A rich narrative portrait of post-revolutionary America and the men who shaped its political future

Though the American Revolution is widely recognized as our nation's founding story, the years immediately following the war--when our government was a disaster and the country was in a terrible crisis--were in fact the most crucial in establishing the country's independence. The group of men who traveled to Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 had no idea what kind of history their meeting would make. But all their ideas, arguments, and compromises--from the creation...
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As the British refocused their war on the southern colonies in the hopes of triggering an outbreak of loyalism that would sweep the rebels aside, Lord Cornwallis found himself thinly spread and unable to guard the fifteen thousand square miles he was responsible for.

So Cornwallis went on the offensive, invading North Carolina and using Camden as a launch pad. This new history reveals how Cornwallis was able to use his aggressive strategy to great effect and how the overconfidence of the American forces under Horatio Gates was to result in a shocking defeat on the night of August 15...
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But a cadre of activists--led by the mysterious Samuel Adams of Massachusetts and assisted by his nervous cousin John--plotted to bring about American i...
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His story is one that should be known by every American -- after all, he drafted the Constitution, and his hand lies behind many of its most important phrases. Yet he has been lost in the shad...
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George C. Daughan's magnificently detailed account of the battle of Lexington and Concord challenges the prevailing narrative of the American War of Independence. It was, Daughan argues, based as much on economic concerns as political ones. When Massachusetts militiamen turned out in overwhelming numbers to fight the British, they believed they were fighting for their farms and livelihoods, as well as for liberty. In the eyes of many American colonists, Britain's repressive measures were not simply an effort to reestablish political control of the colonies, but also a means to reduce the pr...
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A distinctive portrait of the crescendo moment in American history from the Pulitzer-winning American historian, Joseph Ellis.

The summer months of 1776 witnessed the most consequential events in the story of our country's founding. While the thirteen colonies came together and agreed to secede from the British Empire, the British were dispatching the largest armada ever to cross the Atlantic to crush the rebellion in the cradle. The Continental Congress and the Continental Army were forced to make decisions on the run, improvising as history congealed around them. In a brilliant and s...
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But the day that started so well for the king's troops would end in catastrophe: seventy-three British soldiers dead, two hundred wounded, and the survivors chased back into Boston by the angry colonists. Drawing on diaries, letters, official documents, and memoirs, William H. Hallahan vividly captures the drama of those tense twenty-four hours an...
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In The Quartet, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph Ellis tells the unexpected story of America's second great founding and of the men most responsible--Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, John Jay, and James Madison: why the thirteen colonies, having just fought off the imposition of a distant centralized governing power, would decide to subordinate themselves anew. These men, with the help of Robert Morris and Gouverneur Morris, shaped the contours of American history by diagnosing the systemic dysfunctions created by the Articles of Confederation, manipulating the political...
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The American Revolution involved a naval war of immense scope and variety, including no fewer than twenty-two navies fighting on five oceans--to say nothing of rivers and lakes. In no other war were so many large-scale fleet battles fought, one of which was the most strategically significant naval battle in all of British, French, and American history. Simultaneous naval campaigns were fought in the English Channel, the North and Mid-Atlantic, the Mediterranean, off South Africa, in the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, the Pacific, the North Sea and, of course, off the eastern seaboard of Ameri...
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In the "highly recommended" (Library Journal) Those Turbulent Sons of Freedom, 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. They were ruffians who joined the rush for cheap land on the...
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" Built at the dawn of the American Revolution, the one-man wooden submersible, its creation, and its attacks on the Royal Navy in New York harbor is a story still surrounded in mystery. In this much anticipated book, Roy Manstan and Frederic Frese bring the story of Bushnell s revolutionary underwater machine to life. " - JERRY ROBERTS, Director, Connecticut River Museum

At the onset of the American Revolution, the British expected to quell the rebellion quickly with a show of overwhelming force. In an experiment in asymmetric warfare, David Bushnell created the first submarine vessel de...
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" Built at the dawn of the American Revolution, the one-man wooden submersible, its creation, and its attacks on the Royal Navy in New York harbor is a story still surrounded in mystery. In this much anticipated book, Roy Manstan and Frederic Frese bring the story of Bushnell s revolutionary underwater machine to life. " - JERRY ROBERTS, Director, Connecticut River Museum

At the onset of the American Revolution, the British expected to quell the rebellion quickly with a show of overwhelming force. In an experiment in asymmetric warfare, David Bushnell created the first submarine vessel de...
View More...