Revolution History

In The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Porwancher debunks a string of myths about the origins of this founding father to arrive at a startling conclusion: Hamilton, in all likelihood, was born and raised Jewish. For more than two centuries, his youth in the Caribbean has remained shrouded in mystery. Hamilton himself wanted it that way, and most biographers have simply assumed he had a Christian boyhood. With a detective's persistence and a historian's rigor, Porwancher upends that assumption.

Jeff Shaara dazzled readers with his bestselling novels Gods and Generals, The Last Full Measure, and Gone for Soldiers. Now the acclaimed author who illuminated the Civil War and the Mexican-American War brilliantly brings to life the American Revolution, creating a superb saga of the men who...

Bruce Lancaster starts his story with an examination of colonial society and the origins of the quarrel with England. He details the ensuing battles and military campaigns from Lexington and Concord to the surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, as well as the tense political and social situation of the new nation. The American Heritage History of the American Revolution details the birth of America with insight and depth.

A New York Times EDITORS’ CHOICE | Shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize | MOST ANTICIPATED by The Guardian Paste Magazine LitHub The Millions Library Journal From the prizewinning author of The Manningtree Witches, a subversive historical novel set during the French...

A gripping portrait of modern Tibet told through the lives of its people, from the bestselling author of Nothing to Envy “A brilliantly reported and eye-opening work of narrative nonfiction.”—The New York Times Book Review NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Parul Sehgal, The New...

“American history as if from a barstool, not a lecture podium. Giddy, rollicking, and bold.” —Ilyon Woo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Master Slave Husband Wife "Accessible and impassioned entry to anyone interested in understanding the nation's founding from a dazzling, kaleidoscopic...

The bestselling author of In the Heart of the Sea, Mayflower, and In the Hurricane's Eye tells the story of the Boston battle that ignited the American Revolution, in this "masterpiece of narrative and perspective." (Boston Globe) In the opening volume of his acclaimed American Revolution...

For a man who insisted that life on the public stage was not what he had in mind, Thomas Jefferson certainly spent a great deal of time in the spotlight--and not only during his active political career. After 1809, his longed-for retirement was compromised by a steady stream of guests and...

Angel in the Whirlwind is the epic tale of the American Revolution, from its roots among tax-weary colonists to the triumphant Declaration of Independence and eventual victory and liberty, recounted by Benson Bobrick, lauded by the New York Times as "perhaps the most interesting historian writing in America today".

Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station is intellectual history on a grand scale, full of romance, idealism, intrigue, and conspiracy, that traces the revolutionary ideas that shaped the modern world from the French Revolution up through Lenin's arrival at Finland Station in St. Petersburg in 1917. Fueled by Wilson's own passionate engagement with the ideas and politics at play, it is a lively and vivid, sweeping account of a singular idea—that it is possible to construct a society based on justice, equality, and freedom—gaining the power to change history.

Maya Jasanoff won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her groundbreaking work Liberty's Exiles. After the American Revolution, 60,000 British loyalists fled the U.S. for Canada, the Caribbean, India, and other points abroad. Jasanoff traces their harrowing journeys across the globe, shedding light on their ambitions, the post-revolutionary world they encountered, and their legacies.

In Unfriendly to Liberty, Christopher F. Minty explores the origins of loyalism in New York City between 1768 and 1776, and revises our understanding of the coming of the American Revolution.

This comprehensive, accessible, and factual guide to Islam is essential to understanding the world's fastest-growing religion. This essential guide to Islam covers every aspect of the Muslim faith and its history - from the life of the Prophet Muhammad and the teachings of the Koran to Islam in...

Americans revere their Constitution. However, most of us are unaware how tumultuous and improbable the drafting and ratification processes were. As Benjamin Franklin keenly observed, any assembly of men bring with them "all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests and their selfish views." One need not deny that the Framers had good intentions in order to believe that they also had interests.

George Washington claimed that anyone who attempted to provide an accurate account of the war for independence would be accused of writing fiction. At the time, no one called it the “American Revolution”: Former colonists still regarded themselves as Virginians or Pennsylvanians, not Americans, while John Adams insisted that the British were the real revolutionaries, for attempting to impose radical change without their colonists’ consent. With The Cause, Ellis takes a fresh look at the events between 1773 and 1783.

In Inhuman Bondage, David Brion Davis sums up a lifetime of insight. He looks at slavery in the American South; the rise of the Cotton Kingdom; the daily life of slaves; the destructive internal long-distance slave trade; the sexual exploitation of slaves; the emergence of an African-American culture; and much more. A definitive history by a writer deeply immersed in the subject, Inhuman Bondage links together the profits of slavery, the pain of the enslaved, and the legacy of racism.

Barely 50 years ago a computer was a gargantuan, vastly expensive thing that only a handful of scientists had ever seen. The world's brightest engineers were stymied in their quest to make these machines small and affordable until the solution finally came from two ingenious young Americans. Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce hit upon the stunning discovery that would make possible the silicon microchip, a work that would ultimately earn Kilby the Nobel Prize for physics in 2000.

When Kevin Garnett shocked the world by announcing that he would not be attending college - as young basketball prodigies were expected to do - but instead would enter the 1995 NBA draft directly from high school, he blazed a trail for a generation of teenage basketball players to head straight for the pros. That trend would continue until the NBA instituted an age limit in 2005, requiring all players to attend college or another developmental program for at least one year.

The whole truth about America, Starr argues in this new history of the United States since the 1950s, has never been contained in one consistent set of values or interests. Our nation was born in the contradiction between freedom and slavery. Today it is beset by a contradiction between a changing people and a resisting nation, a nation with entrenched institutions that have empowered those who fear the changes and look to restore an old America of their imagining.

The stunning story of one of America’s great disasters, a preventable tragedy of Gilded Age America, brilliantly told by master historian David McCullough. At the end of the nineteenth century, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was a booming coal-and-steel town filled with hardworking families striving...