and military historian Dave Palmer reveals the answer: character.

Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin are known to all; men like Morgan, Greene, and Wayne are less familiar. Yet the dreams of the politicians and theorists became real only because fighting men were willing to take on the grim, risky, brutal work of war. The soldiers of the American Revolution were a diverse lot: merchants and mechanics, farmers and fishermen, paragons and drunkards. Most were ardent amateurs.

In Becoming Madison, Michael Signer takes a fresh look at the life of our fourth president. His focus is on Madison before he turned 36, the years in which he did his most enduring work: battling with Patrick Henry - the most charismatic politician in revolutionary America, whose political philosophy and ruthless tactics eerily foreshadowed those of today's Tea Party - over religious freedom; introducing his framework for a strong central government; and becoming the intellectual godfather of the Constitution.

Eminent historian Richard Brookhiser presents a vivid portrait of James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution” and one of America's greatest statesmen.

Award-winning author Philip Dray delves into the lesser-known side of an American icon in Stealing God's Thunder. Benjamin Franklin, more often viewed as a statesman and founding father than as a man of science, challenged religion, science, and reason with his inventions. But in a time when everything was blamed on sin, it was the lightning rod, Franklin's attempt to control the heavens, that caused the greatest controversy.

Ira Stoll's fascinating biography not only restores this figure to his rightful place in history but portrays him as a man of God whose skepticism of a powerful central government, uncompromising support for freedom of the press, concern about the influence of money on elections, voluble love of liberty, and selfless endurance in a war for freedom has enormous relevance to Americans today.

James Madison is remembered primarily as a systematic political theorist, but this bookish and unassuming man was also a practical politician who strove for balance in an age of revolution. In this biography, Jeff Broadwater focuses on Madison’s role in the battle for religious freedom in Virginia, his contributions to the adoption of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, his place in the evolution of the party system, his relationship with Dolley Madison, his performance as a wartime commander-in-chief, and his views on slavery.

In Those Turbulent Sons of Freedom, Christopher S. Wren overturns the myth of Ethan Allen as a legendary hero of the American Revolution and a patriotic son of Vermont and offers a different portrait of Allen and his Green Mountain Boys. Based on original archival research, this is a groundbreaking account of an important and little-known front of the Revolutionary War, of George Washington (and his good sense), and of a major American myth.

From the author of The Widow’s War and Bound comes a compelling new novel about a young woman’s struggle to decide where her loyalties lie - with family or with forbidden love; with royalist tradition or upstart independence - on the eve of the Revolutionary War.

It is the dawn of the French Revolution when masses of hungry peasants burn the chateaux of aristocrats throughout France. After the death of his estranged family, an 18-year-old nobleman, the Marquis Marcel de la Croix, is forced to raise the royalist banner. The wreck of his family fortress becomes a bastion for newly disenfranchised aristocrats, and Marcel and his fiery associate, Pierre Lafont, lead a rebel group called the League of the Star. After a bitter falling out with Lafont, Marcel escapes to England incognito, hoping to put the past behind him.

In 1777, Captain Isaac Pearson joined the British Army when he believed the Colonial Rebellion would be dispatched with effortless haste. Taking a few American lives was an agreeable price for the pampered aristocrat who believed his actions in the conflict would afford him honor and glory. Yet, the path Captain Pearson rode was neither honorable or glorious and the price he would pay was beyond his imaginable fortunes. Phantom Regiments, ruthless shadow units, British Redcoats, American militia, and crazed men of the occult race to acquire a mysterious Iroquoian artifact which can defeat time.

Someone is trying to kill Lila Hilliard. During the Christmas holidays she returns from running errands to find her family home in flames, her father and brother trapped inside. Later, she is attacked by a mysterious man on a motorcycle... and the threats don't end there. As Lila desperately tries to piece together who is after her and why, she uncovers information about her father's past in Chicago during the volatile days of the late 1960s... information he never shared with her, but now threatens to destroy her.

This short novel follows the fate of Sissy Jupe, a warm-hearted circus child, and the family that adopts her. Deserted by her ailing father, Sissy is taken into the cold household of the Gradgrind family, which operates a school. The "eminently practical" Thomas Gradgrind believes only in facts and figures and has raised his children accordingly, thoroughly suppressing the imaginative side of their nature, and the consequences are devastating.

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....

Even compared to his fellow founders, George Washington stands tall. Our first president has long been considered a stoic hero, holding himself above the rough-and-tumble politics of his day. Now John Ferling peers behind that image, carefully burnished by Washington himself, to show us a leader who was not only not above politics but a canny infighter---a master of persuasion, manipulation, and deniability.

It’s the winter of 1776, a year that brings with it a fiery new spirit of colonial independence. Tensions simmering over a decade have finally come to a boil, and the rebel government in Philadelphia, determined to cast off the chains of British tyranny, has authorized the creation of the United States Navy—a brazen act of American aggression against the greatest maritime power in the world.

It's 1780, days after Benedict Arnold flees to the British when his treasonous plot to surrender the American fort at West Point is discovered and Gideon's Revolution is about to begin. General George Washington orders a secret mission for two Continental Army soldiers to go behind enemy lines, abduct Arnold, and return him to his countrymen to be tried and hanged.