The Pilgrims and
Pocahontas: Rival Myths of American Origin
by Ann Uhry Abrams,
author of The Valiant Hero: Benjamin West and Grand-Style History
Painting and Elizabeth Johns, University of Pennsylvania
Hardcover
Availability Date: 05/28/99
Available
Retail Price: $28.00
($41.00 Can./£21.50 UK)
ISBN: 0-8133-3497-7
"Abrams reveals stark differences and surprising
similarities in the manner that elites from both regions viewed
themselves and their connection to
the larger American culture.... this readable, cogent, and
provocative study eloquently illustrates how these perceptions
were shaped and then
manipulated to help forge new realities in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries."
Booklist
"A fascinating study of the varied literary and artistic
presentations of the founding of Virginia and Massachusetts.
Abrams shows how different
poets, playwrights, sculptors, painters, politicians, and a host
of others reflected the intellectual and political causes of the
day, from abolition to
feminism."
J.A. Leo Lemay
University of Delaware; author of The American Dream of Captain
John Smith
"Abrams has written a comparative study of New England and
Virginian iconography that will be of great value to anyone
interested in American
regional discourse. Especially noteworthy are her observations
concerning the not always obvious implications of historical
paintings inspired by
fabulous events, such as the rescue of Captain John Smith by
Pocahontas and the landing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth
Rock."
John Seelye
University of Florida and author of Memory's Nation: The Place of
Plymouth Rock
"What a pleasure it is to read Ann Abrams' account of the
Pilgrims and Pocahontas as rival myths of American history. Her
subtle, but always
readable analysis of visual, literary and traditional historical
sources has something to say to anyone interested in how past
generations have
struggled to shape our national identity."
Dan T. Carter
Emory University
Description
Biography
Number of pages: 400
Trim Size: 6X9
Season: SPRING 1999
Captive Selves,
Captivating Others: The Politics and Poetics of Colonial American
Captivity Narratives
by Pauline Turner
Strong, University of Texas at Austin
Hardcover
Availability Date: 06/11/99
Available
Retail Price: $60.00
($87.00 Can./£46.50 UK)
ISBN: 0-8133-1665-0
Description
This book reexamines the Anglo-American literary genre known as
the "Indian captivity narrative" in the context of the
complex historical practice
of captivity across cultural borders in colonial North America.
This detailed and nuanced study of the relationship between
practice and
representation on the one hand and identity and alterity on the
other is an important contribution to cultural studies, American
studies, Native
American studies, women's studies, and historical anthropology.
Biography
Pauline Turner Strong is assistant professor of anthropology at
the University of Texas at Austin.
Number of pages: 280
Trim Size: 6X9
Season: SPRING 1999
The Brave Bostonians:
Hutchinson, Quincy, Franklin, and the Coming of the American
Revolution
by Philip McFarland,
author of Sojourners, Sea Dangers, A House Full of Women, and
Seasons of Fear
Paperback
Availability Date: 02/19/99
Available
Retail Price: $16.00
($23.50 Can./£11.00 UK)
ISBN: 0-8133-3652-X
"[This] coherent and revealing narrative is a small tour de
force."
New York Review of Books
"Shunning caricatures of American revolutionary patriots as
heroes and British loyalists as traitors or cowards, novelist
McFarland (Seasons of
Fear, 1983, etc.) shows in this absorbing narrative of three
lives that the prerevolutionary crisis in Boston in 1774-75 had
all the complexity and
tragedy of a true civil war, and neither side had any monopoly on
courage, virtue, or villany.... A compelling narrative that reads
like excellent
fiction."
Kirkus Reviews
"[A] lively reconstruction of the political crisis in Boston
in 1774-75.... McFarland's appealing reconstruction endows these
events with a
you-are-there immediacy."
Booklist
"An excellent work that deserves to have a wide readership.
It is interesting, thoughtful, and well written."
Robert Middlekauff
Author of Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies
"The Brave Bostonians tells with great vividness and human
detail the story of how, in 1774 and 1775, England and America
moved, step by step,
toward a war that neither wanted. It provides a gripping
introduction to the American Revolution for anyone anxious to
know more about that
event."
