"A history of the United States' overseas possessions, from Puerto Rico to the Philippines and beyond, and what they reveal about the true meaning of American empire."--Provided by publisher.

"Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography is both an important historical document and Franklin's major literary work. It was not only the first autobiography to achieve widespread popularity, but after two hundred years remains one of the most enduringly popular examples of the genre ever written. It provides not only the story of Franklin's own remarkably influential career, but maps out a strategy for self-made success in the context of emerging American...

"A book that radically changes our understanding of North America before and after the arrival of Europeans Encounters at the Heart of the World concerns the Mandan Indians, iconic Plains people whose teeming, busy towns on the upper Missouri River were for centuries at the center of the North American universe. We know of them mostly because Lewis and Clark spent the winter of 1804-1805 with them, but why don't we know more? Who were they really?...

"For those who like their history rich in vivid details, Derek Beck has served up a delicious brew in this book....This may soon become everyone's favorite." —Thomas Fleming, author of Liberty! The American Revolution

A sweeping, provocative new look at the pivotal years leading up to the American Revolution

The Revolutionary War did not begin with the Declaration of Independence, but several years earlier in 1773.

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Montcalm and Wolfe is Francis Parkman's detailed account of the French and Indian War framed through portraits of its two opposing generals. The French and Indian War, which was the North American chapter of the Seven Years' War between the French and the British, pitted the commander of the French troops, Louis-Joseph de Montcalm-Gozon, Marquis de Saint-Veran, against the commander of the British forces, British Brigadier General James Wolfe. A captivating...

For thousands of years, pirates have terrorized the ocean voyager and the coastal inhabitant, plundered ship and shore, and wrought havoc on the lives and livelihoods of rich and poor alike. Around these desperate men has grown a body of myths and legends--fascinating tales that today strongly influence our notions of pirates and piracy. Most of these myths derive from the pirates of the "Golden Age," from roughly 1655 to 1725. This was the age of...

"Beginning in January 1692, Salem Village in colonial Massachusetts witnessed the largest and most lethal outbreak of witchcraft in early America. Villagers--mainly young women--suffered from unseen torments that caused them to writhe, shriek, and contort their bodies, complaining of pins stuck into their flesh and of being haunted by specters. Believing that they suffered from assaults by an invisible spirit, the community began a hunt to track down...

An emigrant French aristocrat-turned-farmer, Jean de Crèvecoeur was granted New York citizenship in 1765 and became a landowner in Orange County. There, he wrote about his farming experiences and interpreted the nation's development in a series of charming and keenly observant essay-length letters about life in the Early Republic. A Baedeker of American culture for Old World readers, the book painted a vivid portrait of the young country, not only...

Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest recovers the agrarian village world Indian women created in the lush lands of the Ohio Valley. Algonquian-speaking Indians living in a crescent of towns along the Wabash tributary of the Ohio were able to evade and survive the Iroquois onslaught of the seventeenth century, to absorb French traders and Indigenous refugees, to export peltry, and to harvest riparian, wetland, and terrestrial resources...

British Empire in the vast wilderness of the Ohio Valley. Naïve and self-absorbed, the twenty-two-year-old officer accidentally ignited the French and Indian Wara conflict that opened colonists to the possibility of an American Revolution. With powerful narrative drive and vivid writing, Young Washington recounts the wilderness trials, controversial battles, and emotional entanglements that transformed Washington from a temperamental striver into...