Farrar,
Straus and Giroux
White Savage
William Johnson and the Invention of America
Fintan O’Toole
A provocative new biography of the man who forged America’s alliance with the Iroquois
William Johnson was scarcely more than a boy when he left Ireland and his Gaelic, Catholic family to become a Protestant in the service of Britain’s North American empire. In New York by 1738, Johnson moved to the frontiers along the Mohawk River, where he established himself as a fur trader and eventually became a landowner with vast estates; served as principal British intermediary with the Iroquois Confederacy; command British, colonial, and Iroquois forces that defeated the French in the battle of Lake George in 1755; and created the first groups of “rangers,” who fought like Indians and led the way to the Patriots’ victories in the Revolution.
As Fintan O’Toole’s superbly researched, colorfully dramatic narrative makes clear, the key to Johnson’s signal effectiveness was the style in which he lived as a “white savage.” Johnson had two wives, one European, one Mohawk; became fluent in Mohawk; and pioneered the use of Indians as active partners in the making of a new America. O’Toole’s masterful use of the extraordinary (often hilariously misspelled) documents written by Irish, Dutch, German, French, and Native American participants in Johnson’s drama enlivens the account of this heroic figure’s legendary career; it also suggests why Johnson’s early multiculturalism unraveled, and why the contradictions of his enterprise created a historical dead end.
Fintan O’Toole, columnist and drama critic for the Irish Times, is the author of seven books, including A Traitor’s Kiss (FSG, 1998). His work frequently appears in a number of American magazines. He lives in Dublin, Ireland.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
416 pages
Size: 6 x 9
8 Pages of B&W Illustrations/2 Maps/Notes/Index
Hardcover
Pub Date: 10/2005
ISBN: 0-374-28128-9
Jonathan
Edwards
America's Evangelical
Philip F. Gura
An important new biography of America's founding religious
father.
Jonathan Edwards was America's most influential evangelical, whose revivals of
the 1730s became those against which all subsequent ones have been judged.
The marvelous accomplishment of Philip Gura's Jonathan Edwards is to place the
rich intellectual landscape of America's most formidable evangelical within the
upheaval of his times. Gura not only captures Edwards' brilliance but respectfully
explains the enduring appeal of his theology: in a world of profound uncertainty,
it held out hope of an authentic conversion---the quickening of the indwelling
spirit of God in one's heart and the consequent certitude of Godly behavior and
everlasting grace.
Tracing Jonathan Edwards' life from his birth in 1703 to his untimely death in
1758, Gura magnificently reasserts Edwards rightful claim as the father of America's
evangelical tradition.
Philip F. Gura is Professor of English and Adjunct Professor of American Studies
and Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is
the author of The Wisdom of Words: Language, Theology, and Literature in the American
Renaissance and A Glimpse of Sion's Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England,
1620-1660, and editor, with Joel Myerson, of Critical Essays on American Transcendentalism.Farrar,,
Straus and Giroux
304 pages
Size: 5 1/2 X x 8 1/4
8-Page Black-and-White Insert/Index
$24.00
Hardcover
Hill and Wang
Pub Date: 03/2005
ISBN: 0-8090-3031-4
John
Adams: Party of One
James Grant
An acute examination of a paradoxical U.S. president.
John Adams was an undiplomatic diplomat and an impolitic politician--a fierce
revolutionary yet a detached and reluctant leader of the nation he helped to found.
Few American public figures have ever been more devoted to doing the right thing,
or more contemptuous of doing the merely popular thing. Yet his Yankee-bred fixation
with ethical propriety and fiscal conservatism never stood in the way of his doing
what was necessary.
Adams hated debt, but as minister to the Netherlands during the Revolution, he
was America's premier junk-bond salesman. And though raised a traditional Massachusetts
Congregationalist, Adams was instrumental in bringing about the consecration of
the first American Episcopal bishops. He was a warm and magnanimous friend and,
on occasion, a man who fully vindicated the famous judgment of a rival he detested.
