Early English History

Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots delineates the differences between the British and Portuguese empires as they struggled with revolutionary tumult. It reveals how those differences led to turbulent transnational exchanges between the United States and Brazil as merchants, smugglers, rogue officials, slave traders, and pirates sought to trade outside legal confines.

The revolutionary Ohio Valley is often depicted as a chaotic Hobbesian dystopia, in which Indians and colonists slaughtered each other at every turn. In Unsettling the West, Rob Harper overturns this familiar story. Rather than flailing in a morass, the peoples of the revolutionary Ohio Valley actively and persistently sought to establish a new political order that would affirm their land claims, protect them against attack, and promote trade.

How did Muslims across time and place define the line between themselves and their neighbors? Youshaa Patel explores why the Prophet Muhammad first advised his followers to emulate Christians and Jews, but then allegedly reversed course, urging them to "be different!" He details how subsequent generations of Muslim scholars canonized the Prophet's admonition into an influential doctrine against imitation that enjoined ordinary believers to embody and display their religious difference in public life.

Under the Skin investigates the role of cross-cultural body modification in seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century North America, revealing that the practices of tattooing and scalping were crucial to interactions between Natives and newcomers. These permanent and painful marks could act as signs of alliance or signs of conflict, producing a complex bodily archive of cross-cultural entanglement. Indigenous body modification practices were adopted and transformed by colonial powers, making tattooing and scalping key forms of cultural and political contestation in early America.

With the same ability to make personalities and events come alive that characterizes his classic Skid Road, Murray Morgan here tells the colorful story of Tacoma, "the City of Destiny," and southern Puget Sound, where many major events of Washington's history took place. Drawing upon original journals and reports, Morgan builds Puget's Sound around individuals, interweaving portraits of well-known historical figures with a raucous parade of saloonkeepers, politicians, union organizers, schemers, and swindlers.

Over the span of two hundred years, Great Britain established, governed, lost, and reconstructed an empire that embraced three continents and two oceanic worlds. The British ruled this empire by correlating incoming information about the conduct of subjects and aliens in imperial spaces with norms of good governance developed in London. Officials derived these norms by studying the histories of government contained in the official records of both the state and corporations and located in repositories known as archives.

American Indians remain familiar as icons, yet poorly understood as historical agents. In this ambitious book that ranges across Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, and eastern California (a region known as the Great Basin), Ned Blackhawk places Native peoples squarely at the center of a dynamic and complex story as he chronicles two centuries of Indian and imperial history that profoundly shaped the American West.

Discover the Holy Roman Empire: The Empire That Shaped Modern EuropeStep into the fascinating story of the Holy Roman Empire, a powerful force that connected the old world to the new. This audiobook shows how the empire's impact is still felt today, from the battles of World War I to the ideas behind Nazi Germany. Learn about the empire's rise to power and the rulers who changed history.

During the years of the Early Republic, prominent Native leaders regularly traveled to American cities primarily on diplomatic or trade business, but also from curiosity. They were frequently referred to as "the Chiefs now in this city" during their visits. Colin Calloway has gathered together the accounts of these visits and created a new narrative of the country's formative years, redefining what has been understood as the "frontier." Calloway captures what Native peoples observed as they walked the streets, sat in pews, attended plays, drank in taverns, and slept in hotels.

Like Rothbard before him, Dr. Newman has authored a book that is masterfully researched and captivatingly written. Even the most voracious listener of American history will never see some of America's "Great Men" the same way again. Cronyism: Liberty Versus Power in America 1607-1849 describes the evolution of political favor seeking in early American history, from the colonial era to the Mexican War. Newman argues that cronyism emerged from the perennial clash between the forces of liberty and power.

The belief that Native Americans might belong to the fabled “lost tribes of Israel” - Israelites driven from their homeland around 740 BCE - took hold among Anglo-Americans and Indigenous peoples in the United States during its first half century. In Lost Tribes Found, Matthew W. Dougherty explores what this idea can tell us about religious nationalism in early America.

Rockets and Revolution offers a multifaceted study of the race toward space in the first half of the twentieth century, examining how the Russian, European, and American pioneers competed against one another in the early years to acquire the fundamentals of rocket science, engineer simple rockets, and ultimately prepare the path for human spaceflight.

The recent Hollywood film Hidden Figures presents a portrait of how African American women shaped the US effort in aerospace during the height of Jim Crow. In Storming the Heavens, Gerald Horne presents the necessary back story to this account and goes further to detail the earlier struggle of African Americans to gain the right to fly.

When Jesus sent 70 disciples on ahead of him, part of their mission was to heal the sick. In fact, they were supposed to heal the sick before they preached the Gospel. Best-selling author Mike Aquilina calls this command the healing imperative. And it's an imperative that ushered in the world of modern medicine. In The Healing Imperative: The Early Church and the Invention of Medicine as We Know It, Aquilina reconstructs the fascinating history of a uniquely Christian institution: the hospital.

The Jewish sect which ascribed Jesus the title of Messiah was eventually transformed into a non-Jewish movement wholly separated from its Jewish context. The transformation was not instantaneous, and there were deviating or at the least parallel streams of Jesus supporters early on. A critical mistake which has been made, in my opinion, is the assumption that the Jesus movement was uniform even among its early Jewish followers. Analyzing the original movement(s) in the first centuries of the Common Era can reveal how the schism between Judaism and Christianity evolved.

In 1823, the History of the Celebrated Mrs. Ann Carson rattled Philadelphia society and became one of the most scandalous, and popular, memoirs of the age. This tale of a woman who tried to rescue her lover from the gallows and attempted to kidnap the governor of Pennsylvania tantalized its audience with illicit love, betrayal, and murder.

Beginning with the Continental Navy, Small Boats and Daring Men traces maritime missions through the wars of the early republic, from the coast of modern-day Libya to the rivers and inlets of the Chesapeake Bay. Armstrong brings a uniquely informed perspective to his subject; and his work is at once an exciting narrative of danger and combat at sea and a thoroughgoing analysis of how these events fit into concepts of American sea power.

Contrary to popular belief, the American Revolutionary War was not a limited and restrained struggle for political self-determination. From the onset of hostilities, British authorities viewed their American foes as traitors to be punished, and British abuse of American prisoners - both tacitly condoned and at times officially sanctioned - proliferated.

A must-listen new audio book about filmmakers Ted and Leo Wharton, whose serials become popular in the 1910s.

When Dr. David Hosack tilled the country's first botanical garden in the Manhattan soil more than 200 years ago, he didn't just dramatically alter the New York landscape; he left a monumental legacy of advocacy for public health and wide-ranging support for the sciences. In melodic prose, historian Victoria Johnson eloquently chronicles Hosack's tireless career to reveal the breadth of his impact. The result is a lush portrait of the man who gave voice to a new, deeply American understanding of the powers and perils of nature.