The Slave Ship
A Human History
Marcus Rediker
The missing link in the chain of American slavery
For three centuries slave ships carted millions of people from the coasts of Africa across the Atlantic to the Americas. Much is known of the slave trade and the American plantation system, but little of the ships that made it all possible. In The Slave Ship, award-winning historian Marcus Rediker draws on thirty years of research in maritime archives to create an unprecedented history of these vessels and the human drama acted out on their rolling decks. He reconstructs in chilling detail the lives, deaths, and terrors of captains, sailors, and the enslaved aboard a “floating dungeon” trailed by sharks. From the young African kidnapped from his village and sold into slavery by a neighboring tribe to the would-be priest who takes a job as a sailor on a slave ship only to be horrified at the evil he sees to the captain who relishes having “a hell of my own,” Rediker illuminates the lives of people who were thought to have left no trace.
This is a tale of tragedy and terror, but also an epic of resilience, survival, and the creation of something entirely new. Marcus Rediker restores the slave ship to its rightful place alongside the plantation as a formative institution of slavery, a place where a profound and still haunting history of race, class, and modern economy was made.
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$27.95
Book: Hardcover | 5.98 x 9.01in | 448 pages | ISBN 9780670018239 | 04 Oct 2007 | Viking Adult | AdultHead and Heart: American Christianities
by Garry Wills
A landmark examination of Christianity's place in American life across the broad sweep of this country's history, from the Puritans to the presidential administration of George W. Bush.
The struggle within American Christianity, Garry Wills argues, now and throughout our country's history, is between the head and the heart: between reason and emotion, Enlightenment and Evangelism. Why has this been so? How has the tension between the two poles played out, and with what consequences, over the past 400 years? How "Christian" is America, after all? Garry Wills brings a lifetime's worth of thought about these questions to bear on a magnificent historical reckoning that offers much needed perspective on some of the most contentious issues of our time.
A religious revolution occurred in America in the 18th century, one that saw the emergence of an Enlightenment religious culture whose hallmarks were tolerance for other faiths and a belief that religion was a matter best divorced from political institutions-the proverbial "separation of church and state." Wills shows us just how incredibly radical a departure this separation was: there was simply no precedent for it. To put this leap in perspective, Wills provides a grounding in the pre-Enlightenment religion that preceded it, beginning with the early Puritans. He then provides a thrillingly clear unpacking of the steps, particularly Madison's and Jefferson's, by which church-state separation was enshrined in the Constitution, and reveals the great irony of the efforts of today's Religious Right to blur the lines between the two. In fact, it is precisely that separation that has allowed religion in America to flourish since the disestablishment of religion created a free market, as it were, and competition for souls led to the profusion of denominations across the length and breadth of the land.
As Wills examines the key movements and personalities that have transformed America's religious landscape, we see again and again the same pattern emerge: a cooling of popular religious fervor followed by a grassroots explosion in evangelical activity, generally at a time of great social transformation and anxiety. But such forces inevitably go too far, provoking a backlash as is happening right now with the forces of Creationism and the anti-abortion fundamentalists.
Garry Wills closes with a penetrating dissection of the Religious Right's current machinations and the threat they pose to the enlightened religion that has proved to be such a fertile and enduring force throughout American history. But in the end, Wills's abiding message is to be vigilant against the triumph of emotions over reason, but to know that the tension between the two is in fact necessary, inevitable, and unending.Garry Wills is one of the most respected writers on religion today. He is the translator of Saint Augustine’s Confessions and author of Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives), The Rosary, What Jesus Meant, Why I Am a Catholic, Papal Sin, and Lincoln at Gettysburg, which won the Pulitzer Prize. He is professor of history emeritus at Northwestern University.
