If We Must Die examines nearly five hundred shipboard rebellions that occurred over the course of the entire slave trade, directly challenging the prevailing thesis that such resistance was infrequent or insignificant. As Eric Robert Taylor shows, though most revolts were crushed quickly, others raged on for hours, days, or weeks, and, occasionally, the Africans captured the vessel and returned themselves to freedom. In recounting these rebellions, Taylor suggests that certain factors like...

A startling and superbly researched book demythologizing the North’s role in American slavery“The hardest question is what to do when human rights give way to profits. . . . Complicity is a story of the skeletons that remain in this nation’s closet.”—San Francisco ChronicleThe North’s profit from—indeed, dependence on—slavery has mostly been a shameful and well-kept secret . . . until now. Complicity reveals the c...

Ancient China collides with newfangled America in this epic tale of opium smugglers, sea pirates, and dueling clipper ships.Brilliantly illuminating one of the least-understood areas of American history, best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin now traces our fraught relationship with China back to its roots: the unforgiving nineteenth-century seas that separated a brash, rising naval power from a battered ancient empire. It is a prescient fable for our time, one that su...

The sleeper history hit of 2008, released in paperback to coincide with the heart of hurricane seasonOn September 2, 1775, the eighth deadliest Atlantic hurricane of all time landed on American shores. Over the next days, it would race up the East Coast, striking all of the important colonial capitols and killing more than four thousand people. In an era when hurricanes were viewed as omens from God, what this storm signified to the colonists about the justness of their ca...

**From a leading historian, the definitive untold story of the Roanoke Colony’s mysterious disappearance“A fast-paced tale of greed, adventure, and tragedy that distills pretty much all that is known and most of what is surmised about the Lost Colony.” —Seattle Times**In 1587, John White and 117 men, women, and children landed off the coast of North Carolina on Roanoke Island, hoping to carve a colony from fearsome wilderness. A mere month later, facing quickly dim...

"Excellent…deserves high praise. Mr. Taylor conveys this sprawling continental history with economy, clarity, and vividness." —Brendan Simms, Wall Street JournalThe American Revolution is often portrayed as a high-minded, orderly event whose capstone, the Constitution, provided the nation its democratic framework. Alan Taylor, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, gives us a different creation story in this magisterial history. The American Revolution builds l...

**A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICEA magisterial new work that rewrites the story of America's founding**The American Revolution is often portrayed as an orderly, restrained rebellion, with brave patriots defending their noble ideals against an oppressive empire. It’s a stirring narrative, and one the founders did their best to encourage after the war. But as historian Holger Hoock shows in this deeply researched and elegantly written account of America’...

From the author of ‘Edge of Empire’ comes a fascinating, thought-provoking and alternative history of the American Revolution – that of those Americans who remained loyal to the British Empire.George Washington's triumphant entrance into New York City in 1783 marked the end of the American Revolution; the British were gone, the patriots were back and a key moment inscribed itself in the annals of the emerging United States. Territorial independence had effectively begun.Alt...

Until very recently, the idea of ancient Jewish sciences would have been considered unacceptable. Since the 1990s, Early Modern and Medieval Science in Jewish sources has been actively studied, but the consensus was that no real scientific themes could be found in earlier Judaism. This work points them out in detail and posits a new field of research: the scientific activity evident in the Dead Sea Scrolls and early Jewish pseudepigrapha. The publication of new texts and new analyses of ol...

This book is written mainly from my experience since my arrival in the United Kingdom in the early 1960s. I came to the UK before I came in contact with any Afro American or Caribbean. In Nigeria I know some people whose parents originally returned to Nigeria from Brazil and Cuba. The names of these great people are household names in Nigeria and particularly in Lagos. The more I stay in the UK the more I realise that our people from America and Caribbean have very little knowledge of Afri...

The Secret Alliances Between History's Most Notorious Buccaneers and Colonial AmericaWas classical piracy an earlier version of state-sponsored terrorism?Here's the story of how almost every well-known buccaneer of the “Golden Age of Piracy” enjoyed active sponsorship from England's governors in the American colonies- setting a pattern of official disobedience to the Crown that would ultimately contribute to the American push for independen...

In this fascinating social history of America’s first frontier, Charles Clark brings to life the people and settlements of Maine and New Hampshire before the Revolutionary War. He describes what life was like beyond the Merrimack from the early fishing camps on the coast to the settlement of mid-eighteenth-century wilderness towns in the interior.The sturdy, independent men who first settled the craggy islands and salt marsh harbors of northern New England were a very different bre...