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" A brilliant and scholarly demonstration of the way a single act of violence can affect the course of history. ... The reasons for the resort to war ... have never been brought into such clear focus as through the lens of this remarkable study." - Julian P. Boyd, editor, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson "One of the most important books ever written about the origins of the American Revolution."- Journal of American History

This collection of essays on seventeenth-century Virginia, the first such collection on the Chesapeake in nearly twenty-five years, highlights emerging directions in scholarship and helps set a new agenda for research in the next decade and beyond. The contributors represent some of the best of a younger generation of scholars who are building on, but also criticizing and moving beyond, the work of the so-called Chesapeake School of social history that dominated the historiography of the regio...

David Starbuck and his colleagues have been excavating British military sites in Fort Edward and Lake George, New York, for two decades. This region housed the largest British forts and encampments of the French and Indian War (1754-1763), with as many as 16,000 soldiers and officers garrisoned there. In 1996, on the east bank of the Hudson River, Starbuck's team unearthed the remarkable remains of a sutlers' (or merchants') house which had supplied goods to the British armies throughout the lat...

Prompted by a serendipitous visit to a bookstore, an epiphany leads Paula Bennett and her husband, Harvey, to southern Maine where they spontaneously buy the General Ichabod Goodwin House with its original nine-over-six windows, wide-plank painted wood floors, early Georgian moldings, and an 8-ft wide hearth perfect for cooking. While learning about 18th-century decor to characterise the furnishing of her historic home, Paula diligently researches the house's first inhabitants. She begins to im...

How did our modern ideas of physical comfort originate? This study demonstrates that changes in the technology of comfort depended on a fashion-conscious public being made to feel discomfort with surroundings they had previously preceived as functionally adequate.

A dramatic, exciting and tragic book about the Irish fur trapper who held the fate of America and the British Empire in his hands. William Johnson began life as a poor Irish Catholic peasant. After converting to Protestantism, he emigrated to America where he became the leading fur trader in the British colony and one of its richest men. He also 'went native,' marrying an Indian woman and adopting the religion of her tribe, the Iroquois. When war broke out between the French and English - what...

Is government forbidden to assist all religions equally, as the Supreme Court has held? Or does the First Amendment merely ban exclusive aid to one religion, as critics of the Court assert? After years of debate the controversy still rages on, with both positions now more solidified but neither side victorious. The First Freedoms studies the Church-State context of colonial and revolutionary America to provide a bold new reading of the historical meaning of the religion clauses of the First Amen...

Jefferson's diverse scientific pursuits; Though we most often think of Thomas Jefferson as president and statesman, he is also recognized, in the words of the late Dumas Malone, "as an American pioneer in numerous branches of science, notably paleontology, ethnology, geography, and botany." In this fascinating book, Silvio Bedini explores his wide-ranging mathematical and scientific pursuits. Taught surveying by his map-making father, Jefferson developed an interest in measurement and observatio...

From 1539 to 1542 Hernando de Soto and several hundred armed men cut a path of destruction and disease across the Southeast from Florida to the Mississippi River. The eighteen contributors to this volume-anthropologists, ethnohistorians, and literary critics-investigate broad cultural and literary aspects of the resulting social and demographic collapse or radical transformation of many Native societies and the gradual opening of the Southeast to European colonization.