Book: Hardcover | $29.95 6.14 x 9.25in | 640 pages | ISBN 9781594201462 | 04 Oct 2007 | The Penguin Press | Adult
The Shawnees and the War for America
Colin G. Calloway
The Penguin Library of American Indian History series
Long before the American Revolution, the Shawnees lived in Ohio, hunted in Kentucky, and traveled as far afield as Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Missouri. White settlers, however, sharply curtailed their freedom. With the courage and resilience embodied by their legendary leader Tecumseh, the Shawnee tribe waged a war of territorial and cultural resistance that lasted for more than sixty years. For a time the Shawnees and their allies met American forces on nearly equal terms—but their story is of an embattled nation fighting to maintain its cultural and political independence. Here is the account of the early American settlers’ drive to occupy the West, the Shawnees’ unwavering defense of their homeland, and the bitter battles that resulted. Here too are the alliances that the Shawnees forged with their Indian neighbors to present a united resistance, as well as instances of cooperation, collaboration, and intermarriage between the opposing forces.
Book: Hardcover | $19.95 | 10.74 x 7.51in | 256 pages | ISBN 9780670038626 | 05 Jul 2007 | Viking Adult
The Mayflower Papers
Selected Writings of Colonial New England
Various - Author
Nathaniel Philbrick - Editor/introduction
Thomas Philbrick - Editor/introduction
The most important personal accounts of the Plymouth Colony—the key sources of Nathaniel Philbrick’s New York Times bestseller Mayflower
The most important personal accounts of the Plymouth Colony?the key sources of Nathaniel Philbrick?s New York Times bestseller Mayflower
National Book Award winner Nathaniel Philbrick and his father, Thomas Philbrick, present the most significant and readable original works that were used in the writing of Mayflower, offering a definitive look at a crucial era of America?s history. The selections include William Bradford?s ?Of Plymouth Plantation? (1651), the most comprehensive of all contemporary accounts of settlement in seventeenth-century America; Benjamin Church?s ?Entertaining Passages Relating to Philip?s War 1716,? an eye-opening account from Church?s field notes from battle; and much more. Providing explanatory notes for every piece, the editors have vividly re- created the world of seventeenth-century New England for anyone interested in the early history of our nation.Book: Paperback | $15.00 | 8.26 x 5.23in | 336 pages | ISBN 9780143104988 | 24 Apr 2007 | Penguin Classics
Thomas Paine
Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations
Craig Nelson
A thrilling biography of America's most controversial founding father and the revolutionary age he helped to shapeDespite being a founder of both the United States and the French Republic, the creator of the phrase “United States of America,” and the author of three of the biggest bestsellers of the eighteenth century, Thomas Paine is perhaps the least well known – and the most controversial – of the American founding fathers. Unlike such friends and allies as Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, and John Adams, the world’s first crusader for the public good has always remained a somewhat indistinct figure. How this lower-class British tradesman managed not only to have written the cornerstone of American democracy, Common Sense, but become a revered citizen of the world are questions that have challenged historians for centuries, and have more often than not left us with biographies that are more monumental than illuminating.
In Craig Nelson’s Thomas Paine we now have a rich and vivid portrait that does justice to this towering figure of our history, one that brings him to life against the dramatic backdrop of the Revolutionary era and the heady intellectual exhilaration of the Age of Enlightenment. Nelson traces Paine’s path from his years as a struggling London mechanic to his journey to seek his fortune in the New World (in which he arrived on a stretcher, after a nearly deadly bout of shipboard typhus); from his early career as a crusading pamphleteer to his emergence as the heroic voice of revolutionary fervor on two continents; from his miraculous escape from execution in Paris during The Terror to his final years in America, where the once-lionized patriot spent his final days nearly impoverished and in the throes of dementia. Throughout his insightful portrait Nelson takes full account of this paradoxical figure, whom some contemporaries judged as brilliant and charismatic and others disparaged as abrasive and egotistical, a cherished patriot who was nonetheless dismissed by John Adams as a “disastrous meteor” and Teddy Roosevelt as a “dirty little atheist.”
Five years in the making, drawing on both the most recent scholarship and the archives of Philadelphia, Washington, New York, Paris, London, Lewes, and Thetford, Thomas Paine restores this often misunderstood man to the stature that he deserves, and reveals him, a man who famously asserted that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again,” to be as much a man of our own time as a paragon of the Enlightenment.
