In a fast-paced narrative of soaring ideals and sordid politics, of civil war and foreign invasion, the award-winning historian Alan Taylor presents a pivotal twenty-year period in which North America's three largest countries--the United States, Mexico, and Canada--all transformed themselves into nations. The American Civil War stands at the center of the story, its military history and the drama of emancipation the highlights. Taylor relies on vivid characters to carry the story, from Joseph Hooker, whose timidity in crisis was exploited by Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in the Union defeat at Chancellorsville, to Martin Delany and Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Black abolitionists whose critical work in Canada and the United States advanced emancipation and the enrollment of Black soldiers in Union armies.

The outbreak of the Civil War created a continental power vacuum that allowed French forces to invade Mexico in 1862 and set up an empire ruled by a Habsburg archduke. This inflamed the ongoing power struggle between Mexico's Conservatives--landowners, the military, the Church--and Liberal supporters of social democracy, led ably by Benito Juarez. Along the southwestern border Mexico's Conservative forces made common cause with the Confederacy, while General James Carleton violently suppressed Apaches and Navajos in New Mexico and Arizona. When the Union triumph restored the continental balance of power, French forces withdrew, and Liberals consolidated a republic in Mexico.

Canada was meantime fending off a potential rupture between French-speaking Catholics in Quebec and English-speakers in Ontario. When Union victory raised the threat of American invasion, Canadian leaders pressed for a continent-wide confederation joined by a transcontinental railroad. The rollicking story of liberal ideals, political venality, and corporate corruption marked the dawn of the Gilded Age in North America.

A multicultural, multinational history of colonial America from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Internal Enemy and American Revolutions

In the first volume in the Penguin History of the United States, edited by Eric Foner, Alan Taylor challenges the traditional story of colonial history by examining the many cultures that helped make America, from the native inhabitants from milennia past, through the decades of Western colonization and conquest, and across the entire continent, all the way to the Pacific coast.

Transcending the usual Anglocentric version of our colonial past, he recovers the importance of Native American tribes, African slaves, and the rival empires of France, Spain, the Netherlands, and even Russia in the colonization of North America. Moving beyond the Atlantic seaboard to examine the entire continent, American Colonies reveals a pivotal period in the global interaction of peoples, cultures, plants, animals, and microbes. In a vivid narrative, Taylor draws upon cutting-edge scholarship to create a timely picture of the colonial world characterized by an interplay of freedom and slavery, opportunity and loss.

Formidable . . . provokes us to contemplate the ways in which residents of North America have dealt with diversity. -The New York Times Book Review

In the traditional narrative of American colonial history, early European settlements, as well as native peoples and African slaves, were treated in passing as unfortunate aberrations in a fundamentally upbeat story of Englishmen becoming freer and more prosperous by colonizing an abundant continent of free land.

Over the last generation, historians have broadened our understanding of colonial America by adopting both a trans-Atlantic and a trans-continental perspective, examining the interplay of Europe, Africa, and the Americas through the flow of goods, people, plants, animals, capital, and ideas. In this Very Short Introduction, Alan Taylor presents an engaging overview of the best of this new scholarship. He shows that American colonization derived from a global expansion of European exploration and commerce that began in the fifteenth century. The English had to share the stage with the French, Spanish, Dutch, and Russians, each of whom created alternative Americas. By comparing the diverse colonies of rival empires, Taylor recovers what was truly distinctive about the English enterprise in North America. He focuses especially on slavery as central to the economy, culture, and political thought of the colonists and restores the importance of native peoples to the colonial story. To adapt to the new land, the colonists needed the expertise, guidance, alliance, and trade of the Indians who dominated the interior. This historical approach emphasizes the ability of the diverse natives to adapt to the newcomers and to compel concessions from them.

This Very Short Introduction describes an intermingling of cultures and of microbes, plants, and animals--from different continents that was unparalleled in global history.

Oxford's Very Short Introductions series offers concise and original introductions to a wide range of subjects--from Islam to Sociology, Politics to Classics, Literary Theory to History, and Archaeology to the Bible. Not simply a textbook of definitions, each volume in this series provides trenchant and provocative--yet always balanced and complete--discussions of the central issues in a given discipline or field. Every Very Short Introduction gives a readable evolution of the subject in question, demonstrating how the subject has developed and how it has influenced society. Eventually, the series will encompass every major academic discipline, offering all students an accessible and abundant reference library. Whatever the area of study that one deems important or appealing, whatever the topic that fascinates the general reader, the Very Short Introductions series has a handy and affordable guide that will likely prove indispensable.

