In this groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology, Charles C. Mann radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492.
Contrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the land around them.
The astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running water and immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city. Mexican cultures created corn in a specialized breeding process that it has been called mans first feat of genetic engineering. Indeed, Indians were not living lightly on the land but were landscaping and manipulating their world in ways that we are only now beginning to understand.
Thomas Kidd, a widely respected scholar of colonial history, deftly offers both depth and breadth in this accessible, introductory text on the American Colonial era. Interweaving primary documents and new scholarship with a vivid narrative reconstructing the lives of European colonists, Africans, and Native Americans and their encounters in colonial North America, Kidd offers fresh perspectives on these events and the period as a whole. This compelling volume is organized around themes of religion and conflict, and distinguished by its incorporation of an expanded geographic frame.
In the beginning, North America was Indian country. But only in the beginning. After the opening act of the great national drama, Native Americans yielded to the westward rush of European settlers. Or so the story usually goes. Yet, for three centuries after Columbus, Native people controlled most of eastern North America and profoundly shaped its destiny. In Facing East from Indian Country, Daniel K. Richter keeps Native people center-stage throughout the story of the origins of the United States.
Viewed from Indian country, the sixteenth century was an era in which Native people discovered Europeans and struggled to make sense of a new world. Well into the seventeenth century, the most profound challenges to Indian life came less from the arrival of a relative handful of European colonists than from the biological, economic, and environmental forces the newcomers unleashed.
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Cokie Roberts comes New York Times bestseller Founding Mothers, an intimate and illuminating look at the fervently patriotic and passionate women whose tireless pursuits on behalf of their families?and their country?proved just as crucial to the forging of a new nation as the rebellion that established it. While much has been written about the men who signed the Declaration of Independence, battled the British, and framed the Constitution, the wives, mothers, sisters and daughters they left behind have been little noticed by history.
#1 New York Times bestselling author Cokie Roberts brings us women who fought the Revolution as valiantly as the men, often defending their very doorsteps. Drawing upon personal correspondence, private journals, and even favoured recipes, Roberts reveals the often surprising stories of these fascinating women, bringing to life the everyday trials and extraordinary triumphs of individuals like Abigail Adams, Mercy Otis Warren, Deborah Read Franklin, Eliza Pinckney, Catherine Littlefield Green, Esther DeBerdt Reed and Martha Washington?proving that without our exemplary women, the new country might have never survived.
An acclaimed historian captures the true nature of imperialism in early America, demonstrating how the frontier shaped the nation. We are divided over the history of the United States, and one of the central dividing lines is the frontier. Was it a site of heroism? Or was it where the full force of an all-powerful empire was brought to bear on Native peoples?
In this startingly original work, historian Robert Parkinson presents a new account of ever-shifting encounters between white colonists and Native Americans. Drawing skillfully on Joseph Conrad's famous novella, Heart of Darkness, he demonstrates that imperialism in North America was neither heroic nor a perfectly planned conquest. It was, rather, as bewildering, violent, and haphazard as the European colonization of Africa, which Conrad knew firsthand and fictionalized in his masterwork.
Nathaniel Philbrick became an internationally renowned author with his National Book Award winning In the Heart of the Sea hailed as spellbinding by Time magazine In Mayflower Philbrick casts his spell once again giving us a fresh and extraordinarily vivid account of our most sacred national myth the voyage of the Mayflower and the settlement of Plymouth Colony From the Mayflowers arduous Atlantic crossing to the eruption of King Philips War between colonists and natives decades later Philbrick reveals in this electrifying history of the Pilgrims a fifty-five-year epic at once tragic and heroic that still resonates with us today
A compelling and original recovery of Native American resistance and adaptation to colonial America With rigorous original scholarship and creative narration, Lisa Brooks recovers a complex picture of war, captivity, and Native resistance during the "First Indian War" (later named King Philip's War) by relaying the stories of Weetamoo, a female Wampanoag leader, and James Printer, a Nipmuc scholar, whose stories converge in the captivity of Mary Rowlandson.
Through both a narrow focus on Weetamoo, Printer, and their network of relations, and a far broader scope that includes vast Indigenous geographies, Brooks leads us to a new understanding of the history of colonial New England and of American origins. Brooks's pathbreaking scholarship is grounded not just in extensive archival research but also in the land and communities of Native New England, reading the actions of actors during the seventeenth century alongside an analysis of the landscape and interpretations informed by tribal history.
Four centuries ago, and fourteen years before the Mayflower, a group of men?led by a one-armed ex-pirate, an epileptic aristocrat, a reprobate cleric and a government spy?left London aboard a fleet of three ships to start a new life in America. They arrived in Virginia in the spring of 1607 and set about trying to create a settlement on a tiny island in the James River.
Despite their shortcomings, and against the odds, they built Jamestown, a ramshackle outpost that laid the foundations of the British Empire and the United States of America. Drawing on new discoveries, neglected sources and manuscript collections scattered across the world, Savage Kingdom challenges the textbook image of Jamestown as a mere money-making venture.
In one of the most triumphant high sea stories ever told, Kieran Doherty brings to life?the true story of the ship that rescued the Jamestown settlement in 1610 and ensured England's place in the New World.?When the Sea Venture left England in 1609, it was flagship in a fleet of nine bound for Jamestown with roughly 600 settlers and badly needed supplies aboard. But after four weeks at sea, as the voyage neared its end, a hurricane?devastated the fleet, leaving the Sea Venture shipwrecked on the island of Bermuda.
It took Sea Venture's passengers nearly a year and half to reach their destination. Awaiting them was not a thriving colony, but instead the remaining fifty colonists--beleaguered, desperate and hungry. But, the question remains, would the English have lost their place in the New World if the ship never arrived? A story of strife and triumph, but above all, endurance,?Sea Venture?begins and ends in hope and remains one of the greatest "What Ifs?" in history.
An insightful biography of Mary Ball Washington, the mother of our nation's fatherThe Widow Washington is the first life of Mary Ball Washington, George Washington's mother, based on archival sources. Her son's biographers have, for the most part, painted her as self-centered and crude, a trial and an obstacle to her son. But the records tell a very different story. Mary Ball, the daughter of a wealthy planter and a formerly indentured servant, was orphaned very young and grew up in an atmosphere of work, frugality, and piety. She married the older planter Augustine Washington and had five children with him before his death eleven years later.
As a widow deprived of most of her late husband's properties, Mary struggled to raise her children and secure them places among Virginia's elite. In her later years, she had a contested relationship with her wealthy son and struggled with fears of poverty and helplessness. Yet Mary Ball Washington had a stronger impact on George than mothers like her usually had on their sons, and she taught him many of the moral and religious principles by which he lived. The two were strikingly similar, though the commanding demeanor, persistence, athleticism, penny-pinching, and irascibility that they shared have served the memory of the country's father immeasurably better than that of his mother.
Martha Saxton's The Widow Washington is a necessary and deeply insightful corrective, telling the story of Mary's long, arduous life on its own terms, and not as her son's satellite.
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