"What would the founders think? We live in a divided America that is currently incapable of sustained argument and is feeling unsure of its destiny. Joseph J. Ellis, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Founding Brothers and the recent best-selling The Quartet, explores anew four of our most prominent founders, in each instance searching for patterns and principles that bring the lamp of experience to our contemporary dilemmas. Ellis discusses Thomas...

Chernow "vividly re-creates the whole sweep of Hamilton's turbulent life-- his exotic, brutal upbringing; his titanic feuds with celebrated rivals; his pivotal role in defining the shape of the Federal government; his shocking illicit romances; his enlightened abolitionism; and his famous death in a duel with Aaron Burr in July 1804. Drawing upon extensive, unparalleled research-- including nearly fifty previously undiscovered essays highlighting...

"The story of the Astors is an extraordinary but true tale of ambition, invention, destruction, and reinvention -- and of cunning, determination, hard work, hubris, infighting, and greed. One of the wealthiest men to have ever lived, John Jacob Astor first arrived in New York in 1783 and built a fortune through a ruthless expansion of his beaver trapping business, which he grew into an empire through real estate that enriched him at the expense of...

"From bestselling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist H. W. Brands, a revelatory history of the shocking emergence of vicious political division at the birth of the United States Founding Partisans is a lively narrative of the early years of the republic as the Founding Fathers fought one another with competing visions of what our nation would be. To the framers of the Constitution, political parties were an existential threat to republican virtues....

Based on extensive research in both American and British archives, 1776 is the story of Americans in the ranks, men of every shape, size, and color, farmers, schoolteachers, shoemakers, no-accounts, and mere boys turned soldiers. And it is the story of the British commander, William Howe, and his highly disciplined redcoats who looked on their rebel foes with contempt and fought with a valor too little known. But it is the American commander-in-chief...

When General George Washington beat a hasty retreat from New York City in August 1776, many thought the American Revolution might soon be over. Instead, Washington rallied -- thanks in large part to a little-known, top-secret group called the Culper Spy Ring. Washington realized that he couldn't beat the British with military might, so he recruited a sophisticated and deeply secretive intelligence network to infiltrate New York. So carefully guarded...

"In 1776, upon the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Founding Fathers concluded America's most consequential document with a curious note, pledging 'our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.' Lives and honor did indeed hang in the balance, yet just what were their fortunes? How much did the Founders stand to gain or lose through independence? And what lingering consequences did their respective financial stakes have on liberty,...

"A revelatory account of the actions taken by the first president to retain his slaves in spite of Northern laws. Profiles one of the slaves, Ona Judge, describing the intense manhunt that ensued when she ran away."--NoveList. "When George and Martha Washington moved from their beloved Mount Vernon in Virginia to Philadelphia, then the seat of the nation's capital, they took nine enslaved people with them. They would serve as cooks and horsemen,...

A group portrait of America's first four presidents from Virginia focuses on a series of key historical episodes that illustrate how the myriad leadership roles of Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe promoted transcendental, if contradictory, national views about freedom and equality.

What if the year that has long been commemorated as America's defining moment was in fact, misleading? In this book the author, a historian punctures the myth that 1776 was the watershed year of the American Revolution. 1775 was the year in which Patriots captured British forts and fought battles from the Canadian border to the Carolinas, obtained the needed gunpowder, and orchestrated the critical months of nation building in the backrooms of a secrecy-shrouded...