Painter in a Savage Land
The Strange Saga of the First European Artist in North America
Written by Miles Harvey
ABOUT THIS BOOK
In this vibrantly told, meticulously researched book, Miles Harvey reveals one of the most fascinating and overlooked lives in American history. Like The Island of Lost Maps, his bestselling book about a legendary map thief, Painter in a Savage Land is a compelling search into the mysteries of the past. This is the thrilling story of Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, the first European artist to journey to what is now the continental United States with the express purpose of recording its wonders in pencil and paint. Le Moyne’s images, which survive today in a series of spectacular engravings, provide a rare glimpse of Native American life at the pivotal time of first contact with the Europeans–most of whom arrived with the preconceived notion that the New World was an almost mythical place in which anything was possible.
In 1564 Le Moyne and three hundred other French Protestants landed off the coast of Florida, hoping to establish the first permanent European settlement in the sprawling territory that would become the United States. Their quest ended in gruesome violence, but Le Moyne was one of the few colonists to escape, returning across the Atlantic to create dozens of illustrations of the local Native Americans–works of lasting importance to scholars. Today, he is also recognized as an influential early painter of flowers and plants.
A Zelig-like persona, Le Moyne worked for some of the most prominent figures of his time, including Sir Walter Raleigh. Harvey’s research, moreover, suggests a fascinating link to the notorious Mary Queen of Scots. Largely forgotten until the twentieth century, Le Moyne’s pieces have become increasingly sought after in the art world–at a 2005 auction, a previously unknown book of his botanical drawings sold for a million dollars.
In re-creating the life and legacy of Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, Miles Harvey weaves a tale of both intellectual intrigue and swashbuckling drama. Replete with shipwrecks, mutinies, religious wars, pirate raids, and Indian attacks, Painter in a Savage Land is truly a tour de force of narrative nonfiction.
About the Author
Miles Harvey is the author of The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime, a national and international bestseller that was named one of the top ten books of 2000 by USA Today and the Chicago Sun-Times. The recipient of a 2004-2005 Illinois Arts Council Award for prose and a 2007-2008 Knight-Wallace fellowship at the University of Michigan, he teaches at Northwestern University and lives in Chicago with his wife and children.
Category: History - United States; Art - History - American
Format: Hardcover, 368 pages
On Sale: June 24, 2008
Price: $27.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6120-4 (1-4000-6120-2)
Imprint: Random House
Also available as an eBook.
Founding Faith
Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America
Written by Steven Waldman
about this book
The culture wars have distorted the dramatic story of how Americans came to worship freely. Many activists on the right maintain that the United States was founded as a “Christian nation.” Many on the left contend that the Founders were secular or Deist and that the First Amendment was designed to boldly separate church and state throughout the land. None of these claims are true, argues Beliefnet.com editor in chief Steven Waldman. With refreshing objectivity, Waldman narrates the real story of how our nation’s Founders forged a new approach to religious liberty, a revolutionary formula that promoted faith . . . by leaving it alone.
This fast-paced narrative begins with earlier settlers’ stunningly unsuccessful efforts to create a Christian paradise, and concludes with the presidencies of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison, during which the men who had devised lofty principles regarding the proper relationship between church and state struggled to practice what they’d preached. We see how religion helped cause, and fuel, the Revolutionary War, and how the surprising alliance between Enlightenment philosophers such as Jefferson and Madison and evangelical Christians resulted in separation of church and state.
As the drama unfolds, Founding Faith vividly describes the religious development of five Founders. Benjamin Franklin melded the morality-focused Puritan theology of his youth and the reason-based Enlightenment philosophy of his adulthood. John Adams’s pungent views on religion–hatred of the Church of England and Roman Catholics–stoked his revolutionary fervor and shaped his political strategy. George Washington came to view religious tolerance as a military necessity. Thomas Jefferson pursued a dramatic quest to “rescue” Jesus, in part by editing the Bible. Finally, it was James Madison–the tactical leader of the battle for religious freedom–who crafted an integrated vision of how to prevent tyranny while encouraging religious vibrancy.
The spiritual custody battle over the Founding Fathers and the role of religion in America continues today. Waldman provocatively argues that neither side in the culture war has accurately depicted the true origins of the First Amendment. He sets the record straight, revealing the real history of religious freedom to be dramatic, unexpected, paradoxical, and inspiring.
An interactive library of the key writings by the Founding Father, on separation of church and state, personal faith, and religious liberty can be found at www.beliefnet.com/foundingfaith.