Craig NelsonCraig Nelson is the author of four previous books, including The First Heroes and Let's Get Lost. His writings have appeared in Salon, The New England Review, Blender, Genre, and a host of other publications. He was an editor at HarperCollins, Hyperion, and Random House for almost twenty years and has been profiled by Variety, Interview, Manhattan, Inc., and Time Out.
Book: Hardcover | $27.95 | 6.14 x 9.25in | 416 pages | ISBN 9780670037889 | 21 Sep 2006 | Viking Adult
Mayflower
A Story of Courage, Community, and War
Nathaniel Philbrick
From the bestselling author of In the Heart of the Sea - winner of the National Book Award - the startling story of the Plymouth Colony
From the perilous ocean crossing to the shared bounty of the first Thanksgiving, the Pilgrim settlement of New England has become enshrined as our most sacred national myth. Yet, as bestselling author Nathaniel Philbrick reveals in his spellbinding new book, the true story of the Pilgrims is much more than the well-known tale of piety and sacrifice; it is a fifty-five-year epic that is at once tragic, heroic, exhilarating, and profound.
The Mayflower's religious refugees arrived in Plymouth Harbor during a period of crisis for Native Americans as disease spread by European fishermen devastated their populations. Initially the two groups—the Wampanoags, under the charismatic and calculating chief Massasoit, and the Pilgrims, whose pugnacious military officer Miles Standish was barely five feet tall—maintained a fragile working relationship. But within decades, New England would erupt into King Philip's War, a savagely bloody conflict that nearly wiped out English colonists and natives alike and forever altered the face of the fledgling colonies and the country that would grow from them.
With towering figures like William Bradford and the distinctly American hero Benjamin Church at the center of his narrative, Philbrick has fashioned a fresh and compelling portrait of the dawn of American history—a history dominated right from the start by issues of race, violence, and religion.
Nathaniel Philbrick, is a leading authority on the history of Nantucket Island. His In the Heart of the Sea won the National Book Award. His latest book is Sea of Glory, about the epic U.S. Exploring Expedition of 1838–1842. His other books include Away off Shore: Nantucket Island and Its People, 1602-1890 (which Russell Baker called "indispensable") and Abram's Eyes: The Native American Legend of Nantucket Island ("a classic of historical truthtelling," according to Stuart Frank, director of the Kendall Whaling Museum). He has written an introduction to a new edition of Joseph Hart's Miriam Coffin, or The Whale Fisherman, a Nantucket novel (first published in 1834) that Melville relied upon for information about the island when writing Moby Dick.
Philbrick, a champion sailboat racer, has also written extensively about sailing, including The Passionate Sailor (1987) and the forthcoming Second Wind: A Sunfish Sailor's Odyssey. He was editor in chief of the classic Yaahting: A Parody (1984).
In his role as director of the Egan Institute of Maritime Studies, Philbrick, who is also a research fellow at the Nantucket Historical Association, gives frequent talks about Nantucket and sailing. He has appeared on NBC Today Weekend, A&E's Biography series, and National Public Radio and has served as a consultant for the movie Moby Dick, shown on the USA Network. He received a bachelor of Arts from Brown University and a Master of Arts in American Literature from Duke. He lives on Natucket with his wife and two children.
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$29.95About Penguin Group USA Copyright © 2006
Middle Passages
African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005
James T. Campbell
Penguin announces a prestigious new series under presiding editor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Many works of history deal with the journeys of blacks in bondage from Africa to the United States along the “middle passage,” but there is also a rich and little examined history of African Americans traveling in the opposite direction. In Middle Passages, award-winning historian James T. Campbell vividly recounts more than two centuries of African American journeys to Africa, including the experiences of such extraordinary figures as Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Richard Wright, Malcolm X, and Maya Angelou. A truly groundbreaking work, Middle Passages offers a unique perspective on African Americans’ ever-evolving relationship with their ancestral homeland, as well as their complex, often painful relationship with the United States.Book: Hardcover | 9.01 x 5.98in | 544 pages | ISBN 9781594200830 | 04 May 2006 | The Penguin Press$29.95
Benjamin Franklin, The Portable Benjamin Franklin, Larzer Ziff - Editor/introduction
Gordon Wood, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different
October 18, 2007