When the Mayflower embarked on her famous voyage to America in 1620, she was carrying 102 passengers. To most, they are simply known as “the Pilgrims.” Perhaps the name of Governor William Bradford, Elder William Brewster, or Captain Myles Standish are vaguely familiar; but the vast majority of the Mayflower passengers have remained anonymous and nameless. In The Mayflower and Her Passengers, I have attempted to resurrect the unique individuality of each passenger by providing short biogra...

National Book Award FinalistFrom one of our most accomplished and widely admired historians, a revelatory portrait of Benjamin Franklin’s youngest sister and a history of history itself. Like her brother, Jane Franklin was a passionate reader, a gifted writer, and an astonishingly shrewd political commentator. Unlike him, she was a mother of twelve.Benjamin Franklin, who wrote more letters to his sister than he wrote to anyone else, was the original America...

**"Vivid and remarkably fresh...Philbrick has recast the Pilgrims for the ages."--**The New York Times Book ReviewFinalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History**New York Times Book Review Top Ten books of the YearWith a new preface marking the 400th anniversary of the landing of the Mayflower.**How did America begin? That simple question launches the acclaimed author of In the Hurricane's Eye and V...

"[Full of] the author's deep knowledge of virtually every man, woman and child affected by the trials in this bizarre period." — Kirkus ReviewsThe story of the Salem Witch Trials told through the lives of six womenSix Women of Salem is the first work to use the lives of a select number of representative women as a microcosm to illuminate the larger crisis of the Salem witch trials. By the end of the trials, beyond the twenty who were execute...

This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even...

Award-winning historian Mary Beth Norton reexamines the Salem witch trials in thisstartlingly original, meticulously researched, and utterly riveting study.In 1692 the people of Massachusetts were living in fear, and not solely of satanic afflictions. Horrifyingly violent Indian attacks had all but emptied the northern frontier of settlers, and many traumatized refugees—including the main accusers of witches—had fled to communities like Salem. Meanwhile the colony’s leaders, defens...

Adapted from the New York Times bestseller Mayflower!After a dangerous journey across the Atlantic, the Mayflower?s passengers were saved from certain destruction with the help of the Natives of the Plymouth region. For fifty years a fragile peace was maintained as Pilgrims and Native Americans learned to work together. But when that trust was broken by the next generation of leaders, a conflict erupted that nearly wiped out Pilgrims and Natives alike. Adapted fro...

In the early to mid-nineteenth century, Isaac Brown, a slave, was accused of the attempted murder of a prominent plantation owner, despite there being no evidence of his guilt. Brown, after enduring two brutal floggings, was shipped to a New Orleans slave pen. From there the resourceful Brown was able to make a daring escape to Philadelphia in the free state of Pennsylvania. His biggest error was writing a note informing his free wife and eleven children in Maryland of his whereabouts. The...

Marking the 225th anniversary of loyalist landings in Canada, this important and comprehensive history is essential reading on the shaping of our country.The few hundred loyalists who gathered at Roubalet’s Tavern in New York on the night of Saturday, November 16, 1782, shared a vision of the future intended to sustain them through the nightmare of the present. Abandoned by the king to whom they had promised their loyalty, unwelcome in the land that had so recently been theirs, the...

Mac Griswold's The Manor is the biography of a uniquely American place that has endured through wars great and small, through fortunes won and lost, through histories bright and sinister—and of the family that has lived there since its founding as a Colonial New England slave plantation three and a half centuries ago.In 1984, the landscape historian Mac Griswold was rowing along a Long Island creek when she came upon a stately yellow house and a garden guarded by looming bo...

“Quick in the saddle and fast out of town.” Watch one of America’s most remarkable heroes come alive through fast-paced prose and gripping storytelling.He’s Famous for his Ride. He’s Essential for So Much More.The story of Paul Revere is the story of the American Revolution.Always smack dab in the thick of things, he was an ordinary citizen living in extraordinarily turbulent times. Revere played key roles in colonial tax fights and riots, the infam...

In 1692 Puritan Samuel Sewall sent twenty people to their deaths on trumped-up witchcraft charges. The nefarious witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts represent a low point of American history, made famous in works by Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne (himself a descendant of one of the judges), and Arthur Miller. The trials might have doomed Sewall to infamy except for a courageous act of contrition now commemorated in a mural that hangs beneath the golden dome of the Massachusetts State Hou...