検索キーワード： 革命・建国

In Wicked Flesh, Jessica Marie Johnson explores the nature of complicated intimate and kinship ties and how they were used by Black women to construct freedom in the Atlantic world. Johnson draws on archival documents scattered in institutions across three continents, written in multiple languages and largely from the perspective of colonial officials and slave-owning men, to recreate Black women's experiences from coastal Senegal to French Saint-Domingue to Spanish Cuba to the swampy outposts of the Gulf Coast.

Volume Four opens as the British abandoned Boston in March 1776. They moved their troops to Long Island and their fleet to New York Harbor. Washington, anticipating such a strategy, came out to face the Redcoats in Brooklyn, but was driven back to the city. More British troops arrived, forcing Washington to withdraw north. As the winter of 1777 approached with Redcoats occupying Philadelphia, Washington restricted the British army's supply line. But almost nobody believed the British could be defeated and few believed Washington's army could survive.

Benjamin Franklin was the oldest of the founding fathers—he was indeed a whole generation ahead of George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson—and yet he was the most forward-looking of the group and the most modern of the founders. The Greatest American shows just how much of an impact Benjamin Franklin had on American politics and daily life.

Despite the key part he played in the country's founding, few Americans today have heard of John Dickinson. Early chroniclers and historians, seeking to create a patriotic narrative and taking their cues from his political enemies, cast him as a coward and Loyalist for not signing the Declaration. Many later historians have simply accepted and echoed this distorted and dismissive view. Jane Calvert's fascinating, authoritative, and accessible biography restores him to a place of prominence in the nation's formative years.

"Give me liberty, or give me death!" is a quotation attributed to Patrick Henry from his speech to the Second Virginia Convention on March 23, 1775, at St. John's Church in Richmond, Virginia. Henry spoke without notes, and no transcript of his exact words have survived. The only known version of his speech was reconstructed in the early 1800s by William Wirt, a biographer who corresponded with various attendees of the convention.

The revolutions that raged across Europe and the Americas over seven decades, from 1760 to 1825, created the modern world. Revolutionaries shattered empires, toppled social hierarchies, and birthed a world of republics. But old injustices lingered on and the powerful engines of revolutionary change created new and insidious forms of inequality. In The Age of Revolutions, historian Nathan Perl-Rosenthal offers the first narrative history of this entire era.

This addition to Oxford's Very Short Introductions series traces how Americans have addressed the issues and events of their time and place, whether it is the Civil War, the Great Depression, or the culture wars of today.

"With impressive scholarly sleuthing and a storyteller's eloquence, Danielle Allen has written a landmark book about the people and the ideas that changed the world. By bringing the glamorous Duke of Richmond back to life, Allen paints a panoramic portrait of how principles of human equality and...

How did black suits become so ubiquitous? Why has men's clothing been so plain since the American Revolution? In Suitable, American historian and costume designer Chloe Chapin offers a deeply researched and groundbreaking explanation for why American men's fashion was standardized from the time...

A revelatory account of how words and actions combined to destroy Britain's colonial rule and secure Washington's American victory The American Revolution was not only fought on bloody battlefields, it was waged with the ink of pen and print. George Goodwin shows how the leaders of the American...

In Cocked and Boozy—two of Benjamin Franklin’s two hundred terms for drunkenness—public historian Brooke Barbier examines the role that alcohol played in spurring, binding, and winning the American Revolution and how it shaped the nascent United States. Every chapter concludes with an eighteenth-century cocktail recipe made for modern tastes, so listeners can participate in their own historic tippling.

History is often concentrated into short bursts of change, with long periods of shifting before and waves of alteration afterwards. Nowhere is this more obvious than the thirty year interregnum between the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. In this period, three figures stand tall; Pitt, the elder stateman who saw the need for genuine constitutionalism; Burke, the consummate parliamentarian, speaking for the glory of empire; and Robespierre, the legendary and controversial frontman of the French Revolution.

The Federalist Papers is a series of 85 articles arguing in favor of ratification of the United States Constitution by the 13 original colonies. Federalist No. 74 discusses the powers of the president as commander-in-chief and to grant pardons and reprieves. Hamilton asserts that the role of commander-in-chief is inherent in the office itself and requires the speed and resolve of a single decision-maker.

Soon after the new Constitution took effect and George Washington became president, the United States was in serious danger. A bitter political rivalry between two men who had once been allies, and two surging issues that inflamed the nation, led to grim talk of breaking up the Republic. Then, a single great evening, arguably the most important dinner party in American history, achieved the compromises that led to America's mighty expansion.

In 1789, the people of France decided to overtake the monarchy of their country in favor of a republic. The French Revolution played out like an echo of the American Revolution of the decade prior, with people rising against their governing bodies. Like the American Revolution, the French Revolution had its dissidents and supporters. Thomas Paine was one such supporter, and Rights of Man was his manifesto in support of people fighting for liberty.

In the second volume of the landmark American Revolution trilogy by the Pulitzer Prize–winning and #1 New York Times bestselling author of The British Are Coming, George Washington’s army fights on the knife edge between victory and defeat. The first twenty-one months of the American...

In John Adams: A Life, Ferling offers a compelling portrait of one of the giants of the Revolutionary era. Drawing on extensive research, Ferling depicts a reluctant revolutionary, a leader who was deeply troubled by the warfare that he helped to make, and a fiercely independent statesman. Bringing to life an exciting time, an age in which Adams played an important political and intellectual role. this book is a singular biography of the man who succeeded George Washington in the presidency and shepherded the fragile new nation through the most dangerous of times. 

After winning the war for independence from Great Britain, the 13 adopted the Articles of Confederation as their system of government. However, the Articles proved to be ineffective, and only a few short years after gaining its independence, the young country was headed for fracture and failure. In the summer of 1787, 12 of the states (Rhode Island excepted) sent delegates to Philadelphia in a last-ditch effort to fix the Articles. But it soon became clear that the problems facing the young country were too great for the Articles of Confederation to address, even in an amended form.

The prize-winning historian’s fresh look at the people and events that decided America’s struggle for independence. Its suspenseful climax is the 500-mile march undertaken by General Washington to surround Cornwallis at Yorktown.

“In December 1776, a small boat delivered an old man to France.” So begins a dazzling narrative account of Benjamin Franklin’s French mission, the most exacting—and momentous—eight years of his life. When Franklin embarked, the colonies were without money, munitions, gunpowder, or...