Pauline Maier
Author of American Scripture
"The Brave Bostonians is an exciting story told with
stylistic sureness, narrative pacing, and a firm command of the
materials. It dramatizes the
human and personal transactions that helped drive a great
historical event."
Justin Kaplan
Author of Walt Whitman: A Life
Description
Most Americans are familiar with the Revolution through its
defining moments: the Stamp Act riots, the Boston Massacre, the
Boston Tea Party,
Paul Revere's ride, the first shots fired at Lexington and
Concord. These were events fueled by the anger of an array of
Bostonians in search of
liberty and justice for an American cause. As a legacy of the
Revolution, their heroic tales have intimately defined our
consciousness as Americans
and the sense of history we carry with us today.
But there is another side to the story, a story of Bostonians
equally brave and as intensely devoted to liberty and justice,
who watched with horror
as their homes were pillaged, their reputations destroyed, and
their lives torn apart. They were the losers, far more deeply
than Britain, King
George, or a host of British Redcoats. But their story is largely
forgotten.
In The Brave Bostonians, acclaimed novelist and historian Philip
McFarland traces both sides through the intertwined lives of
three native, and
eminently respected, Bostonians during the turbulent year
preceding the Revolution. Thomas Hutchinson, the last civilian
governor of the
Massachusetts Bay Colony, stands as the centerpiece of the story.
Unfalteringly loyal to British law and order and far from home as
an exile in
London, he could only agonize over letters and newspaper
headlines as his beloved Boston burst apart at the seams. Josiah
Quincy, an archpatriot
and feverish enemy of Hutchinson's loyalism, drove himself to his
own tubercular death in pursuit of the colony's independence. And
Benjamin
Franklin, the venerable diplomat, scientist, and devoted
Anglophile, fought with considerable skill to hold the British
Empire together before
conceding at last to declare himself heart and soul an American.
These three men, each fiercely loyal in his own way to Boston and
America, stood
in separate corners of the conflict. And each found his own fate.
Told in skillful style through the words of those who endured the
struggles of the times, The Brave Bostonians brings fresh life to
this stirring
period of America's past.
Biography
Philip McFarland is the author of Sojourners, Sea Dangers, A
House Full of Women, and Seasons of Fear. He lives in Lexington,
Massachusetts.
Number of pages: 304
Trim Size: 6X9
Season: SPRING 1999
Selling Territory: WORLD
Duel: Alexander
Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and the Future of America
by Thomas Fleming
Hardcover
Availability Date: 08/20/99
Available
Retail Price: $30.00
($43.50 Can./£20.95 UK)
Basic Books
ISBN: 0-465-01736-3
"Duel, Thomas Fleming's stunning panorama of the fledgling
nation, is a parable of titanic intellect and potential subverted
by ambition; of
vindictiveness, venality, lust, chimerical visions of empire and,
finally, murder.... To be as masterfully concise as Fleming
manages to be is an
achievement in itself, for this epic would have challenged
Tolstoy.... In the end, Duel does a scintillating job of
restoring salient edges that decades
of historical buffing have rounded."
Salon
"Thomas Fleming is one of America's finest writers and
finest historians. This book about two pivotal figures in the
early development of the
United States reads like Shakespearean tragedy. It is riveting,
revealing and relevant as it reminds today's reader that men of
power and position
have always possessed human flaws no matter the time or
place."
Kenneth T. Jackson
Barzun Professor of History and Social Sciences, Columbia
University
"Duel is an utterly absorbing blend of biography and family
conflict, richly personalized, about two of the most complex and
enigmatic figures in
all American history. It has been said that Americans love a
tragedy with a happy ending. In Fleming's skilled hands that
formula gets altered in
gripping ways. Historical truth trumps tragedy as a source of
intense suspense."
Michael Kammen
Cornell University
"Set against a background of scandal and conspiracy,
Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr fought the most famous duel in
American history.
Thomas Fleming has here given us a whole new understanding of
what that fateful contest was about. History in the grand manner
by a master of
his craft."
