An investigation of how the trauma of shipwreck affected American values and behaviorA Sea of Misadventures examines more than one hundred documented shipwreck narratives from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century as a means to understanding gender, status, and religion in the history of early America. Though it includes all the drama and intrigue afforded by maritime disasters, the book's significance lies in its investigation of how the trauma of shi...

**Finalist for the Pulitzer PrizeA compelling, fresh account of the first great transit of people from Britain, Europe, and Africa to British North America, their involvements with each other, and their struggles with the indigenous peoples of the eastern seaboard.**The immigrants were a mixed multitude. They came from England, the Netherlands, the German and Italian states, France, Africa, Sweden, and Finland, and they moved to the western hemisphere for different reasons,...

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...

BANCROFF PRIZE WINNER • King Philip's War, the excruciating racial war—colonists against Indigenous peoples—that erupted in New England in 1675, was, in proportion to population, the bloodiest in American history. Some even argued that the massacres and outrages on both sides were too horrific to "deserve the name of a war."The war's brutality compelled the colonists to defend themselves against accusations that they had become savages. But Jill Le...

Explores the sexual world of the one of the most fabled and romanticized characters in history—the pirateFrom Blackbeard to Captain Hook, pirates have been the subject of countless movies, books, children's tales, and even a world-famous amusement park ride. In Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition, B.R. Burg looks beyond the myth to analyze the social and sexual world of sea rovers. Through his innovative analysis of archival materials, he uncovers the queer hi...

Completely revised and edited with an introduction and notes by Vincent CarrettaAn exciting and often terrifying adventure story, as well as an important precursor to such famous nineteenth-century slave narratives as Frederick Douglass's autobiographies, Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrativerecounts his kidnapping in Africa at the age of ten, his service as the slave of an officer in the British Navy, his ten years of labor on slave ships until he w...

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...

**A Los Angeles Times Best Non-Fiction Book of 2007A Boston Globe Best Non-Fiction Book of 2007Amazon.com Editors pick as one of the 10 best history books of 2007Winner of the 2007 John Lyman Award for U. S. Maritime History, given by the North American Society for Oceanic History"The best history of American whaling to come along in a generation." —Nathaniel Philbrick**The epic history of the "iron men in wooden boats" who built an in...

The American dream was built along the banks of the James River in Virginia.The settlers who established America's first permanent English colony at Jamestown were not seeking religious or personal freedom. They were comprised of gentlemen adventurers and common tradesmen who risked their lives and fortunes on the venture and stood to reap the rewards—the rewards of personal profit and the glory of mother England. If they could live long enough to see thei...

"A rip-snortin' story of shipwreck, intrigue, horror, courage, risk, luck and will . . . The authors have brought the drama in the Chesapeake alive." — Publishers WeeklyThe English had long dreamed of colonizing America, especially after Sir Francis Drake brought home Spanish treasure and dramatic tales from his raids in the Caribbean. Ambitions of finding gold and planting a New World colony seemed within reach when in 1606 Thomas Smythe extended overseas...

"A fascinating re-examination of the Salem witchhunts and the woman whose confession initiated them" (Robynne Rogers Healey, University of Alberta).In this important book, Elaine Breslaw claims to have rediscovered Tituba, the elusive, mysterious, and often mythologized Indian woman accused of witchcraft in Salem in 1692 and immortalized in Arthur Miller's The Crucible.Reconstructing the life of the slave woman at the center of the notorious Salem w...

In 1609, two years after its English founding, colonists struggled to stay alive in a tiny fort at Jamestown.John Smith fought to keep order, battling both English and Indians. When he left, desperate colonists ate lizards, rats, and human flesh. Surviving accounts of the “Starving Time” differ, as do modern scholars’ theories.Meanwhile, the Virginia-bound Sea Venture was shipwrecked on Bermuda, the dreaded, uninhabited “Isle of Devils.” The castaways’ journals describe th...