English Revolution Historical

John Paul Jones is more than a great sea story. Jones is a character for the ages. John Adams called him the "most ambitious and intriguing officer in the American Navy." The renewed interest in the Founding Fathers reminds us of the great men who made this country, but John Paul Jones teaches us that it took fighters as well as thinkers, men driven by dreams of personal glory as well as high-minded principle to break free of the past and start a new world. Jones' spirit was classically American.

Meredith Mason Brown traces Daniel Boone's life from his Pennsylvania childhood to his experiences in the militia and his rise as an unexcelled woodsman, explorer, and backcountry leader. In the process, we meet the authentic Boone: he didn't wear coonskin caps; he read and wrote better than many frontiersmen; he was not the first to settle Kentucky; he took no pleasure in killing Indians. At once a loner and a leader, a Quaker who became a skilled frontier fighter, Boone is a study in contradictions.

Central to America's idea of itself is the character of Benjamin Franklin. We all know him, or think we do: In recent works and in our inherited conventional wisdom, he remains fixed in place as a genial polymath and self-improver who was so very American that he is known by us all as the first American.

Pierre Grimard’s dream was to leave his boyhood home in France and voyage to America. He longed to begin a new life, business, and family in the French settlements of the faraway frontier in the Illinois country. Ten years later it seemed that Pierre had fulfilled every one of his dreams. He had a beautiful, devoted wife, a home full of children, and a thriving business in the French trading outpost at Vincennes on the Wabash River.

In the midst of a struggle for survival in colonial Bermuda, Hal is thrust into a world of revolution and intrigue when Molly’s father enlists his help in a daring plot to aid the mainland rebels. Though more concerned with his next meal than distant conflicts, Hal finds himself caught between his personal desires and a cause he can’t ignore.

In the spring of 1914, Nadia Shulkina, the daughter of Russian aristocrats, looks toward a bright future. She has no premonitions of war, let alone the revolution that is about to destroy her comfortable world. Her once-noble family is stripped of every possession, and more terrible losses soon follow. To save what's left of her family and future, Nadia marries a zealous Bolshevik in an act of calculated reinvention.

A bustling port city, Charleston, South Carolina, is the crossroads of the American Revolution, where supplies and weapons for the rebel army must be unloaded and smuggled north. From the window of the dressmaker's shop where she works, lovely Celia Garth, recently engaged to the heir to a magnificent plantation, watches all of this thrilling activity. When the unthinkable occurs and the British capture and occupy Charleston, bringing fiery retribution to the surrounding countryside, Celia sees her world destroyed.

On the eve of the Civil War, one soldier embodied the legacy of George Washington and the hopes of a divided land. Both North and South knew Robert E. Lee as the son of Washington's most famous eulogist and the son-in-law of Washington's adopted child. Each side sought his services for high command. Lee could choose only one. The decision he made would change history.

Historian and biographer James Srodes tells Benjamin Franklin's incredible life story, making full use of the previously neglected Franklin papers to provide the most riveting account yet of the journalist, scientist, polilician, and unlikely adventurer. From London, Paris, Philadelphia to his numerous romantic liaisons, Franklin's life becomes a panorama of dramatic history.

Havana, Cuba, 1947. Young Patricio flees impoverished Spain and steps into the sultry island paradise of Havana with only the clothes on his back and half-baked dreams of a better life. Blessed with good looks and natural charm, he lands a job as a runner at El Encanto - one of the most luxurious department stores in the world. Famous for its exquisite offerings from French haute couture to Arabian silks, El Encanto indulges the senses in opulent extravagance. It caters to visiting Hollywood stars, rising politicos, and prerevolutionary Cuba’s wealthiest power players.

It's the 1790s, and the circus has arrived in Durham, Maine. Before weaver Will Rees is able to take in its spectacle, he spots Magistrate Hanson - the man he blames for his family's having to flee Dugard two years earlier. On his journey home he encounters Shaker brothers searching for a girl from their Zion community. Despite women not being allowed inside the circus, Leah had snuck out to visit it. They quickly come across her lifeless body beaten and thrown into a farmer's field on the road leading to the circus.

Francis Marion was probably the most romantic figure to emerge from the American Revolutionary War. Of Huguenot ancestry, Marion was descended from a French family fleeing the religious persecutions of Louis XIV. Listen to this great history as you learn how Marion used guerrilla tactics to defeat one British force after another. It is a thrilling tale of patriotism, determination, and sacrifice.

A revealing biography of Dr. Benjamin Rush - fiery signer of the Declaration of Independence, prominent physician, ardent politician, zealous social reformer, passionate humanitarian, and dedicated educator. Known primarily as America's most influential and leading physician, Rush was also among the first to call for the abolition of slavery, equal rights for women, free education and health care for the poor, slum clearance, citywide sanitation facilities, an end to child labor, and universal public education, among other causes.

From New York Times best-selling author and Founding Fathers' biographer Harlow Giles Unger comes the astonishing biography of the man whose pen set America ablaze, inspiring its revolution, and whose ideas about reason and religion continue to try men's souls.

They drowned Victoire's mother, claiming she was a witch. Then, her father died beneath the wheels of a nobleman's carriage. Forced to leave her village, Victoire finds work in Paris. But domestic employment comes at a high price, and the orphaned girl suffers gruesome abuse at the hands of a diabolical aristocracy. Accused of a heinous crime, they imprison her in the depraved lunatic asylum, La Salpêtriere. With the help of ruthless seductress, Jeanne de Valois, Victoire must find the strength to join the revolutionary force storming the Bastille.

The American Colonies, 1765. As the Stamp Act dissent marks the first organized resistance to English rule, someone is kidnapping and killing members of the Iroquois Nation. Asked by an elder to investigate, Scottish exile Duncan McCallum soon uncovers a network of secret runners supporting the nascent “committees of correspondence", engaged in the political dissent fomenting across colonial borders. But as Duncan follows the trail further, it leads to his capture.

In 1776, upon the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Founding Fathers concluded America’s most consequential document with a curious note, pledging “our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor”. Lives and honor did indeed hang in the balance, yet just what were their fortunes? How much did the Founders stand to gain or lose through independence? In this landmark account, historian Willard Sterne Randall investigates the private financial affairs of the Founders, illuminating like never before how and why the Revolution came about.

James Fichter reveals that despite the so-called Boston Tea Party in 1773, two other large shipments of tea from the East India Company survived and were ultimately drunk in North America. The survival of these shipments shaped the politics of the years ahead and hint at the enduring potency of consumerism in revolutionary politics. Tea protests were widespread in 1774, but, Fichter argues, so were tea advertisements and tea sales. Such protests were noisy and sometimes misleading performances, not clear signs that tea consumption was unpopular.

In Washington's Circle, David and Jeanne Heidler introduce not just the president but the group of extraordinary men who advised him. The familiar names are here, like the often irked and occasionally irksome John Adams, the scheming Alexander Hamilton, and the prodigiously talented James "Jemmy" Madison, but so are the lesser known Edmund Randolph, John Jay, and Gouverneur Morris. Washington's choices of whom to listen to, for better and sometimes worse, were as consequential as the advice his cabinet gave.

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.