The 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 like a ground fire overspreading Britain's colonies, fueled by local conditions and resistant to control. Emerging from the continental rivalries of European empires and their native allies, the revolution pivoted on western expansion as well as seaboard resistance to British taxes. When war erupted, Patriot crowds harassed Loyalists and nonpartisans into compliance with their cause. The war exploded in set battles like Saratoga and Yorktown and spread through continuing frontier violence.

The discord smoldering within the fragile new nation called forth a movement to concentrate power through a Federal Constitution. Assuming the mantle of We the People, the advocates of national power ratified the new frame of government. But it was Jefferson's expansive empire of liberty that carried the revolution forward, propelling white settlement and slavery west, preparing the ground for a new conflagration.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of William Cooper's Town comes a dramatic and illuminating portrait of white and Native American relations in the aftermath of the American Revolution.

The Divided Ground tells the story of two friends, a Mohawk Indian and the son of a colonial clergyman, whose relationship helped redefine North America. As one served American expansion by promoting Indian dispossession and religious conversion, and the other struggled to defend and strengthen Indian territories, the two friends became bitter enemies. Their battle over control of the Indian borderland, that divided ground between the British Empire and the nascent United States, would come to define nationhood in North America. Taylor tells a fascinating story of the far-reaching effects of the American Revolution and the struggle of American Indians to preserve a land of their own.

In a fast-paced narrative of soaring ideals and sordid politics, of civil war and foreign invasion, the award-winning historian Alan Taylor presents a pivotal twenty-year period in which North America's three largest countries--the United States, Mexico, and Canada--all transformed themselves into nations. The American Civil War stands at the center of the story, its military history and the drama of emancipation the highlights. Taylor relies on vivid characters to carry the story, from Joseph Hooker, whose timidity in crisis was exploited by Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in the Union defeat at Chancellorsville, to Martin Delany and Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Black abolitionists whose critical work in Canada and the United States advanced emancipation and the enrollment of Black soldiers in Union armies.

The outbreak of the Civil War created a continental power vacuum that allowed French forces to invade Mexico in 1862 and set up an empire ruled by a Habsburg archduke. This inflamed the ongoing power struggle between Mexico's Conservatives--landowners, the military, the Church--and Liberal supporters of social democracy, led ably by Benito Juarez. Along the southwestern border Mexico's Conservative forces made common cause with the Confederacy, while General James Carleton violently suppressed Apaches and Navajos in New Mexico and Arizona. When the Union triumph restored the continental balance of power, French forces withdrew, and Liberals consolidated a republic in Mexico.

Canada was meantime fending off a potential rupture between French-speaking Catholics in Quebec and English-speakers in Ontario. When Union victory raised the threat of American invasion, Canadian leaders pressed for a continent-wide confederation joined by a transcontinental railroad. The rollicking story of liberal ideals, political venality, and corporate corruption marked the dawn of the Gilded Age in North America.

In this beautifully written history of America's formative period, a preeminent historian upends the traditional story of a young nation confidently marching to its continent-spanning destiny. The newly constituted United States actually emerged as a fragile, internally divided union of states contending still with European empires and other independent republics on the North American continent. Native peoples sought to defend their homelands from the flood of American settlers through strategic alliances with the other continental powers. The system of American slavery grew increasingly powerful and expansive, its vigorous internal trade in Black Americans separating parents and children, husbands and wives. Bitter party divisions pitted elites favoring strong government against those, like Andrew Jackson, espousing a democratic populism for white men. Violence was both routine and organized: the United States invaded Canada, Florida, Texas, and much of Mexico, and forcibly removed most of the Native peoples living east of the Mississippi. At the end of the period the United States, its conquered territory reaching the Pacific, remained internally divided, with sectional animosities over slavery growing more intense.

