Showing titles in Revolution & Founding

The game of chess has long be used a microcosm for everything from international politics to war. In The Morals of Chess, an essay originally published in The Columbian Magazine in 1786, Benjamin Franklin, American founding father, polymath, and thinker, tackles this intricate game and likens it to life itself. Franklin discusses what he believes to be key virtues one must possess to be happy, successful, and productive in life, and illustrates these virtues, such a patience and circumspection, within the context of the game of chess.

Like most legends, the origins of Freemasonry are still disputed to this day. The earliest mention of the society traces back to The Halliwell Manuscript, or Regius Poem, authored sometime between the late 14th and the early 15th centuries. The Society of Freemasonry is one of the most controversial brotherhoods in the history of mankind. This book examines the origins and history of the controversial brotherhood, its expansion across the globe, and some of the most mindboggling conspiracy theories that surround the society to this day.

In 1799, at the behest of President George Washington, Patrick Henry came out of retirement to defend the Constitution that he had once opposed and to thwart Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, whom Washington accused of putting party over country and threatening the fragile union. For the People, For the Country tells the remarkable story of how the most eloquent public speaker of the American Revolutionary era and a leading antifederalist during debates over ratification of the Constitution reemerged on the side of the federalists and once again changed history.

In the wake of the American Revolution, the Founding Fathers faced a daunting task: overcome their competing visions to build a new nation, the likes of which the world had never seen. Washington and Hamilton chronicles the unlikely collaboration between two conflicting characters working together to protect their hard-won freedoms. Yet while Washington and Hamilton's different personalities often led to fruitful collaboration, their conflicting ideals also tested the boundaries of their relationship - and threatened the future of the new republic.

In General Peter Muhlenberg: A Virginia Officer of the Continental Line, historian Michael Cecere cuts away the romanticism surrounding this fascinating character to present him as a highly capable and dedicated officer who served for seven long years in America’s War for Independence; a man of faith who held the high ideals of that office in his conduct with fellow officers and regular soldiers alike.

The autobiography of Louis Hughes serves as a window on the daily lives of slaves before and during the Civil War. Born into slavery near Charlottesville, Virginia in 1832, the narrative charts his life through Pontotoc, Mississippi to Memphis where he met his wife Matilda Morgan, to Tombigbee, Alabama and escape from slavery in Mississippi in 1865. Hughes provides unique historical insight into slavery in the Confederacy during the Civil War and concludes with the family living as free people in Milwaukee.

Here is a brisk, accessible, and vivid introduction to arguably the most important event in the history of the United States: the American Revolution. Between 1760 and 1800, the American people cast off British rule to create a new nation and a radically new form of government based on the idea that people have the right to govern themselves. In this lively account, Robert Allison provides a cohesive synthesis of the military, diplomatic, political, social, and intellectual aspects of the Revolution, paying special attention to the Revolution's causes and consequences.

At the time of the Revolutionary War, nations such as France undoubtedly had an elevating effect on America’s capacity to make formal war, and Lafayette is the most famous foreigner to serve in the Continental Army, but some of the most important individuals who fought for the colonists came from Poland. One of the most important individuals who arrived at George Washington’s door was Polish aristocrat Kazimierz Michal Wladyslaw Wiktor Pulaski, known to future generations as the “Father of the American Cavalry”, while Tadeusz Kosciuszko perceived the American conflict as the test of a new universal paradigm.

Scholars and popular authors regularly claim that Christianity, at least orthodox Christianity, has fostered oppression and intolerance. A common narrative is that liberty and equality have been advanced primarily when America's leaders embrace progressive manifestations of religion or reject faith altogether. This book demonstrates that Christianity is responsible for advancing liberty and equality for all citizens.

The fundamental message of A Preface to Politics is that statesmanship cannot succeed if it focuses merely on the forms and mechanics of government and the technical development and administration of policy. Political leadership can be successful only if political leaders attune themselves to the human beings they lead, keeping themselves abreast of their wants and needs and the social and cultural movements among them. No political mechanism can function without intelligent, perceptive, and responsive people to make it work.

Everyone knows Benjamin Franklin—the thrifty inventor-statesman of the Revolutionary era—but not about his love life. Poor Richard’s Women reveals the neglected voices of the women Ben loved and lost during his lifelong struggle between passion and prudence. The most prominent among them was Deborah Read Franklin, his common-law wife and partner for 44 years. Long dismissed by historians, she was an independent, politically savvy woman and devoted wife who raised their children, managed his finances, and fought off angry mobs at gunpoint while he traipsed about England.

Many Americans labor under the misconception that the nation’s colonial and national heritage was almost wholly accomplished by an English migration, and the notion of early American diversity ends at an acknowledgment of the slave trade conducted between Southern buyers, Northern shippers, the African continent, and the Caribbean region. However, early America witnessed the development of New York by the Dutch, the southernmost regions by Spain, and what would become eastern Canada by the French after lengthy battles with Britain.

They were legalized pirates empowered by the Continental Congress to raid and plunder, at their own considerable risk, as much enemy trade as they could successfully haul back to America's shores. They played a decisive role in America's struggle for independence and later turned their seafaring talents to the slave trade, revealing the conflict between enterprise and morality central to American history.

If you’re looking for a book that gives you a great snapshot into what was going on in Pennsylvania during the American Revolutionary War, and for that matter the newly founded United States, I think you’ll find this book ideal. Going through the state of Pennsylvania’s Revolutionary War Pension Archives I picked out, what I felt, were interesting and detailed stories of our forefathers’ efforts in fighting that war. As you read their detailed stories in their own words, as they told them to the court in order to obtain pension benefits, I think you will be amazed at the wide range ...

When the Revolutionary War began, Congress established a national army and appointed George Washington its commander in chief. Congress then took it upon itself to choose numerous subordinate generals to lead the army’s various departments, divisions, and brigades. How this worked out in the end is well known.

Scholars have long debated the meaning of the pursuit of happiness, yet have tended to define it narrowly, focusing on a single intellectual tradition, and on the use of the term within a single text, the Declaration of Independence. In this insightful volume, Carli Conklin considers the pursuit of happiness across a variety of intellectual traditions, and explores its usage in two key legal texts of the Founding Era, the Declaration and William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England.

Yorktown was a former tobacco trading post now in decline, not much bigger than a large village. But Yorktown was tucked away on the northern edge of the York peninsula in rural Virginia, and in 1781 it became the site of a brief siege between two small armies, fought with all the decorum and formality of 18th century European warfare. About 5,000 British and Germans faced perhaps 18,000 Americans and French. After only three weeks the smaller garrison surrendered, tired and low on ammunition.

Award-winning author Philip Dray delves into the lesser-known side of an American icon in Stealing God's Thunder. Benjamin Franklin, more often viewed as a statesman and founding father than as a man of science, challenged religion, science, and reason with his inventions. But in a time when everything was blamed on sin, it was the lightning rod, Franklin's attempt to control the heavens, that caused the greatest controversy.

This collection contains authentic re-enactments of all of George Washington's (1732-1799) major speeches during his two presidential term of office as America's first president after victory in the War for Independence. It includes his farewell address in full, regarded as a fine example of his political beliefs, as well as eight annual messages to Congress and two inaugural addresses.

America Bewitched is the first major history of witchcraft in America - from the Salem witch trials of 1692 to the present day. The infamous Salem trials are etched into the consciousness of modern America, the human toll a reminder of the dangers of intolerance and persecution. The refrain 'Remember Salem!' was invoked frequently over the ensuing centuries. As time passed, the trials became a milepost measuring the distance America had progressed from its colonial past, its victims now the righteous and their persecutors the shamed.