The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family
Annette Gordon-Reed
"Pathbreaking ... and very moving" (Edmund S. Morgan)—the multigenerational story of Thomas Jefferson's hidden slave family.
This epic work tells the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president had been systematically expunged from American history until very recently. Now, historian and legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed traces the Hemings family from its origins in Virginia in the 1700s to the family's dispersal after Jefferson's death in 1826. It brings to life not only Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson but also their children and Hemings's siblings, who shared a father with Jefferson's wife, Martha. The Hemingses of Monticello sets the family's compelling saga against the backdrop of Revolutionary America, Paris on the eve of its own revolution, 1790s Philadelphia, and plantation life at Monticello. Much anticipated, this book promises to be the most important history of an American slave family ever written.
Annette Gordon-Reed is a professor of law at New York Law School and a professor of history at Rutgers University. She is the author of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. She lives in New York City.
September 2008 / hardcover / ISBN 978-0-393-06477-36 1/8" x 9 1/4" / 37 illustrations / 608 pages / History
Our Savage Neighbors
How Indian War Transformed Early America
Peter Silver
“No recent work of history ... has presented such a distinctive—and beautifully resonant—authorial voice.”—John Demos, Yale University
The colonial communities of eighteenth-century America were perhaps the most racially, ethnically, and religiously mixed societies on earth. Lutherans and Presbyterians, Quakers, Catholics, and Covenentors, the Irish, the German, the French, the Welsh—groups that rarely intermingled in Europe—were thrown together when they confronted the American countryside. Rather than embracing the inescapable and ever-increasing diversity, the European settler communities had their very existence threatened by the tensions and fears among their own groups. Only through “Indian-hating”—in both military and rhetorical forms—could the splintered colonists find a common ground.
In potent, graceful prose that sensitively unearths the social complexity and tangled history of colonial relations, Peter Silver gives us an astonishingly vivid picture of eighteenth-century America. He straddles cultural history, political history, social history, and ethnohistory to offer groundbreaking insights into the seminal forces that continue to shape the United States today.
Peter Silver is an assistant professor of history at Princeton University. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
November 2007 / hardcover / ISBN 978-0-393-06248-9
6 1/8" x 9 1/4" / 352 pages / History/United States
Leviathan
The History of Whaling in America
Eric Jay Dolin
The epic history of the "iron men in wooden boats" who built an industrial empire through the pursuit of whales.
"To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme," Herman Melville proclaimed, and this absorbing history demonstrates that few things can capture the sheer danger and desperation of men on the deep sea as dramatically as whaling. Eric Jay Dolin begins his vivid narrative with Captain John Smith's botched whaling expedition to the New World in 1614. He then chronicles the rise of a burgeoning industry—from its brutal struggles during the Revolutionary period to its golden age in the mid-1800s when a fleet of more than 700 ships hunted the seas and American whale oil lit the world, to its decline as the twentieth century dawned. This sweeping social and economic history provides rich and often fantastic accounts of the men themselves, who mutinied, murdered, rioted, deserted, drank, scrimshawed, and recorded their experiences in journals and memoirs. Containing a wealth of naturalistic detail on whales, Leviathan is the most original and stirring history of American whaling in many decades. 32 pages of illustrations.
Eric Jay Dolin studied environmental policy at Yale University and MIT, where he received his Ph.D.. He has written extensively on the marine world. Employed by the National Marine Fisheries Service, he lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts.
July 2007 / hardcover / ISBN 978-0-393-06057-7
6" x 9" / 416 pages / History
July 2008 / trade paper / ISBN 978-0-393-33157-8
5 1/2" x 8 1/4" / 480 pages / History
The Rise of American Democracy
Jefferson to Lincoln
Sean Wilentz
A grand political history in a fresh new style of how the elitist young American republic became a rough-and-tumble democracy.