Taylor's elegant history of this tumultuous period offers indelible miniatures of key characters from Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Margaret Fuller. It captures the high-stakes political drama as Jackson and Adams, Clay, Calhoun, and Webster contend over slavery, the economy, Indian removal, and national expansion. A ground-level account of American industrialization conveys the everyday lives of factory workers and immigrant families. And the immersive narrative puts us on the streets of Port-au-Prince, Mexico City, Quebec, and the Cherokee capital, New Echota.

Absorbing and chilling, American Republics illuminates the continuities between our own social and political divisions and the events of this formative period.

Offers a vivid portrait of Edinburgh's evolution, capturing its historical significance, cultural shifts, and the diverse lives of its people.

From one of the earliest mentions of its name in the sixth century to the Covid lockdowns of the twenty-first, this is a magnificent portrait of one of the world's great cities in its many iterations, from 'Edinburgh, the sink of abomination' to the Athens of the North and everything - including the home of the Enlightenment, the Festival City, the Aids Capital of Europe and a Mecca for tourists seeking tartan tat - in between.

As the nation's capital it has been critical to its progress and a witness to epochal events, such the tumultuous reign of Mary, Queen of Scots, the Reformation, the Forty-Five rebellion, the Disruption of the Church of Scotland and the reconvening of the Scottish Parliament. All of these and more feature. But this is not simply a book about the great and good, the famous and infamous. There is testimony aplenty from ordinary folk who may not have made their mark on history but who have contributed to Edinburgh's ever-expanding tapestry.

There are stories of body snatching and murder, drunkenness and drug-taking, sex and shopping, as well rants against inclement weather and the city council.

In this beautifully written history of America's formative period, a preeminent historian upends the traditional story of a young nation confidently marching to its continent-spanning destiny. The newly constituted United States actually emerged as a fragile, internally divided union of states contending still with European empires and other independent republics on the North American continent. Native peoples sought to defend their homelands from the flood of American settlers through strategic alliances with the other continental powers. The system of American slavery grew increasingly powerful and expansive, its vigorous internal trade in Black Americans separating parents and children, husbands and wives. Bitter party divisions pitted elites favoring strong government against those, like Andrew Jackson, espousing a democratic populism for white men. Violence was both routine and organized: the United States invaded Canada, Florida, Texas, and much of Mexico, and forcibly removed most of the Native peoples living east of the Mississippi. At the end of the period the United States, its conquered territory reaching the Pacific, remained internally divided, with sectional animosities over slavery growing more intense.

Taylor's elegant history of this tumultuous period offers indelible miniatures of key characters from Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Margaret Fuller. It captures the high-stakes political drama as Jackson and Adams, Clay, Calhoun, and Webster contend over slavery, the economy, Indian removal, and national expansion. A ground-level account of American industrialization conveys the everyday lives of factory workers and immigrant families. And the immersive narrative puts us on the streets of Port-au-Prince, Mexico City, Quebec, and the Cherokee capital, New Echota.

Absorbing and chilling, American Republics illuminates the continuities between our own social and political divisions and the events of this formative period.

In the early nineteenth century, Britons and Americans renewed their struggle over the legacy of the American Revolution, leading to a second confrontation that redefined North America. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Alan Taylor's vivid narrative tells the riveting story of the soldiers, immigrants, settlers, and Indians who fought to determine the fate of a continent. Would revolutionary republicanism sweep the British from Canada? Or would the British contain, divide, and ruin the shaky republic?

In a world of double identities, slippery allegiances, and porous boundaries, the leaders of the republic and of the empire struggled to control their own diverse peoples. The border divided Americans--former Loyalists and Patriots--who fought on both sides in the new war, as did native peoples defending their homelands. And dissident Americans flirted with secession while aiding the British as smugglers and spies.

During the war, both sides struggled to sustain armies in a northern land of immense forests, vast lakes, and stark seasonal swings in the weather. After fighting each other to a standstill, the Americans and the British concluded that they could safely share the continent along a border that favored the United States at the expense of Canadians and Indians.

Moving beyond national histories to examine the lives of common men and women, The Civil War of 1812 reveals an often brutal (sometimes comic) war and illuminates the tangled origins of the United States and Canada.

Moving beyond national histories to examine the lives of common men and women, The Civil War of 1812 reveals an often brutal (sometimes comic) war and illuminates the tangled origins of the United States and Canada.

