Early American History

In Speaking with the Dead in Early America, historian Erik R. Seeman undertakes a 300-year history of Protestant communication with the dead. Seeman chronicles the story of Protestants' relationships with the deceased from Elizabethan England to puritan New England and then on through the American Enlightenment into the middle of the nineteenth century with the explosion of interest in Spiritualism. He brings together a wide range of sources to uncover the beliefs and practices of both ordinary people, especially women, and religious leaders.

The area that became known as the Old Northwest caught the eye of European settlers as far back as the 17th century, when the French explorers Marquette and Jolliet found that waterways in the area connected the Mississippi River to the Great Lakes. The area was perfect for fur trade outposts before it was settled by whites. Throughout the 19th century, American settlers pushing across the Western frontier came into contact with diverse American tribes, producing a series of conflicts ranging from the Great Plains to the Southwest, and from the Trail of Tears to the Pacific Northwest.

An eyewitness to the Kentucky revival of the early 1800s describes how it started and how it progressed and what the people believed and the strange manifestations that were present in their services. It was the beginning of the Second Great Awakening. Preface to the Modern Edition The information in this book is very enlightening because history books tell us the Second Great Awakening started about 1820 with camp-meetings in the Northeast, but this book shows that great revival camp-meetings started in 1799 and went on continuously up to and including the period given for the Second Great...

Ulysses S. Grant, 18th President of the United States and commander of the Union forces in the Civil War, tells the story of his life in his own words. In this opening volume, Grant covers his early years, including his time at the U.S. military academy at West Point and his service during the Mexican War under Zachary Taylor. Grant wrote his memoirs in order to rescue his family from debt and they were published as he lay dying of throat cancer. Today, they are an American classic.

No sport has been more associated with America’s sense of itself, with its identity, than baseball. No sport has been so inextricably bound with America’s traditions—with its notions of democracy and fair play—than baseball. And no professional sport in America has been as dramatically connected to social change as Major League Baseball when it became racially integrated the moment Jackie Robinson took the field with the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947.

The Seneca Falls Convention is typically seen as the beginning of the first women's rights movement in the United States. Revolutionary Backlash argues otherwise. Integrating the approaches of women's historians and political historians, this book explores changes in women's status that occurred from the time of the American Revolution until the election of Andrew Jackson.

Ranging from the earliest Native American settlers to the presidency of Barack Obama, this Very Short Introduction offers an illuminating account of politics, diplomacy, and war as well as the full spectrum of social, cultural, and scientific developments that shaped our country.

In the 18th century, Bridgetown, Barbados, was heavily populated by both enslaved and free women. Marisa J. Fuentes creates a portrait of urban Caribbean slavery in this colonial town from the perspective of these women whose stories appear only briefly in historical records. Combining fragmentary sources with interdisciplinary methodologies that include black feminist theory and critical studies of history and slavery, Dispossessed Lives demonstrates how the construction of the archive marked enslaved women's bodies, in life and in death.

Although many Americans consider the establishment of the colonies as the birth of this country, in fact early America existed long before the arrival of the Europeans. From coast to coast, Native Americans had created enduring cultures, and the subsequent European invasion remade much of the land and society. In New Worlds for All, Colin G. Calloway explores the unique and vibrant new cultures that Indians and Europeans forged together in early America.

Danger lurks everywhere as he travels alone across the continent. Strange mannerisms, frightening movements, sudden screaming—all involuntary—set him apart. Out of step with everyone, Pieter experiences a crisis of faith and eventually leaves his family, church and community to set off on his own. The French Indian conflict with the British is beginning to gather momentum. At nineteen, Pieter is swept up into the maelstorm of war. By 1757, the British and the French are in a race to claim the Great Sea of the West for their respective countries. The British capture Pieter, now a young ...

The Early Explorers Book 1 includes biographical sketches of some of the first explorers that penetrated the American mainland, both South America and North America. The history of Colonial America would not be complete without biographical information on some of the explorers of North America. These New World adventurers laid the foundations of the future United States and Canada, as pioneers followed after them building settlements as they colonized the interior.

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.

Discover the Epic Birth of a Nation The Thirteen Colonies by Jaime Bedoya Martínez is a powerful and engaging journey through the early history of the United States. From the indigenous roots and European conquests to the foundation of each of the thirteen original colonies, this book brings to life the struggles, ideals, and triumphs that shaped America. With vivid storytelling and a humanist lens, Bedoya explores the political, cultural, and religious forces that drove English settlers across the Atlantic. Readers will uncover the foundations of democracy, freedom of religion, economic ...

Get ready to explore the forgotten stories of America’s past. Untold American History brings to life strange, exciting, and true tales that many people have never heard before. Imagine a flood of sticky molasses sweeping through the streets of Boston. It sounds like something out of a movie, but it actually happened in 1919. This is just one of the many surprising events you’ll learn about. You’ll also meet Norton, a man who called himself the “Emperor of the United States” and became a local legend.

The Settlers' Empire traces the first federal endeavor to build states wholesale out of the Northwest Territory, a process that relied on overlapping colonial rule over Euro-American settlers and the multiple Indian nations in the territory. In the Northwest Territory, diverse populations of newcomers and natives struggled over the region's geographical and cultural definition in areas such as religion, marriage, family, gender roles, and economy.

Joseph Julius Jackson was an African-American preacher who published The History of the Black Man (1921). The book discusses the influence of African civilization upon ancient history, and covers the black kingdoms of Ghana, Sudan, Melle, Hausa, Songhay, as well as the Moorish dynasty of Spain in some detail.

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.

In The Sum of Our Dreams, Louis P. Masur offers a sweeping yet compact history of America from its beginnings to the current moment. Evoking Barack Obama's belief that America remains the "sum of its dreams", Masur locates the origin of those dreams - of freedom, equality, and opportunity - and traces their progress chronologically, illuminating the nation's struggle over time to articulate and fulfill their promise.

In Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean, Randy M. Browne looks past the familiar numbers of life and death and into a human drama in which enslaved Africans and their descendants struggled to survive against their enslavers, their environment, and sometimes one another.

The Dutch, through the directors of the West India Company, purchased Manhattan Island in 1625. They had come to the New World as traders, not expecting to assume responsibility as the sovereign possessor of a conquered New Netherland. They did not intend to make war on the native peoples around Manhattan Island, but they did; they did not intend to help destroy native cultures, but they did; they intended to be overseas the tolerant, pluralistic, and antimilitaristic people they thought themselves to be - and in so many respects were - at home, but they were not.