Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
The [author] unpacks the mystery of the Salem Witch Trials. It began in 1692, over an exceptionally raw Massachusetts winter, when a minister's daughter began to scream and convulse. It ended less than a year later, but not before 19 men and women had been hanged and an elderly man crushed to death. The panic spread quickly, involving the most educated men and prominent politicians in the colony. Neighbors accused neighbors, parents and children...
Author
Language
English
Description
"From the author of 1491--the best-selling study of the pre-Columbian Americas--a deeply engaging new history that explores the most momentous biological event since the death of the dinosaurs. More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed totally different suites of plants and animals. Columbus's voyages brought them back together--and marked the beginning...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
Benjamin Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, statesman, and diplomat. As a scientist, he was a major figure in the American Enlightenment and the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity. Hear his own thoughts in his autobiography.
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
Could you identify a sausage gun if you had to? How about a plate warmer or a well-sweep? Any idea how the term log-rolling really originated? Alice Morse Earle (1851-1911), a prolific popular historian and the first American to chronicle everyday life and customs of the colonial era, describes what these and many other obscure utensils were and how they were used. She also conveys a vivid picture of home production of textiles, colonial dress, transportation,...
Author
Language
English
Description
A sweeping, provocative new look at the pivotal years leading up to the American Revolution The Revolutionary War did not begin with the Declaration of Independence, but several years earlier in 1773. In this gripping history, Derek W. Beck reveals the full story of the war before American independence-from both sides. Spanning the years 1773-1775 and drawing on new material from meticulous research and previously unpublished documents, letters, and...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
The Wealth of Nations is the magnum opus of the Scottish economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith. First published in 1776, the book offers one of the world's first collected descriptions of what builds nations' wealth, and is today a fundamental work in classical economics. By reflecting upon the economics at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the book touches upon such broad topics as the division of labour, productivity, and free markets....
Author
Language
English
Description
Named one of the Top 10 Books of 2008 by The Times-Picayune. Winner of the 2009 Humanities Book of the Year award from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. Awarded the New Orleans Gulf South Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award for 2008.
New Orleans is the most elusive of American cities. The product of the centuries-long struggle
...Author
Language
English
Description
In the summer of 1754, deep in the wilderness of western Pennsylvania, a very young George Washington suffered his first military defeat, and a centuries-old feud between Great Britain and France was rekindled. The war that followed would be fought across virgin territories, from Nova Scotia to the forks of the Ohio River, and it would ultimately decide the fate of the entire North American continent-not just for Great Britain and France but also...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
An iconoclastic look at America's past: overlooked episodes that shaped the nation's destiny and character. Spanning a period from the Spanish arrival in America to George Washington's inauguration in 1789, these narratives bring to light little-known but fascinating, myth-busting facts. Read the story of the first real Pilgrims in America, who were wine-making French Huguenots, not dour English Separatists; the coming-of-age story of Queen Isabella,...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
A new, brash, and unexpected view of the president we thought we knew, from the bestselling author of Astoria. Two decades before he led America to independence, George Washington was a flailing young soldier serving the British Empire in the vast wilderness of the Ohio Valley. Naive and self-absorbed, the twenty-two-year-old officer accidentally ignited the French and Indian War--a conflict that opened colonists to the possibility of an American...
Author
Language
English
Description
Americans on both sides of the aisle love to reference the Constitution as the ultimate source of truth. But which truth? What did the framers really have in mind? In a book that author R. B. Bernstein calls "essential reading," acclaimed historian Ray Raphael places the Constitution in its historical context, dispensing little-known facts and debunking popular preconceived notions. For each myth, Raphael first notes the kernel of truth it represents,...
13) Topsail Island
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
A novel based on the history of Topsail Island, NC, beginning with the final days of piracy in the era dominated by the infamous Blackbeard. The story winds its way through a suspicious search for Blackbeard's treasure in The Dirty Thirties, the subsequent use of the island as a US Military Rocket Testing Facility after World War 2, through the tourism boom in the 1990's, the real estate crash of 2008 and culminating in the island's subsequent recovery.
Wendell...
Wendell...
Author
Language
English
Description
In this book, the author investigates American origin stories, from John Smith's account of the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to Barack Obama's 2009 inaugural address, in order to show how American democracy is bound up with the history of print. It excavates the origins of everything from the paper ballot and the Constitution to the I.O.U. and the dictionary. It presents readings of Benjamin Franklin's Way to Wealth, Thomas Paine's Common Sense,...
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on these lists
4th of July Reads (adults)
MPL-Women Who Made History
OBD Women's History Month (March) - YOUTH
Women's History Month (teens)
MPL-Women Who Made History
OBD Women's History Month (March) - YOUTH
Women's History Month (teens)
Formats
Description
Using a host of primary sources, author Brandon Marie Miller recounts the roles, hardships, and daily lives of Native American, European, and African women in 17th- and 18th-century colonial America. Hard work proved a constant for most women -- they ensured their family's survival through their skills while others sold their labor or lived in bondage as indentured servants and slaves. Even in this world defined entirely by men, a world where no one...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
Here is the story of the fateful marriage of the richest woman in Virginia and the man who could have been king. In telling their story, Chadwick explains not only their remarkable devotion to each other, but why the wealthiest couple in Virginia became revolutionaries who risked the loss of their vast estates and their very lives.
"One of George Washington's secret weapons in his rise to power and immortality was the extraordinary
...Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Adult - Native American Heritage Month 2022
HPL National Native American Heritage Month
Native American Heritage Month (adults)
More Lists...
HPL National Native American Heritage Month
Native American Heritage Month (adults)
More Lists...
Formats
Description
"An immersive tale of the killing of a Native American man and its far-reaching consequences for Colonial America. In the summer of 1722, on the eve of a conference between the Five Nations of the Iroquois and British-American colonists, two colonial fur traders brutally attacked an Indigenous hunter in colonial Pennsylvania. The crime set the entire mid-Atlantic on edge, with many believing that war was imminent. Frantic efforts to resolve the case...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
A new history of the United States that turns American exceptionalism on its headAmerican Empire is a panoramic work of scholarship that presents a bold new global perspective on the history of the United States. Drawing on his expertise in economic history and the imperial histories of Britain and Europe, A. G. Hopkins takes readers from the colonial era to today to show how, far from diverging, the United States and Western Europe followed similar...
19) John Adams under fire: the founding father's fight for justice in the Boston Massacre murder trial
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
"'An expert, extremely detailed account of John Adams' finest hour.'--Kirkus Reviews. Honoring the 250th Anniversary of the Boston Massacre The New York Times bestselling author of Lincoln's Last Trial and host of LivePD Dan Abrams and David Fisher tell the story of a trial that would change history. History remembers John Adams as a Founding Father and our country's second president. But in the tense years before the American Revolution, he was still...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Floundering from two years of warfare with Indians and dissent among the settlers, the Virginia Company was about to collapse. To rescue the doomed colonists and restore order, the company chose a new leader, Thomas Gates. Nine ships left Plymouth in the summer of 1609--the largest fleet England had ever assembled--and sailed into the teeth of a storm.... The inspiration for Shakespeare's The Tempest, the hurricane separated the flagship from the...