Frederick Douglass recalled that slaves living along Chesapeake Bay longingly viewed sailing ships as freedom's swift-winged angels. In 1813 those angels appeared in the bay as British warships coming to punish the Americans for declaring war on the empire. Over many nights, hundreds of slaves paddled out to the warships seeking protection for their families from the ravages of slavery. The runaways pressured the British admirals into becoming liberators. As guides, pilots, sailors, and marines, the former slaves used their intimate knowledge of the countryside to transform the war. They enabled the British to escalate their onshore attacks and to capture and burn Washington, D.C. Tidewater masters had long dreaded their slaves as an internal enemy. By mobilizing that enemy, the war ignited the deepest fears of Chesapeake slaveholders. It also alienated Virginians from a national government that had neglected their defense. Instead they turned south, their interests aligning more and more with their section.

In 1820 Thomas Jefferson observed of sectionalism: Like a firebell in the night [it] awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once the knell of the union. The notes of alarm in Jefferson's comment speak of the fear aroused by the recent crisis over slavery in his home state. His vision of a cataclysm to come proved prescient. Jefferson's startling observation registered a turn in the nation's course, a pivot from the national purpose of the founding toward the threat of disunion. Drawn from new sources, Alan Taylor's riveting narrative re-creates the events that inspired black Virginians, haunted slaveholders, and set the nation on a new and dangerous course.

By turns entertaining and tragic, this elegant history reveals the origins of a great university in the dilemmas of Virginia slavery. Thomas Jefferson shares center stage with his family and fellow planters, but at the crux are the enslaved black families on whom they depend.

Taylor's account of Jefferson's campaign to save Virginia by building the university is dramatic, a contest for power and resources rich in political maneuver and eccentricities comic and cruel.

This detailed exploration of the settlement of Maine beginning in the late eighteenth century illuminates the violent, widespread contests along the American frontier that served to define and complete the American Revolution. Taylor shows how Maine's militant settlers organized secret companies to defend their populist understanding of the Revolution.

In the simmering heat of August 1967, a kaleidoscopic minivan carrying a band of hippies - adorned with long hair, beards, beads, sandals, and granny dresses - pulls up at the gates of Ft. Gordon, Augusta, GA, then the heartland of the Military Police. Their mission is unconventional: to instruct the 25th Infantry Division, 60th Mine Scout Dog Platoon in harnessing the keen senses of dogs to detect landmines, trip wires, and hidden tunnels.

The air crackles with animosity as two worlds collide: the free-spirited and the regimented. Yet amidst the discord, Charlie Fasanaro, a young man with wisdom flowing through his veins, recognizes the crucial necessity of forging a bridge across the chasm of enmity that separates them. Their common cause is as clear as it is noble: saving lives in a theatre of war. Unbeknownst to Charlie, he is on the precipice of a spiritual catharsis that will redefine his very essence.

Volunteering to journey to the harsh landscapes of Vietnam alongside the 60th, Charlie is plunged into the visceral cruelties of war. Amidst the chaos, he witnesses acts of heroism and self-sacrifice that cast a new light on the soldiers he stands beside; a nobility and honor scarcely seen amidst the peace-loving circles of his civilian life. This revelation propels Charlie into a tumultuous voyage of self-discovery, as he grapples with his identity amidst a whirlwind of contrasting ideologies.

Bridge of Stones navigates through the turbulent waters of a time where ideologies clashed and the essence of humanity was put to the test. As Charlie endeavors to find his footing on the battlefield of conflicting beliefs, readers are ushered through a rich narrative that explores the profound essence of camaraderie, the unyielding spirit of sacrifice, and the indelible marks etched upon souls in times of war and peace.

In the simmering heat of August 1967, a kaleidoscopic minivan carrying a band of hippies - adorned with long hair, beards, beads, sandals, and granny dresses - pulls up at the gates of Ft. Gordon, Augusta, GA, then the heartland of the Military Police. Their mission is unconventional: to instruct the 25th Infantry Division, 60th Mine Scout Dog Platoon in harnessing the keen senses of dogs to detect landmines, trip wires, and hidden tunnels.