Praise for Founding Faith
“Steven Waldman, a veteran journalist and co-founder of Beliefnet.com, a religious web site, surveys the convictions and legacy of the founders clearly and fairly, with a light touch but a careful eye.”—New York Times Book Review
“Waldman ends by encouraging us to be like the founders. We should understand their principles, learn from their experience, then have at it ourselves. “We must pick up the argument that they began and do as they instructed – use our reason to determine our views.” A good place to start is this entertaining, provocative book.”—New York Times Book Review
"Steven Waldman's enlightening new book, "Founding Faith," is wise and engaging on many levels, but Waldman has done a particular service in detailing Madison's role in creating a culture of religious freedom that has served America so well for so long…."Founding Faith" is an excellent book about an important subject: the inescapable—but manageable—intersection of religious belief and public life. With a grasp of history and an understanding of the exigencies of the moment, Waldman finds a middle ground between those who think of the Founders as apostles in powdered wigs and those who assert, equally inaccurately, that the Founders believed religion had no place in politics."–Newsweek"
Well-wrought, well-written and well-reasoned—a welcome infusion of calm good sense into a perennially controversial and relevant subject."–Kirkus"Founding Faith takes up two central questions about religion in early America. First, what did such Founding Fathers as Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison usually believe? And second, how did it come about that the First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees that "Congress shall make no laws respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof"? The answers to these questions carry implications for our lives today, since at stake is the flash-point principle of the separation of church and state." –Washington Post
“There is a fierce custody battle going on out there for ownership of the Founding Fathers. Founding Faith strikes me as a major contribution to that debate, a sensible and sophisticated argument that the Founders’ religious convictions defy our current categories.” –Joseph Ellis, author of American Creation
“Steven Waldman does a great job describing the nuances of the Founders’ beliefs and the balances they struck, thus rescuing them from those on both sides who would oversimplify their ideas.”
–Walter Isaacson, president of the Aspen Institute and author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life.“This is a history every American should know, and Waldman masterfully tells it.”
–Jim Wallis, author of The Great Awakening“Steven Waldman recovers the founders’ true beliefs with an insightful and truly original argument. It will change the way you think about the separation of church and state.” –George Stephanopoulos, chief Washington correspondent, ABC News, and anchor of This Week
“Steve Waldman makes the strong case that the culture wars have distorted how and why we have religious freedom in America. Americans can be inspired by this story–the extraordinary birth story of freedom of religion.” –William J. Bennett, author of America: The Last Best Hope
“An unusually well-balanced book on an unusually controversial subject. Not every reader will agree with Waldman that, of the Founding Fathers, James Madison’s conclusions about religion and society were best. But all should be grateful for the way Waldman replaces myths with facts, clarifies the complexity in making the Founders speak to present-day problems, and allows the Founders who differed with Madison a full and sympathetic hearing. An exceptionally fair, well-researched, and insightful book.” –Mark A. Noll, University of Notre Dame, author of America’s God
about the author
Steven Waldman is co-founder, CEO, and editor in chief of Beliefnet.com, the largest faith and spirituality website. Previously, Waldman was the national editor of U.S. News & World Report and a national correspondent for Newsweek. His writings have also appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Slate, The Washington Monthly, National Review, and elsewhere. He appears frequently on television and radio to discuss religion and politics. He is also the author of The Bill, a book about the creation of AmeriCorps. Waldman lives in New York with his wife, the writer Amy Cunningham, and their children, Joseph and Gordon.
Category: Religion; History - United States
Format: Hardcover, 304 pages
On Sale: March 11, 2008
Price: $26.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6437-3 (1-4000-6437-6)
Imprint: Random House
Also available as an eBook.
American Creation
Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic
Written by Joseph Ellis
From the first shots fired at Lexington to the signing of the Declaration of Independence to the negotiations for the Louisiana Purchase, Joseph J. Ellis guides us through the decisive issues of the nation’s founding, and illuminates the emerging philosophies, shifting alliances, and personal and political foibles of our now iconic leaders–Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and Adams. He casts an incisive eye on the founders’ achievements, arguing that the American Revolution was, paradoxically, an evolution–and that part of what made it so extraordinary was the gradual pace at which it occurred. He explains how the idea of a strong federal government was eventually embraced by the American people, and details the emergence of the two-party system, which stands as the founders’ most enduring legacy.