Adams, said Benjamin Franklin, "means well for his country, is always an
honest man, often a wise one, but, sometimes, and in some things, is absolutely
out of his senses."
James Grant examines this complex and often contradictory founding father in the
most well-rounded and multi-faceted portrait of Adams to date. Going from his
beginnings on a hardscrabble Massachusetts farm to the Continental Congress to
the Court of St. James and the White House, Grant traces the words and deeds of
one of our most learned but politically star-crossed leaders.
James Grant is the editor of Grant's Interest Rate Observer and the author of
four books on finance and financial history, including Money of the Mind (FSG,
1992) and Minding Mr. Market (FSG, 1993). He lives in Brooklyn with his wife,
Patricia Kavanagh, and their four children.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
544 pages
Size: 6 x 9
8-Page Black-and-White Insert/Index
$30.00
Hardcover
Pub Date: 03/2005
ISBN: 0-374-11314-9
Hamilton,
Adams, Jefferson
The Politics of Enlightenment and the American Founding
Darren Staloff
Where The Ideas for which We Stand came from.
In this incisively drawn book, Darren Staloff forcefully reminds us that America
owes its guiding political traditions to three Founding Fathers whose lives embodied
the collision of Europe's grand Enlightenment project with the birth of the nation.
Alexander Hamilton, the worldly New Yorker; John Adams, the curmudgeonly Yankee;
Thomas Jefferson, the visionary Virginia squire-each governed their public lives
by Enlightenment principles, and for each their relationship to the politics of
Enlightenment was transformed by the struggle for American independence. Repeated
humiliation on America's battlefields banished Hamilton's youthful idealism, leaving
him a disciple of Enlightened realpolitik and the nation's leading exponent of
modern statecraft. After ten years in Europe's diplomatic trenches, Adams's embrace
of the politics of Enlightenment became increasingly skeptical in spirit, and
his public posture became increasingly that of the gadfly of his country. And
Jefferson's frustrations as a Revolutionary governor in Virginia led him to go
beyond his Enlightened worldview, and articulate a new and radical Romantic politics
of principle. As a consequence, Americans demand a government that is both modern,
constrained by checks and balances, and capable of appealing to our loftiest aspirations
while adhering to decidedly pragmatic policies.
Darren Staloff teaches history at the City College of New York and the Graduate
Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of The Making of
an American Thinking Class: Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in Puritan Massachusetts.
Hill and Wang
Pub Date: 06/2005
ISBN: 0-8090-7784-1
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
448 pages
Size: 6 x 9
15 illustrations
$30.00
Hardcover
Thomas Paine and the Promise of America
Harvey J. Kaye
America's unfinished revolution
The revolutionary spirit that runs through American history and whose founding
father and greatest advocate was Thomas Paine is fiercely traced in Thomas Paine
and the Promise of America. Showing how Paine turned Americans into radicals-and
how we have remained radicals at heart ever since-Harvey J. Kaye presents the
nation's democratic story with wit, subtlety, and, above all, passion.
Paine was one of the most remarkable political writers of the modern world and
the greatest radical of a radical age. Through writings like Common Sense-and
words such as “The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth,” “We
have it in our power to begin the world over again,” and “These are
the times that try men's souls”-he not only turned America's colonial rebellion
into a revolutionary war but, as Kaye demonstrates, articulated an American identity
charged with exceptional purpose and promise.
Beginning with Paine's life and ideas and following their vigorous influence through
to our own day, Thomas Paine and the Promise of America reveals how, while the
powers that be repeatedly sought to suppress, defame, and most recently co-opt
Paine's memory, generations of radical and liberal Americans turned to Paine for
inspiration as they endeavored to expand American freedom, equality, and democracy.
Harvey J. Kaye is professor and chair of Social Change and Development at the
University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. He is the author and editor of numerous books.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
368 pages
Size: 6 x 9
Notes, Index
$25.00
Hardcover
Hill and Wang
Pub Date: 08/2005
ISBN: 0-8090-8970-X
Barbary Wars
American Independence in the Atlantic World
Franklin Lambert
American independence was secured from Britain on September
3, 1783. Within a year, the American merchant ship Betsey was captured by Sallee
Rovers, state-sponsored pirates operating out of the ports of Morocco. Algerian
pirates quickly seized two more American ships: the boats were confiscated, their
crews held captive, and ransom demanded of the fledging American government.