The air crackles with animosity as two worlds collide: the free-spirited and the regimented. Yet amidst the discord, Charlie Fasanaro, a young man with wisdom flowing through his veins, recognizes the crucial necessity of forging a bridge across the chasm of enmity that separates them. Their common cause is as clear as it is noble: saving lives in a theatre of war. Unbeknownst to Charlie, he is on the precipice of a spiritual catharsis that will redefine his very essence.

Volunteering to journey to the harsh landscapes of Vietnam alongside the 60th, Charlie is plunged into the visceral cruelties of war. Amidst the chaos, he witnesses acts of heroism and self-sacrifice that cast a new light on the soldiers he stands beside; a nobility and honor scarcely seen amidst the peace-loving circles of his civilian life. This revelation propels Charlie into a tumultuous voyage of self-discovery, as he grapples with his identity amidst a whirlwind of contrasting ideologies.

Bridge of Stones navigates through the turbulent waters of a time where ideologies clashed and the essence of humanity was put to the test. As Charlie endeavors to find his footing on the battlefield of conflicting beliefs, readers are ushered through a rich narrative that explores the profound essence of camaraderie, the unyielding spirit of sacrifice, and the indelible marks etched upon souls in times of war and peace.

Arranged as a diary around a calendar year, Those Who Marched Away tells many individual stories from many wars down the ages, with several compelling entries for each day of the year. The diarists come from every walk of life; from faceless foot solidiers to those charged with orchestrating battle, from the Home Front to the Holocaust, from famous writers, political leaders and fighting men and women to ordinary working people enveloped by events over which they have no influence. Together, they contribute an intimate insight into what has been described both as 'the most exciting and dramatic thing in life' and the 'universal perversion'.

William Cooper and James Fenimore Cooper, a father and son who embodied the contradictions that divided America in the early years of the Republic, are brought to life in this Pulitzer Prize-winning book.

William Cooper rose from humble origins to become a wealthy land speculator and U.S. congressman in what had until lately been the wilderness of upstate New York, but his high-handed style of governing resulted in his fall from power and political disgrace. His son James Fenimore Cooper became one of this country's first popular novelists with a book, The Pioneers, that tried to come to terms with his father's failure and imaginatively reclaim the estate he had lost.

In William Cooper's Town, Alan Taylor dramatizes the class between gentility and democracy that was one of the principal consequences of the American Revolution, a struggle that was waged both at the polls and on the pages of our national literature. Taylor shows how Americans resolved their revolution through the creation of new social reforms and new stories that evolved with the expansion of our frontier.

Prominent historian Alan Taylor updates and summarizes scholarly advancements in the historiography of American colonialism in this short essay.

Whoever reads these essays--and whether they follow the book from cover to cover, or dip into chapters at random--will find the rich abundance and variety of early American scholarship set out before them. Readers new to the field will grasp a sense of its expansiveness and possibilities, but seasoned scholars, too, will find here a feast of insights and possibilities that will engage, provoke, and inspire them.--from the Foreword, by Christopher Clark

How is American history written? In a penetrating series of review essays, prize-winning author Alan Taylor provides his own answer to this question. In the pages of The New Republic, he has regularly scrutinized the writing of the most interesting historians of early American history.

Together these reviews provide the general reader a rich and rewarding introduction to their subjects. The books reviewed span an enormous range of scholarship, from popular biographies of Founding Fathers, to investigations of murders of prostitutes to discussions of frontier technology. Grouped thematically, the essays reveal a historian with an unrivaled breadth of knowledge and an admirable passion for his subject, and one who has contributed a continent-wide perspective to colonial history. As readers steep themselves in world-class scholarship, they also discover a writer who takes very seriously his role as reader.

The unique beauty of the British countryside has been celebrated down the ages in music, poetry, and art. It has also been celebrated in countless private diaries. This delightful treasury gathers together the very finest - from Rev Gilbert White's journal of life at his famous home in Selborne to Beatrix Potter's holiday diaries from Perthshire. Elsewhere, the thoughts of Dorothy Wordsworth and John Fowles rub shoulders with the words of Queen Victoria, Siegfried Sassoon and Roger Deakin.

Together, these private records, which have been arranged as a diary of the calendar year, paint a rich and surprising portrait of a landscape and a life we think we know so well.