Ellis is equally incisive about their failures, and he makes clear how their inability to abolish slavery and to reach a just settlement with the Native Americans has played an equally important role in shaping our national character. With eloquence and insight, Ellis strips the mythic veneer of the revolutionary generation to reveal men both human and inspired, possessed of both brilliance and blindness. American Creation is an audiobook that delineates an era of flawed greatness, at a time when understanding our origins is more important than ever.
Category: History - United States - Revolutionary Period (1775-1800)
Format: Trade Paperback, 512 pages
On Sale: October 30, 2007
Price: $26.95
ISBN: 978-0-7393-2618-3 (0-7393-2618-X)
Imprint: Random House Large Print
Also available as an unabridged audio CD.
about this book
Mr. Jefferson's Women
Written by Jon Kukla
ABOUT THIS BOOK
A pioneering study of Thomas Jefferson’s relationships with women in his personal life and in American society and politics.
The author of the Declaration of Independence, who wrote the words “all men are created equal,” was surprisingly hostile toward women. In eight chapters based on fresh research in little-used sources, Jon Kukla offers the first comprehensive study of Jefferson and women since the controversies of his presidency.
Educated with other boys at a neighborhood boarding school, young Jefferson learned early that homemaking was the realm of his mother and six sisters. From adolescence through maturity, his views about domesticity scarcely wavered, while his discomfort around women brought a succession of embarrassments as he sought to control his emotions. After Rebecca Burwell declined his awkward proposal of marriage, Jefferson reacted first with despondence, then with predatory misogyny, and finally with the attempted seduction of Elizabeth Moore Walker, the wife of a boyhood friend. His marriage at twenty-nine to Martha Wayles Skelton brought a decade of genuine happiness, but ended in despair with her death from complications of childbirth. In Paris a few years later, Maria Cosway rekindled his capacity for romantic friendship but ultimately disappointed his hopes. Against the background of these relationships, Kukla offers a fresh and cogent account of Jefferson’s liaison with Sally Hemings.
Jefferson’s individual relationships with these women are examined in depth in five chapters. Abigail Adams, the women of Paris, and the wife of a British ambassador figure in the first of two closing chapters that examine Jefferson’s attitudes toward women in public life. In the last chapter, Kukla draws connections between Jefferson’s life experiences and his role in defining the subordination of women in law, culture, and education during and after the American Revolution.About the Author
Jon Kukla received his B.A. from Carthage College and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. From 1973 through 1990 he directed historical research and publishing at the Library of Virginia. From 1992 to 1998 he was curator and then director of the Historic New Orleans Collection. From 2000 to 2007 he was director of Red Hill–The Patrick Henry National Memorial in Charlotte County, Virginia. He now lives and writes in Richmond, Virginia.
Category: History - United States - Colonial Period (1600-1775); Biography & Autobiography - Women
Format: Hardcover, 304 pages
On Sale: October 9, 2007
Price: $26.95
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4324-8 (1-4000-4324-7)
Imprint: Knopf Copyright © 1995-2007 Random House, Inc. All rights reserved
Amerigo
The Man Who Gave His Name to America
Written by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
ABOUT THIS BOOK
In 1507, European cartographers were struggling to redraw their maps of the world and to name the newly found lands of the Western Hemisphere. The name they settled on: America, after Amerigo Vespucci, an obscure Florentine explorer.In Amerigo, the award-winning scholar Felipe Fernández-Armesto answers the question “What’s in a name?” by delivering a rousing flesh-and-blood narrative of the life and times of Amerigo Vespucci. Here we meet Amerigo as he really was: a sometime slaver and small-time jewel trader; a contemporary, confidant, and rival of Columbus; an amateur sorcerer who attained fame and honor by dint of a series of disastrous failures and equally grand self-reinventions. Filled with well-informed insights and amazing anecdotes, this magisterial and compulsively readable account sweeps readers from Medicean Florence to the Sevillian court of Ferdinand and Isabella, then across the Atlantic of Columbus to the brave New World where fortune favored the bold.Amerigo Vespucci emerges from these pages as an irresistible avatar for the age of exploration–and as a man of genuine achievement as a voyager and chronicler of discovery. A product of the Florentine Renaissance, Amerigo in many ways was like his native Florence at the turn of the sixteenth century: fast-paced, flashy, competitive, acquisitive, and violent. His ability to sell himself–evident now, 500 years later, as an entire hemisphere that he did not “discover” bears his name–was legendary. But as Fernández-Armesto ably demonstrates, there was indeed some fire to go with all the smoke: In addition to being a relentless salesman and possibly a ruthless appropriator of other people’s efforts, Amerigo was foremost a person of unique abilities, courage, and cunning. And now, in Amerigo, this mercurial and elusive figure finally has a biography to do full justice to both the man and his remarkable era.“A dazzling new biography . . . an elegant tale.”
–Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“An outstanding historian of Atlantic exploration, Fernández-Armesto delves into the oddities of cultural transmission that attached the name America to the continents discovered in the 1490s. Most know that it honors Amerigo Vespucci, whom the author introduces as an amazing Renaissance character independent of his name’s fame–and does Fernández-Armesto ever deliver.” –Booklist (starred review)
Category: Biography & Autobiography - Historical; History - United StatesFormat: Hardcover, 256 pages
On Sale: August 7, 2007
Price: $24.95
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6281-2 (1-4000-6281-0)
Imprint: Random House
Copyright © 1995-2007 Random House, Inc. All rights reserved
The Divided Ground
Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution
Alan Taylor
ABOUT THIS BOOK
In 1761, at a boarding school in New England, a young Mohawk Indian named Joseph Brant first met Samuel Kirkland, the son of a colonial clergyman. They began a long and intense relationship that would redefine North America. For nearly fifty years, their lives intertwined, at first as close friends but later as bitter foes. Kirkland served American expansion as a missionary and agent, promoting Indian conversion and dispossession. Brant pursued an alternative future for the continent by defending an Indian borderland nestled between the British in Canada and the Americans, rather than divided by them.
By telling their dramatic story, Alan Taylor illuminates the dual borders that consolidated the new American nation after the Revolution. By constricting Indians within reservation lines, the Americans sought to control their northern boundary with the British Empire, which lingered in Canada. The border became firm as thousands of settlers established farms, held as private property, all around the new reservations. This struggle also pitted the federal government against the leaders of New York, competing to control the lands and the Indians of the border country. They contended for the highest of stakes because the transformation of Indian land constructed the wealth and the power of states, nations, and empires in North America.
In addition to land, the frontier contest pivoted on murders, which repeatedly tested who had legal jurisdiction: Indians or newcomers. To assert power, the contending regimes sought to try and execute Indians or settlers who killed one another. To defend native autonomy, however, the Indians asserted an alternative by “covering the graves” of victims with presents to console their kin. When the gallows replaced covered graves, the Indians lost their middle position as free peoples.
Taylor breaks with the stereotype of Indians as defiant but doomed traditionalists, as noble but futile defenders of ancient ways. In fact, the borderland Indians demonstrated remarkable adaptability and creativity in coping with the contending powers and with the growing numbers of invading settlers. Led by Joseph Brant, the natives tried to manage, rather than entirely to block, the process of settlement. Taylor shows that they did so in ways meant to preserve Indian autonomy and prosperity. Rather than sell lands for a song to governments, the Indians sought greater control and revenue by leasing lands directly to settler tenants. But neither the British nor the American leaders could accept Indians as landlords, as competitors in the construction of power from land in North America. Once a “middle ground,” the borderland became a divided ground, partitioned between the British Empire and the American republic.About the Author
Alan Taylor is a professor of history at the University of California at Davis and a contributing editor at The New Republic. He is the author of Liberty Men and Great Proprietors, American Colonies, and William Cooper’s Town which won the Bancroft and Pulitzer prizes for American history.
Category: History - United States - 19th Century; History - Military - United States
Format: Hardcover, 560 pages
On Sale: February 21, 2006
Price: $35.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-45471-7 (0-679-45471-3)
Imprint: Knopf
Format: Trade Paperback, 560 pages
On Sale: January 9, 2007
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-1-4000-7707-6 (1-4000-7707-9)
Copyright © 1995-2006 Random House, Inc. All rights reserved
The First Emancipator
The Forgotten Story of Robert Carter, the Founding Father Who Freed His Slaves
Andrew Levy
about this book
In 1791, Robert Carter III, a pillar of Virginia’s Colonial aristocracy, broke with his peers by arranging the freedom of his nearly five hundred slaves. It would be the largest single act of liberation in the history of American slavery before the Emancipation Proclamation. Despite this courageous move–or perhaps because of it–Carter’s name has all but vanished from the annals of American history. In this haunting, brilliantly original work, Andrew Levy explores the confluence of circumstance, conviction, war, and emotion that led to Carter’s extraordinary act.