The history of America's conflict with the piratical states of the Mediterranean
runs through the presidencies of Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison; the
adoption of the Constitution; the Quasi-War with France and the War of 1812; the
construction of a full-time professional navy; and, most important, the nation's
haltering steps toward commercial independence. Frank Lambert's genius is to see
in the Barbary Wars the ideal means of capturing the new nation's shaky emergence
in the complex context of the Atlantic world.
Depicting a time when Britain ruled the seas and France most of Europe, The Barbary
Wars proves America's earliest conflict with the Arabic world was always a struggle
for economic advantage rather than any clash of cultures or religions.
Frank Lambert teaches history at Purdue University and is the author of The Founding
Fathers and the Place of Religion in America, Inventing the "Great Awakening" and Pedlar in Divinity: George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals, 1737-1770.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
240 pages
Size: 5 1/2 x 8 1/4
20 Illustrations/3 Maps
$23.00
Hardcover
Hill and Wang
Pub Date: 08/2005
ISBN: 0-8090-9533-5
Runaway America
Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution
David Waldstreicher
Scientist, abolitionist, revolutionary: that is the Benjamin
Franklin we know and celebrate. To this description, the talented young historian
David Waldstreicher shows we must add runaway, slave master, and empire builder.
But Runaway America does much more than revise our image of a beloved founding
father. Finding slavery at the center of Franklin's life, Waldstreicher proves
it was likewise central to the Revolution, America's founding, and the very notion
of freedom we associate with both.
Franklin was the sole Founding Father who was once owned by someone else and was
among the few to derive his fortune from slavery. As an indentured servant, Franklin
fled his master before his term was complete; as a struggling printer, he built
a financial empire selling newspapers that not only advertised the goods of a
slave economy (not to mention slaves) but also ran the notices that led to the
recapture of runaway servants. Perhaps Waldstreicher's greatest achievement is
in showing that this was not an ironic outcome but a calculated one. America's
freedom, no less than Franklin's, demanded that others forgo liberty.
Through the life of Franklin, Runaway America provides an original explanation
to the paradox of American slavery and freedom.
Author
Biography Header
David Waldstreicher, professor of history at Notre Dame, is author of In the
Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism and editor of Thomas
Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (Bedford Books).
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
336 pages
Size: 6 x 9
$25.00
Hardcover
Hill and Wang
Pub Date: 08/2004
ISBN: 0-8090-8314-0
Copyright ©2001-2003 Farrar, Straus and Giroux
William
Clark and the Shaping of the West
Landon Y. Jones
Between 1803 and 1806, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark co-captained the most
famous expedition in American history. But while Lewis ended his life just three
years later, Clark, as the highest-ranking Federal official in the West, spent
three decades overseeing its consequences: Indian removal and the destruction
of Native America. In a rare combination of storytelling and scholarship, best-selling
author Landon Y. Jones presents for the first time Clark's remarkable life and
influential career in their full complexity.
Like every colonial family living on Virginia's violent frontier, the Clarks killed
Indians and acquired land; acting on behalf of the United States, William would
prove successful at both. Clark's life was spent fighting in America's fifty-year
running war with the Indians (and their European allies) over the Western borderlands.
The struggle began with his famed brother George Roger's western campaigns during
the American Revolution, continued through the vicious battles of the War of 1812,
and ended with the Black Hawk War in the 1830s. In vividly depicting Clark's life,
Jones memorably captures not only the dark and bloody ground of America's early
West, but also the qualities of character and courage that made him an unequalled
leader in America's grander enterprise: the shaping of the West. No one played
a larger part in that accomplishment than William Clark.
William Clark and the Shaping of the West is an unforgettable human story that
encompasses in a single life the sweep of American history from colonial Virginia
to the conquest of the West.