IN THIS MAGISTERIAL WORK, Sean Wilentz traces a historical arc from the earliest days of the republic to the opening shots of the Civil War. One of our finest writers of history, Wilentz brings to life the era after the American Revolution, when the idea of democracy remained contentious, and Jeffersonians and Federalists clashed over the role of ordinary citizens in government of, by, and for the people. The triumph of Andrew Jackson soon defined this role on the national level, while city democrats, Anti-Masons, fugitive slaves, and a host of others hewed their own local definitions. In these definitions Wilentz recovers the beginnings of a discontent—two starkly opposed democracies, one in the North and another in the South—and the wary balance that lasted until the election of Abraham Lincoln sparked its bloody resolution.
SEAN WILENTZ is the George Henry Davis '86 Professor of History and director of the Program in American Studies at Princeton University. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.October 2005 / hardcover / ISBN 0-393-05820-4 / 75 illustrations / 992 pages / HISTORY/UNITED STATES
Men of the West
Life on the American Frontier
Cathy Luchetti
"A lively read, filled with wonderful quotes and photographs."
—Denver Post & Rocky Mountain NewsTHE LURE OF ADVENTURE and riches brought men west. Some had dreams of a quick gold strike, many were explorers drawn to this vast land, and still others were homesteaders eager to put down new roots. Cathy Luchetti, author of Women of the West, uses the words of the men themselves, taken from letters, diaries, and memoirs—not only the iconic cowboys of our imagination but also the doctors, teachers, and ministers. With words and images, she captures both the frontiersmen from the east and the Native Americans whose lives were changed forever by their arrival. "Men of the West is an excellent complement to Cathy Luchetti's two books on women and children in the West—the settler's West, that is. I thoroughly enjoyed it."—Larry McMurtry "This stunning photographic essay constitutes another significant contribution to the contemporary analysis of social and cultural life on the nineteenthcentury frontier."—Booklist
CATHY LUCHETTI is the author of numerous works including Women of the West, Children of the West, and Home on the Range. She lives in Oakland, California.
March 2006 / trade paper / ISBN 0-393-32829-5 / 139 photographs / 288 pages / HISTORY/REGIONALMay 2004 / hardcover / ISBN 0-393-05905-7 / 11" x 9" / 288 pages / History/Regional
American Slavery, American Freedom
Edmund S. Morgan
"If it is possible to understand the American paradox, the marriage of slavery and freedom, Virginia is surely the place to begin," writes Edmund S. Morgan in American Slavery, American Freedom, a study of the tragic contradiction at the core of America. Morgan finds the key to this central paradox in the people and politics of the state that was both the birthplace of the revolution and the largest slaveholding state in the country. With a new introduction. Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize and the Albert J. Beveridge Award.
Edmund S. Morgan is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and the author of Benjamin Franklin. Morgan was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2000.
2003 / paperback reissue / ISBN 0-393-32494-X / 6" x 9" / 464 pages / History
The Genuine Article: A Historian Looks at Early America
Edmund S. Morgan
A passionate and unparalleled look at the lives of the American colonists by the best-selling author of Benjamin Franklin.
"This book amounts to an intellectual autobiography....These pieces are thus a statement of what I have thought about early Americans during nearly seventy years in their company," writes historian Edmund S. Morgan. Dividing his work into twenty-four essays with sections on "New Englanders," "Southerners," and "Revolutionaries," Morgan examines the history of the American colonies from the arrival of the first settlers in 1607 to the radical changes brought forth by the American Revolution. Filled with illuminating discussions of American leaders, including Winthrop, Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, the book is extraordinary in its range—from the (quite lusty) sex lives of the Puritans to the witch trials in Salem and the corrosive effects of slavery on the soul of Virginia. No living historian has had a more profound role in shaping our perceptions of the American colonies than Morgan, and The Genuine Article reflects the genius of this modest giant like no other previous work.
Edmund S. Morgan has been writing for the New York Review of Books for forty years. A Sterling Professor Emeritus at Yale University, he lives in New Haven.
May 2004 / hardcover / ISBN 0-393-05920-0 / 6" x 9" / 320 pages / History
August 13, 2008