Revolution History

General Alex Dumas is a man almost unknown today, yet his story is strikingly familiar—because his son, the novelist Alexandre Dumas, used his larger-than-life feats as inspiration for such classics as The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers.

Jim Weiss guides listeners on a journey to encounter the fascinating people, high ideals, and bloody battles of the French Revolution and Napoleon's empire. Enter the whirlwind of the French Revolution and follow Napoleon's relentless march of conquest. From the burning desert sands of Egypt and the frozen plains of Russia to the lush jungles of Haiti and the sweeping prairies of North America, Jim Weiss guides listeners through the story of a tumultuous worldwide struggle for liberty.

Most Americans dismiss George III as a buffoon - a heartless and terrible monarch with few, if any, redeeming qualities. The best-known modern interpretation of him is Jonathan Groff's preening, spitting, and pompous take in Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda's Broadway masterpiece. But this deeply unflattering characterization is rooted in the prejudiced and brilliantly persuasive opinions of 18th-century revolutionaries. After combing through hundreds of thousands of pages of never-before-published correspondence, award-winning historian Andrew Roberts has uncovered the truth.

Americans agree that their nation’s origins lie in the Revolution, but they have never agreed on what the Revolution meant. For nearly 250 years, politicians, political parties, social movements, and a diverse array of ordinary Americans have constantly reimagined the Revolution to fit the times and suit their own agendas. Michael D. Hattem reveals how conflicts over the meaning and legacy of the Revolution—including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—have influenced the most important events and tumultuous periods in the nation’s history.

It was 1778, and the recent American victory at Saratoga had netted the US a powerful ally in France. Many, including General George Washington, presumed France’s entrance into the war meant independence was just around the corner. Meanwhile, having lost an entire army at Saratoga, Great Britain pivoted to a 'southern strategy'. The army would henceforth seek to regain its southern colonies, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, a highly profitable segment of its prewar American empire.

To most Americans, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. represent contrasting ideals. The struggle for Black freedom is wrought with the same contrasts. While nonviolent direct action is remembered as an unassailable part of American democracy, the movement's militancy is either vilified or erased outright. In The Sword and the Shield, Peniel E. Joseph upends these misconceptions and reveals a nuanced portrait of two men who, despite markedly different backgrounds, inspired and pushed each other throughout their adult lives.

Award-winning author Philip Dray delves into the lesser-known side of an American icon in Stealing God's Thunder. Benjamin Franklin, more often viewed as a statesman and founding father than as a man of science, challenged religion, science, and reason with his inventions. But in a time when everything was blamed on sin, it was the lightning rod, Franklin's attempt to control the heavens, that caused the greatest controversy.

How do you solve a problem like James Madison? The fourth president is one of the most confounding figures in early American history; his political trajectory seems almost intentionally inconsistent. He was both for and against a strong federal government. He wrote about the dangers of political parties in the Federalist Papers and then helped to found the Republican Party just a few years later. This so-called Madison problem has occupied scholars for ages.

Gustave Le Bon was a French polymath whose areas of interest included anthropology, psychology, sociology, medicine, invention, and physics. He is best known for his 1895 work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, which is considered one of the seminal works of crowd psychology. Other than the cover suggests, this book does not deal with the Russian Revolution, but revolutions and their pre-conditions in general. Le Bon who grew up in France during the revolutionary wave that was pravelent in Europe in the mid 19th century uses in this book the French Revolution as his study case.

Conflict in the Chesapeake Tidewater! It’s early 1776: England’s North American colonies are in revolt against their king and parliament. At Boston, George Washington holds the British occupation force under siege. In Philadelphia, the Continental Congress debates independence. To the south, Virginians are locked in a struggle with Governor Lord Dunmore’s Loyalist army fighting to hold the colony for the crown. At his farm near Winchester, gunsmith Wend eckert expects to spend the war manufacturing muskets for the Patriot cause. Then, one April dawn, his world goes up in flames at the...

In The Words That Made Us, Akhil Reed Amar unites history and law in a vivid narrative of the biggest constitutional questions early Americans confronted, and he expertly assesses the answers they offered. His account of the document's origins and consolidation is a guide for anyone seeking to properly understand America's Constitution today.

From the author of the acclaimed New York Times bestseller Lawrence in Arabia, a stunningly revelatory narrative history of one of the most momentous events in modern times, the jaw-dropping stupidity of the American government, and the dawn of the age of religious nationalism.

Is it science? Is it religion? What exactly is the Design Revolution? This book answers the toughest questions about Intelligent Design. As the Intelligent Design movement has gained momentum over recent years, questions have naturally arisen to challenge its provocative claims. With clarity and concision, William Dembski responds to the most vexing questions and objections raised by experts and non-experts.

Hailed by Thomas Jefferson as "the best commentary on the principles of government which was ever written," The Federalist Papers is a collection of 85 essays published by Founding Fathers Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay from 1787 to 1788, as a means to persuade the public to ratify the Constitution of the United States. With nearly two-thirds of the essays written by Hamilton, this enduring classic is perfect for modern audiences passionate about his work or seeking a deeper understanding of one of the most important documents in US history.

The decade of the 1790s has been called the "age of passion". Fervor ran high as rival factions battled over the course of the new republic - each side convinced that the other's goals would betray the legacy of the Revolution so recently fought and so dearly won. All understood as well that what was at stake was not a moment's political advantage, but the future course of the American experiment in democracy. In this epochal debate, no two figures loomed larger than Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton.

From the best-selling author of Public Enemies and The Big Rich, an explosive account of the decade-long battle between the FBI and the homegrown revolutionary movements of the 1970s. The FBI combated these groups and others as nodes in a single revolutionary underground, dedicated to the violent overthrow of the American government. The FBI’s response to the leftist revolutionary counterculture has not been treated kindly by history, and in hindsight many of its efforts seem almost comically ineffectual, if not criminal in themselves.

Thaddeus Stevens was among the first to see the Civil War as an opportunity for a second American revolution - a chance to remake the country as a genuine multiracial democracy. As one of the foremost abolitionists in Congress in the years leading up to the war, he was a leader of the young Republican Party’s radical wing, fighting for anti-slavery and anti-racist policies long before party colleagues like Abraham Lincoln endorsed them. These policies - including welcoming black men into the Union’s armies - would prove crucial to the Union war effort.

The Spurgin family of North Carolina experienced the cataclysm of the American Revolution in the most dramatic ways—and from different sides. This engrossing book tells the story of Jane Welborn Spurgin, a patriot who welcomed General Nathanael Greene to her home and aided Continental forces while her loyalist husband was fighting for the king as an officer in the Tory militia.

Women of the American Revolution explores the trials of war and daily life for women in the United States during the War of Independence. What challenges were caused by the division within communities as some stayed loyal to the king and others became patriots? How much choice did women have as their loyalties were assumed to be that of their husbands or fathers? The lives of women of the American Revolution will be examined through an intimate look at some significant women of the era.

In The Market Revolution, one of America's most distinguished historians, Charles Sellers, offers a major reinterpretation of a pivotal moment in United States history. Based on impeccable scholarship and written with grace and style, this volume provides a sweeping political and social history of the entire period from the diplomacy of John Quincy Adams to the birth of Mormonism under Joseph Smith, from Jackson's slaughter of the Indians in Georgia and Florida to the Depression of 1819, and from the growth of women's rights to the spread of the temperance movement.