Landon Jones was managing editor at People magazine for eight years and wrote
and edited for Life, Time, Money, and People for thirty-seven years; and is currently
vice president of the National Council of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial. His
books include Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom and The Essential
Lewis and Clark. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
408 pages
Size: 6 x 9
$25.00
Hardcover
Hill and Wang
Pub Date: 05/2004
ISBN: 0-8090-3041-1
Before
Lewis and Clark
The Story of the Chouteaus, the French Dynasty That Ruled America's Frontier
Shirley Christian
Shortly after Meriweather Lewis reached St. Louis in 1803
to plan for his voyage to the Pacific with William Clark, he prepared his first
packet of flora and fauna from west of the Mississippi and dispatched it to President
Jefferson. The cuttings, which were later planted in Philadelphia and Virginia,
were supplied by Lewis's new French friend, Pierre Chouteau, who took them from
a tree growing in the garden of his mansion.
One of the best-known families in French America, the Chouteaus had guarded the
gates to the West for generations and had built fortunes from fur trading, land
speculation, finance, and railroads, and by supplying anything needed to survive
in the region between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains. Patrician
in their origins, they nevertheless won the respect and allegiance of dozens of
Indian tribes. From their St. Louis base, the Chouteaus conquered the more-than-two-thousand-mile
length of the Missouri River, put down the first European roots at the future
site of Kansas City and in present-day Oklahoma, and left their names and imprints
on lands stretching to the Canadian border.
Before Lewis and Clark: The French Dynasty that Ruled America's Frontier is the
extraordinary story of a wealthy, powerful, charming, and manipulative family,
who dominated business and politics in the Louisiana Purchase territory before
the famous Lewis and Clark expedition, and for decades afterward.
Shirley Christian is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has written for The
New York Times, The Miami Herald and the Associated Press. She is the author of
Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family and lives in Overland Park in Kansas.
528 pages Size: 6 x 9
$27.00 Hardcover
Pub Date: 04/2004
ISBN: 0-374-11005-0
An Imperfect God
George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America
by Henry
Wiencek
When George Washington wrote his will, he made the startling decision to set
his slaves free; earlier he had said that holding slaves was his "only
unavoidable subject of regret." In this exciting new book, full of groundbreaking
original research, Henry Wiencek explores the Founding Father's engagement with
slavery at every stage of his life -- as Virginia planter, soldier, politician,
president, and statesman.
Washington was born and raised among blacks and mixed-race people; he and his
wife had blood ties to the slave community. Yet as a young man he bought and
sold slaves without scruple, even raffled off children to collect debts (an
incident ignored by earlier biographers). Then, on the Revolutionary battlefields
where he commanded both black and white troops, Washington's attitudes began
to change. He and the other framers enshrined slavery in the Constitution, but,
Wiencek shows, even before he became president Washington had begun to see the
system's evil, and he understood that the problem of this "peculiar institution" would be central to the American experience.
Wiencek's revelatory narrative, based on a meticulous examination of private
papers, court records, and the voluminous Washington archives, documents for
the first time the moral transformation culminating in Washington's determination
to emancipate his slaves. He acted too late to keep the new republic from perpetuating
slavery, but his repentance was genuine. And it was perhaps related to the possibility
-- as the oral history of Mount Vernon's slave descendants has long asserted
-- that a slave named West Ford was the son of George and a woman named Venus;
Wiencek has new evidence that this could indeed have been true.
George Washington's heroic stature as Father of Our Country is not diminished
in this superb, nuanced portrait: now we see Washington in full as a man of
his time and ahead of his time.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Henry Wiencek, a nationally prominent historian and writer, is the author of
several books, including, most recently, The Hairstons: An American Family in
Black and White, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1999. He
lives with his wife and son in Charlottesville, Virginia.
History
November 2003
$26.00US/$42.95CAN
ISBN: 0-374-17526-8
American
Slavery
1619-1877 (10th-Anniversary Edition, with a new Preface and Afterword)
Peter Kolchin
The single best short survey in America, now updated.