Lloyd C. Gardner
Rutgers University
"Thomas Fleming's Duel explicates with unsurpassed erudition
the complex circumstances that drew Hamilton and Burr to their
fatal 'interview'
in 1804 and explores in a masterful manner the many ironies that
stemmed from Hamilton's death. Duel is not just a landmark study
of the early
Republic. It is also a gripping tragedy that will deeply move all
who read it."
Richard Buel, Jr.
Wesleyan University
"Fleming's ingenious book clears away the smoke from the
larger political duel that backstopped the famous 1804 duel with
pistols in which two
would-be presidents wound up destroying each other."
Kevin Phillips
author of The Cousins' Wars
"Brimming with intrigue, Duel is an antidote for anyone who
thinks American politics is dull. An action-packed narrative
Hollywood won't be
able to pass up."
Douglas Brinkley
Director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies,
University of New Orleans
"Everyone should read Tom Fleming's Duel. It enlarges our
understanding of an exciting era in American history, while
sharpening our awareness
of the private as well as the public lives of two intriguing
personalities. When Fleming's beguiling style of writing is added
to this mix, the result is
a book hard to put aside."
Paul Nagel
author of Descent from Glory: Four Generations of the Adams
Family
"Sex, violence, treason - Thomas Fleming's Duel has them
all, painted in quick, copious strokes. By telling the story of
two self-doomed outsiders,
Fleming shows the dark side of an era - and of American politics
"
Richard Brookhiser
author of Alexander Hamilton, American
"A master narrativist, Thomas Fleming has an astute grasp of
the importance of character and the clash of personalities and a
keen understanding
of what was happening almost behind the backs of such figures as
Jefferson, Hamilton and Burr."
John Patrick Diggins
Distinguished Professor of History, Graduate School, CUNY
"Tom Fleming, in delightful prose, shows how personal and
fractious politics were in the early American republic, when
intense rivalries played
out within the parties as well as between the parties."Don
Higginbotham, Professor of History, University of North Carolina
"By breathing new life into the familiar carcasses of
Hamilton and Burr, Tom Fleming has produced a superb historical
narrative."
Ted Morgan
author of A Covert Life
"An extraordinary feat of rendering history into a
contemporary adventure story of two magnificently flawed heroes
unable to change their tragic
fates. This is a book in which careful scholarship and novelistic
insight create an exciting and compassionate view of two
exceptional men."
Martin Tucker
Editor, Confrontation
"Thomas Fleming's brilliant re-telling of the Aaron
Burr-Alexander Hamilton duel is full of surprises for those who
know the Founding Fathers
as the plastic icons they have become. Fleming gets the story
right in ways that generations of historians have missed. This is
history at its best. "
Thomas Slaughter
Professor of History, Rutgers University
"One of America's most gifted historians, Tom Fleming here
introduces us to a guileful president, his fatally ambitious
vice-president, their
brilliant if morally challenged antagonist and a larger than life
supporting cast. Duel is a tragedy of Shakesperian dimensions,
unforgettably
narrated by a storyteller at the peak of his powers."
Richard Norton Smith
Gerald R. Ford Museum
Description
All school children know the story of the fatal duel between
Hamilton and Burr - but do they really? In this remarkable
retelling, Thomas Fleming
takes the reader into the post-revolutionary world of 1804, a
chaotic and fragile time in the young country as well as a time
of tremendous global
instability. The success of the French Revolution and the
proclamation of Napoleon as First Consul for Life had enormous
impact on men like
Hamilton and Burr, feeding their own political fantasies at a
time of perceived Federal government weakness and corrosion.
Their hunger for fame
spawned antagonisms that wreaked havoc on themselves and their
families and threatened to destabilize the fragile young American
republic. From
that poisonous brew came the tangle of regret and anger and
ambition that drove the two to their murderous confrontation in
Weehawken, New
Jersey.
Readers will find this is popular narrative history at its most
authoritative, and authoritative history at its most readable.
Biography
Thomas Fleming , a widely respected historian, is the author of
more than forty books of fiction and nonfiction,
including most recently Liberty! The American Revolution, and
biographies of Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin.
Fleming is a frequent guest and contributor to NPR, PBS, A&E,
The History Channel, and The Today Show. He lives
in New York City.
Number of pages: 464
Trim Size: 6-1/8X9-1/4
May 30, 2001