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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

In ""The Mind of Thomas Jefferson"", one of the foremost historians of Jefferson and his time, Peter S. Onuf, offers a collection of essays that seeks to historicize one of our nation's founding fathers. Challenging current attempts to appropriate Jefferson to serve all manner of contemporary political agendas, Onuf argues that historians must look at Jefferson's language and life within the context of his own place and time. In this effort to restore Jefferson to his own world, Onuf reconnects...

This work offers a full-length, popular history of the American War of Independence - the "cruel accursed war" that changed the world forever. The story of this war has usually been told in terms of a conflict between blundering British generals and their rigidly disciplined red-coated troops on the one side, and heroic American patriots in homespun shirts and coonskin caps on the other. Here, the author portrays the realities of a war condemned by thousands of Americans, in which George Washing...

“I have now nothing to trouble your Lordship with, but an affair that happened on the 19th instant . . .” General Thomas Gage penned the above line to his superiors in London, casually summing up the shots fired at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775. The history of the Battles of Lexington and Concord were the culmination of years of unrest between those loyal to the British monarchy and those advocating for more autonomy and dreaming of independence from Great Britain in the futre. On th...

James Madison led one of the most influential and prolific lives in American history, and his story--although all too often overshadowed by his more celebrated contemporaries--is integral to that of the nation. Madison helped to shape our country as perhaps no other Founder: collaborating on the Federalist Papers and the Bill of Rights, resisting government overreach by assembling one of the nation's first political parties (the Republicans, who became today's Democrats), and taking to the battl...

On September 6, 1781, Connecticut native Benedict Arnold and a force of 1,600 British soldiers and loyalists took Fort Griswold and burnt New London to the ground. The brutality of the invasion galvanized the new nation, and "Remember New London!" would become a rallying cry for troops under General Lafayette. In Homegrown Terror, Eric D. Lehman chronicles the events leading up to the attack and highlights this key transformation in Arnold-the point where he went from betraying his comrades to m...

This collection of true anecdotes from the American Revolution offers a behind-the-scenes look at 30 bizarre, funny, and incredible events that shaped the course of the war.

When President George Washington ordered an army of 13,000 men to march west in 1794 to crush a tax rebellion among frontier farmers, he established a range of precedents that continues to define federal authority over localities today. The "Whiskey Rebellion" marked the first large-scale resistance to a law of the U.S. government under the Constitution. This classic confrontation between champions of liberty and defenders of order was long considered the most significant event in the first...