Includes a New Preface and Afterward
In terms of accessibility and comprehensive coverage, Kolchin's American Slavery
is a singularly important achievement. Now updated to address a decade of new
scholarship, the book includes a new preface, afterword, and revised and expanded
bibliographic essay. It remains the best book to introduce a subject of profound
and lasting importance, one that lies at the center of American history.
"A miraculous achievement . . . A concise, well-written, and sensibly argued
survey of America's greatest shame." ---The New Yorker
"Peter Kolchin's American Slavery is the best history of the 'peculiar institution'
that I have ever read. Paying equal attention to the slaves and the slaveholders,
it is both comprehensive and fair-minded. A master of comparative history, Kolchin
brilliantly shows how American slavery was similar to, and at the same time different
from, forced labor in Brazil, the Caribbean, and Russia. His splendid bibliographical
essay is an indispensable guide to the vast and complex literature on slavery."--David
Herbert Donald, Charles Warren Professor of American History Emeritus, Harvard
University
"This is a brilliant and masterful synthesis of scholarship on the history
of slavery in America. Kolchin not only pulls together all the relevant literature
but also strikes out with his own perceptive and trenchant analyses.--August Meier,
Kent State University
"A feast of deftly crafted interpretations of the many interrelated dimensions
of a most complex institution that shaped and deeply scarred American society.
Kolchin's masterful survey is by far the best I have seen. It will be hard to
surpass."--David Barry Gaspar, Duke UniversityAuthor Biography Header
Peter Kolchin, the Henry Clay Reed Professor of History at the University of Delaware,
is the author of numerous books, most recently A Sphinx on the American Land:
The Nineteenth Century South in Comparative Perspective (2003).
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
352 pages
Size: 5 1/2 x 8 1/4
$14.00
Trade Paperback
Revised and Updated
Hill and Wang
Pub Date: 09/2003
ISBN: 0-8090-1630-3
Changes
in the Land
Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England
20th - Anniversary Edition
William Cronon
With a Foreword by John Demos and an Afterword by the author
The book that launched environmental history now updated.
Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize
In this landmark work of environmental history, William Cronon offers an original
and profound explanation of the effects European colonists' sense of property
and their pursuit of capitalism had upon the ecosystems of New England. Reissued
here with an updated afterword by the author and a new preface by the distinguished
colonialist John Demos, Changes in the Land, provides a brilliant inter-disciplinary
interpretation of how land and people influence one another. With its chilling
closing line, "The people of plenty were a people of waste," Cronon's
enduring and thought-provoking book is ethno-ecological history at its best.
"Changes in the Land exemplifies, and realizes, the promise of ecological
history with stunning effect. Setting his sights squarely on the well-worn terrain
of colonial New England, [Cronon] fashions a story that is fresh, ingenious, compelling
and altogether important. His approach is at once vividly descriptive and profoundly
analytic."--John Demos, The New York Times Book Review
"A superb achievement: Cronon has changed the terms of historical discourse
regarding colonial New England."--Wilcomb E. Washburn, director of the Office
of American Studies, Smithsonian Institution
"A cogent, sophisticated, and balanced study of Indian-white contact. Gracefully
written, subtly argued, and well informed, it is a work whose implications extend
far beyond colonial New England."--Richard White, Michigan State University
"This is ethno-ecological history at its best . . . American colonial history
will never be the same after this path-breaking, exciting book."--Wilbur
R. Jacobs, University of California, Santa Barbara
"A brilliant performance, from which all students of early American history
will profit."--Edmund S. Morgan, Yale UniversityAuthor Biography Header
William Cronon is the Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History at the University
of Wisconsin--Madison. His book Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
won the Bancroft Prize in 1992.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
288 pages
Size: 5 1/2 x 8 1/4
Notes, Bibliography, Index
$14.00
Trade Paperback
Revised Edition
Hill and Wang
Pub Date: 09/2003
ISBN: 0-8090-1634-6
August 22, 2005