Publisher's description: In the first full-length biography of Alexander Hamilton in decades, National Book Award winner Ron Chernow tells the riveting story of a man who overcame all odds to shape, inspire, and scandalize the newborn America. According to historian Joseph Ellis, Alexander Hamilton is "a robust full-length portrait, in my view the best ever written, of the most brilliant, charismatic and dangerous founder of them all." Few figures...

Thomas Paine, a seminal figure in American History, was an Englishman by birth who immigrated to America in 1774, where he quickly took up the cause of the independence of the American colonies from England. His famous work "Common Sense", published in 1776, helped to gain public support for the American Revolution and established him as a central figure among the founding fathers. Later, while living in France during the French Revolution, Paine...

"From the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian comes a masterful, first-of-its-kind dual biography of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, illuminating their partnership's enduring importance. Theirs was a three-decade-long bond that, more than any other pairing, would forge the United States. Vastly different men, Benjamin Franklin--an abolitionist freethinker from the urban north--and George Washington--a slaveholding general from the agrarian south--were...

From Pulitzer Prize–winning American historian Joseph J. Ellis, the unexpected story of why the thirteen colonies, having just fought off the imposition of a distant centralized governing power, would decide to subordinate themselves anew. We all know the famous opening phrase of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this Continent a new Nation.” The truth is different. In 1776, thirteen...

An "account of the complicated middle years of the American Revolution that shares lesser-known insights into the tragic relationship between George Washington and Benedict Arnold."--NoveList. In September 1776, the vulnerable Continental Army under an unsure George Washington (who had never commanded a large force in battle) evacuates New York after a devastating defeat by the British Army. Three weeks later, near the Canadian border, one of his...

The must-have companion to Bill O'Reilly's historical docudrama Legends and Lies: The Patriots, an exciting and eye-opening look at the Revolutionary War through the lives of its leaders The American Revolution was neither inevitable nor a unanimous cause. It pitted neighbors against each other, as loyalists and colonial rebels faced off for their lives and futures. These were the times that tried men's souls: no one was on stable ground and few...

"When the Revolutionary War ended in victory, there remained the stupendous problem of how to establish a workable democratic government in the vast, newly independent country. Three key Founding Fathers played significant roles: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton. Their lives and policies could not have been more different; their relationships with each other were complex and often rife with animosity. And yet these three men led...

One of the half dozen most important books ever written about the American Revolution.--New York Times Book Review "During the nearly two decades since its publication, this book has set the pace, furnished benchmarks, and afforded targets for many subsequent studies. If ever a work of history merited the appellation 'modern classic,' this is surely one.--William and Mary Quarterly"{A} brilliant and sweeping interpretation of political culture in...

Explores the little-known true story of the kidnapping of thirteen-year-old Jemima Boone, Daniel Boone's daughter, by a Cherokee-Shawnee raiding party and the ensuing battle with reverberations that nobody could predict.

Award-winning historian Cassandra A. Good shows how the outspoken stepgrandchildren of George Washington played an overlooked but important role in the development of American society and politics from the Revolution to the Civil War. While it’s widely known in America that George and Martha Washington never had children of their own, few are aware that they raised numerous children together. In First Family, we see Washington as a father...