Revolution & Founding

Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us - an ambitious urban entrepreneur who rose up the social ladder, from leather-aproned shopkeeper to dining with kings....

The ideas that inspired the radicals who founded America were neither British nor Christian but largely ancient, pagan, and continental....

The first book to appear in the illustrious Oxford History of the United States, this critically-acclaimed volume - a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize - offers an unsurpassed history of the Revolutionary War and the birth of the American republic....

In this narrative history of the Mohawk River Valley and surrounding region from 1713 to 1794, Professor Richard Berleth charts the passage of the valley from a fast-growing agrarian region streaming with colonial traffic to a war-ravaged wasteland....

Killing England chronicles the path to independence in gripping detail, taking the listener from the battlefields of America to the royal courts of Europe....

What causes people to forsake their country and take arms against it? What prompts their neighbors, hardly distinguishable in station or success, to defend that country against the rebels?  That is the question H. W. Brands answers....

The loss of America was a stunning and unexpected defeat for the powerful British Empire....

American Revolution for Dummies capitalizes on the recent resurgence of interest in the Revolutionary War period - one of the most important in the history of the United States....

Historian Derek Beck draws on previously unpublished documents to tell the full story of the war before American independence - from both sides....

Gonzague Saint Bris recounts Lafayette’s invaluable contributions to the American War of Independence and, later, the French Revolution of 1789....

This is ex-slave Frederick Douglass' second autobiography. It was written after 10 years of reflection following his legal emancipation in 1846....

Known to history as "Dunmore's War", the 1774 campaign against a Shawnee-led Indian confederacy in the Ohio Country marked the final time an American colonial militia took to the field....

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....

Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais was an 18th-century French inventor, famed playwright, and upstart near-aristocrat in the court of King Louis XVI. In 1776, he conceived an audacious plan to send aid to the American rebels. What's more, he convinced the king to bankroll the project....

John Ferling peers behind the traditional image of our first president, carefully burnished by Washington himself, to show us a leader who was not only not above politics but a canny infighter....

The drama of the life of the second president of the United States has been stirringly chronicled both in print and on television. Yet, the life of John Adams is so rich in history, emotion, power, and tragedy....

A sizable British military force attacks the Northern Army's southern front in the fall of 1777 in hopes of assisting a much larger British Army....

Two centuries after his death, Alexander Hamilton is shining once more under America's spotlight - and we need him now more than ever....

From the cohost of Fox & Friends, the true story of the anonymous spies who helped win the Revolutionary War....

Originally published anonymously, The Federalist Papers first appeared in 1787 as a series of letters to New York newspapers exhorting voters to ratify the proposed Constitution of the United States....