Showing titles in Colonial Period

In many ways, the captivity narrative is a genre introducing us to a conflict between cultures and beliefs as well as our most infamous yet popular manner of communication: violence. Mary Rowlandson was one of the colonials taken captive by the Native Americans during the attack on Lancaster. After her release, she created this now archetypical account of her ordeal constructed around biblical typology.

As Great Britain and France eyed the Illinois country and the Tennessee, Ohio, and Wabash River valleys for their respective empires, the Overhill Cherokees were coalescing and maintaining a conspicuous presence throughout the territory. Contrary to the traditional narrative of westward expansion, the Europeans were not the drivers behind the ensuing contest over the Tennessee corridor. The Overhills traded, negotiated, and fought with other Indigenous peoples along this corridor, in the process setting parameters for European expansion.

The purpose of this book is to provide background information for The Leatherstocking Series of novels written by James Fenimore Cooper. The work includes biographical information about the author, his place of residence and his social position. It also provides information concerning the history and geography of Central New York during the period.

On the eve of a major treaty conference between Iroquois leaders and European colonists in the distant summer of 1722, two White fur traders attacked an Indigenous hunter and left him for dead near Conestoga, Pennsylvania. This act of brutality set into motion a remarkable series of criminal investigations and cross-cultural negotiations that challenged the definition of justice in early America. Leading historian Nicole Eustace reconstructs the crime and its aftermath, bringing us into the overlapping worlds of white colonists and Indigenous peoples in this formative period.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Manhunt (now an Apple TV+ series) and in the tradition of Empire of the Summer Moon comes “a vivid account” (The Wall Street Journal) of a forgotten chapter in American history: the deadly confrontation between natives and colonists in...

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.

Nearly 20 years before Jamestown was settled, the English established one of the earliest colonies in North America. Like other early settlements, Roanoke struggled to survive in its infancy. The colony's leader, John White, sailed back to England in 1587 to bring more supplies and help. What White found when he came back to Roanoke led to one of the most enduring mysteries in American history. Despite the fact he left over 100 people in Roanoke in 1587, White returned to literally nothing, with all traces of the settlement gone and no evidence of fighting.

Alabama endured warfare, slave trading, squatting, and speculating on its path to becoming America’s 22nd state, and Daniel S. Dupre brings its captivating frontier history to life in Alabama's Frontiers and the Rise of the Old South. Dupre’s vivid narrative begins when Hernando de Soto first led hundreds of armed Europeans into the region during the fall of 1540. Although this early invasion was defeated, Spain, France, and England would each vie for control over the area’s natural resources.

This is a brief highly digestable history of the Catholic experience in British America, which shaped the development of the colonies and the nascent republic in the 17th and 18th centuries. Historian Robert Emmett Curran begins his account with the English reformation, which helps us to understand the Catholic exodus from England, Ireland, and Scotland that took place over the nearly two centuries that constitute the colonial period.

At a time when surveys reveal that Americans know less and less about our past, Tony Williams provides entertaining and informative descriptions of 50 of the most important and dramatic events from the colonial and Revolutionary period - some known and some forgotten - from the Mayflower Compact to the Annapolis Convention.

From 1754 to 1755, the slave ship Hare completed a journey from Newport, Rhode Island, to Sierra Leone and back to the United States - a journey that transformed more than 70 Africans into commodities, condemning some to death and the rest to a life of bondage in North America. In this engaging narrative, Sean Kelley painstakingly reconstructs this tumultuous voyage, detailing everything from the identities of the captain and crew to their wild encounters with inclement weather, slave traders, and near-mutiny.

Indian peoples made some 400 treaties with the United States between the American Revolution and 1871, when Congress prohibited them. They signed nine treaties with the Confederacy, as well as countless others over the centuries with Spain, France, Britain, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, Canada, and even Russia, not to mention individual colonies and states. In retrospect, the treaties seem like well-ordered steps on the path of dispossession and empire. The reality was far more complicated.

It was an age of fascinating leaders and difficult choices, of grand ideas eloquently expressed and of epic conflicts bitterly fought. Now comes a brilliant portrait of the American Revolution, one that is compelling in its prose, fascinating in its details, and provocative in its fresh interpretations.

It was the street your mother warned you about - even if you lived in San Francisco. Long associated with skid row, saloons, freak shows, violence, and vice, the Bowery often showed the worst New York City had to offer. Yet there were times when it showed its best as well. 

On the night of December 16, 1773, a group of 30 to 130 men boarded the tea ship Dartmouth and two other ships and dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor over the span of three hours in protest of the Tea Act of 1773. Agreement over what exactly happened ends there, but a number of legends have since popped up and become part of the common narrative. The urban legend that the people who boarded the ship dressed as Mohawks is not entirely true.

In the dramatic few years when colonial Americans were galvanized to resist British rule, perhaps nothing did more to foment anti-British sentiment than the armed occupation of Boston. As If an Enemy's Country is Richard Archer's gripping narrative of those critical months between October 1, 1768 and the winter of 1770 when Boston was an occupied town.

The Apache are a culturally connected set of Native American tribe in the southwest United States, including some Native American subtribes. The Apache and the Navajo are distant cousins who share the Southern Athabaskan languages. Apache towns can be found in Oklahoma and Texas, and also bookings in Arizona and New Mexico. Apaches have settled across the US and beyond, especially in city parts. Politically independent, the Apache Nations speak a range of dialects and have separate customs.

The Sabbath in Puritan New England by Alice Morse Earle published by Charles Scribner’s Sons 1891.

New attention from historians and journalists is raising pointed questions about the founding period: was the American revolution waged to preserve slavery, and was the Constitution a pact with slavery or a landmark in the antislavery movement? We have long needed a history of the founding that fully includes Black Americans in the Revolutionary protests, the war, and the debates over slavery and freedom that followed. We now have that history in Edward J. Larson's insightful synthesis of the founding.

Bloomsbury presents Being Thomas Jefferson by Andrew Burstein, read by John Chancer The deepest dive yet into the heart and soul, secret affairs, unexplored alliances, and bitter feuds of a generally worshipped, intermittently reviled American icon. Perhaps no founding father is as mysterious as...