As Levy points out, Carter was not the only humane master, nor the sole partisan of emancipation, in that freedom-loving age. So why did he dare to do what other visionary slave owners only dreamed of? In answering this question, Levy reveals the unspoken passions that divided Carter from others of his class, and the religious conversion that enabled him to see his black slaves in a new light. Drawing on years of painstaking research and written with grace and fire, The First Emancipator is an astonishing, challenging, and ultimately inspiring book.
“[Andrew Levy] brings a literary sensibility to the study of history, and has written a richly complex book, one that transcends Carter’s story to consider larger questions of individual morality and national memory.”
–The New York Times Book Review
“A vivid narrative of the future emancipator’s evolution.”
–The Washington Post Book World
“Highly recommended . . . a truly remarkable story about an eccentric American hero and visionary . . . should be standard reading for anyone with an interest in American history.”
–Library Journal (starred review)
“Absorbing. . . Well researched and thoroughly fascinating, this forgotten history will appeal to readers interested in the complexities of American slavery.”
–Booklist (starred review)
about the author
ANDREW LEVY was born in Mount Holly, New Jersey, in 1962. He received an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars in 1986 and a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Pennsylvania in 1991. Levy has published essays in Harper’s, Dissent, and The American Scholar, book reviews in the Chicago Tribune and The Philadelphia Inquirer, and has written or co-edited several books on American literature and writing. He lives in Indianapolis with his wife, Siobhan, and their son, Aedan, and is currently Cooper Chair at Butler University.
Publisher: Random House
Format: Hardcover, 336 pages
Pub Date: April 2005
Price: $25.95
ISBN: 0-375-50865-1
Also available as an eBook.
Format: Trade Paperback, 336 pages
On Sale: January 9, 2007
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-76104-1 (0-375-76104-7)
New York Burning
Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan
Jill Lepore
about this book
Pulitzer Prize Finalist
Anisfield-Wolf Award Winner
Over a frigid few weeks in the winter of 1741, ten fires blazed across Manhattan. With each new fire, panicked whites saw more evidence of a slave uprising. In the end, thirteen black men were burned at the stake, seventeen were hanged and more than one hundred black men and women were thrown into a dungeon beneath City Hall.
In New York Burning, Bancroft Prize-winning historian Jill Lepore recounts these dramatic events, re-creating, with path-breaking research, the nascent New York of the seventeenth century. Even then, the city was a rich mosaic of cultures, communities and colors, with slaves making up a full one-fifth of the population. Exploring the political and social climate of the times, Lepore dramatically shows how, in a city rife with state intrigue and terror, the threat of black rebellion united the white political pluralities in a frenzy of racial fear and violence.
about the author
Jill Lepore is Professor of History at Harvard University and the author of The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity, which won both the Bancroft Prize and Phi Beta Kappa's Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, as well as A is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States. She is a contributor to The New Yorker. Lepore lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Category: History - United States - Colonial Period (1600-1775)
Publisher: Knopf
Pub Date: August 2005
352 Pages
ISBN: 1-4000-4029-9
Price: $26.95
Format: Trade Paperback, 352 pages
On Sale: August 8, 2006
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-1-4000-3226-6 (1-4000-3226-1)
Revolutionary Mothers
Women in the Struggle for America's Independence
Carol Berkin
about this book
The American Revolution was a home-front war that brought scarcity, bloodshed, and danger into the life of every American. In this groundbreaking history, Carol Berkin shows us how women played a vital role throughout the conflict.
The women of the Revolution were most active at home, organizing boycotts of British goods, raising funds for the fledgling nation, and managing the family business while struggling to maintain a modicum of normalcy as husbands, brothers and fathers died. Yet Berkin also reveals that it was not just the men who fought on the front lines, as in the story of Margaret Corbin, who was crippled for life when she took her husband’s place beside a cannon at Fort Monmouth. This incisive and comprehensive history illuminates a fascinating and unknown side of the struggle for American independence.
about the author
Carol Berkin, professor of American history at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is the author of A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution, First Generations, and Jonathan Sewall. She lives in New York City.
History - United States - Revolutionary Period (1775-1800)
Hardcover: ISBN: 1-4000-4163-5
February 2005, Price: $24.00
Format: Trade Paperback, 224 pages
On Sale: February 14, 2006
Price: $13.95
ISBN: 978-1-4000-7532-4 (1-4000-7532-7)
August 13, 2008