History Nation State

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.

In The Browns of California, journalist and scholar Miriam Pawel weaves a narrative history that spans four generations, from August Schuckman, the Prussian immigrant who crossed the Plains in 1852 and settled on a northern California ranch, to his great-grandson Jerry Brown, who reclaimed the family homestead 140 years later. Through the prism of their lives, we gain an essential understanding of California and an appreciation of its importance.

Sitting beneath a stained glass window dedicated to his grandmother in the Atlanta church where his family had prayed for generations, preeminent American historian David Levering Lewis was struck by the great lacunae in what he could know about his own ancestors. He vowed to excavate their past and tell their story.

A vivid account of leadership focusing on the first four Virginia presidents - George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe - from the best-selling historian and author of James Madison.

In life and in death, slaves were commodities, their monetary value assigned based on their age, gender, health, and the demands of the market. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved people through every phase of their lives—including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, the senior years, and death—in the early American domestic slave trade.

First published in 1998, this perennial best seller distills more than 400 exciting tales of heroism from the 150,000 search-and-rescue missions carried out by the National Park Service since Yellowstone was established as the first national park in 1872. Updated to include the most notable incidents through 2004 (including the Park Service's efforts to protect the nation's treasures following 9/11), the new edition features recent rescues and rescue attempts from the icy slopes of Mt. Rainer to the seas off of Acadia National Park.

James Pierson Beckwourth (1798-1866) was a fur trader and explorer born into slavery in Virginia. He moved to the West, and as a fur trapper, he lived with the Crow for years. He is credited with the discovery of Beckwourth Pass through the Sierra Nevada Mountains during the California Gold Rush era.

A provocative and penetrating investigation into the rivalry between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, whose infamous duel left the founding father dead and turned a sitting vice president into a fugitive. In the summer of 1804, two of America's most eminent statesmen squared off, pistols raised, on a bluff along the Hudson River. That two such men would risk not only their lives but the stability of the young country they helped forge is almost beyond comprehension. Yet we know that it happened.

The twin acts of singing and fighting for freedom have been inseparable in African American history. May We Forever Stand tells an essential part of that story. With lyrics penned by James Weldon Johnson and music composed by his brother Rosamond, "Lift Every Voice and Sing" was embraced almost immediately as an anthem that captured the story and the aspirations of black Americans. Since the song's creation, it has been adopted by the NAACP and performed by countless artists in times of both crisis and celebration, cementing its place in African American life.

One of the darkest and cruelest chapters in the history of the United States occurred when the nation’s young government decided to remove the native peoples from their lands in the name of profit. Having helped settlers for hundreds of years, five Native American tribes found it increasingly more difficult to relate to, and trust, the country that had once acted as their allies. The native peoples had fought alongside the Americans to gain freedom from England, the nation that the colonists deemed oppressive and unfair.

Based on a viral article, 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act is the essential guide to understanding the Canadian legal document and its repercussion on generations of Indigenous peoples, written by a leading cultural sensitivity trainer. The Indian Act, after 141 years, continues to shape, control, and constrain the lives and opportunities of Indigenous peoples, and is at the root of many lasting stereotypes.

Reader's Choice Award Winner. Throughout China's rapidly growing cities, a new wave of unregistered house churches is growing. They are developing rich theological perspectives that are both uniquely Chinese and rooted in the historical doctrines of the faith. To understand how they have endured despite government pressure and cultural marginalization, we must understand both their history and their theology. In this volume, key writings from the house church have been compiled, translated, and made accessible to English speakers.

Known to generations of Americans for his stirring call to arms, “Give me liberty or give me death,” Patrick Henry is all but forgotten today as the first of the Founding Fathers to call for independence, the first to call for revolution, and the first to call for a bill of rights. If Washington was the “Sword of the Revolution” and Jefferson, “the Pen,” Patrick Henry more than earned his epithet as “the Trumpet” of the Revolution for rousing Americans to arms in the Revolutionary War.

By the time their obituary was being written in the late 1980s, Yuppies—the elite, uber‑educated faction of the Baby Boom generation—had become a cultural punchline. But amidst the Yuppies' preoccupation with money, work, and the latest status symbols, something serious was happening, too, something that continues to have profound ramifications on American culture four decades later.

Deep in the heart of Northern Arizona, in a small and isolated patch of the vast 17.5 million-acre Navajo reservation, sits Chinle High School. Here, basketball is passion, passed from grandparent to parent to child. Celebrated Times journalist Michael Powell brings us a narrative of triumph and hardship, a moving story about a basketball team on a Navajo reservation that shows how important sports can be to youths in struggling communities, and the transcendent magic and painful realities that confront Native Americans living on reservations.

In the dramatic period from 1800 through 1850, the United States emerged from its inauspicious beginning as a tiny newborn nation, to a near-empire that spanned the continent. It was a time in which the “dream of our founders” spread in ways that few men of that Revolutionary Generation could possibly have imagined. And it was an era that led to the great, tragic conflagration that followed—the American Civil War.

The UFO enigma has been part of our culture since the 1940s and is building to a worldwide explosion of acceptance today. Now, as governments around the world open their files and records on internal UFO investigations, the US remains steadfast in its denial of interest in the UFO issue. As more of the world's population accepts the possibility of an extraterrestrial presence, the demand is building for disclosure from the United States.

When Abraham Lincoln was assassinated and Vice-President Andrew Johnson became "the Accidental President", it was a dangerous time in America. Devastated by war and resorting to violence, many white Southerners hoped to restore a pre-Civil War society, if without slavery, and the pugnacious Andrew Johnson seemed to share their goals. With profound insights and making use of extensive research, Brenda Wineapple dramatically evokes this pivotal period in American history, when the country was rocked by the first-ever impeachment of a sitting American president.

Maine Acadia National Park is one of the most visited national parks in the United States. It is an adventure seeker's paradise. Hiking, climbing, snowshoeing, back-country skiing, and ice-climbing are among the activities pursued there; as well as the less extreme sight seeing along the park road and Atlantic coast. Death in Acadia gathers the stories of fatalities that have occurred in the park, from falls to exposure to cardiac arrest - even getting swept out to sea - and presents dozens of misadventures.

Most histories of the Cherokee nation focus on its encounters with Europeans, its conflicts with the U.S. government, and its expulsion from its lands during the Trail of Tears. This work, however, traces the origins of the Cherokee people to the third century B.C.E. and follows their migrations through the Americas to their homeland in the lower Appalachian Mountains.