American Colonies

In the first volume in the Penguin History of the United States series, edited by Eric Foner, Alan Taylor challenges the traditional story of colonial history by examining the many cultures that helped make America, from the native inhabitants from millennia past through the decades of Western colonization and conquest and across the entire continent, all the way to the Pacific coast.

In a grand-scale narrative history, the bestselling author of two finalists for the Pulitzer Prize now captures the decades when capitalism was at its most unbridled and a few breathtakingly wealthy businessmen utterly transformed America from an agrarian economy to a world power. The years...

What if the local legends were true? What if the whispers from the past never faded? In the quiet corners of New England, where history holds a grudge, some stories are best left untold. From a lonely Vermont trail where a mysterious lantern lures hikers to their doom, to a historic Salem house where a 17th-century diary is not a journal but a trap, this collection unearths the terrifying truths behind the region’s most unsettling folklore. Venture to a salt-scoured lighthouse on the coast of Maine where the dead keeper still stands watch, walk the silent grounds of a Harvard graveyard ...

Discover the Epic Birth of a Nation The Thirteen Colonies by Jaime Bedoya Martínez is a powerful and engaging journey through the early history of the United States. From the indigenous roots and European conquests to the foundation of each of the thirteen original colonies, this book brings to life the struggles, ideals, and triumphs that shaped America. With vivid storytelling and a humanist lens, Bedoya explores the political, cultural, and religious forces that drove English settlers across the Atlantic. Readers will uncover the foundations of democracy, freedom of religion, economic ...

Coyote America is both an environmental and a deep natural history of the coyote. It traces both the five-million-year-long biological story of an animal that has become the "wolf" in our backyards and its cultural evolution from a preeminent spot in Native American religions to the hapless foil of the Road Runner. A deeply American tale, the story of the coyote in the American West and beyond is a sort of Manifest Destiny in reverse.

American History, Volume 1 surveys the broad sweep of American history from the first Native American societies to the end of the Reconstruction period, following the Civil War. Drawing on a deep range of research and years of classroom teaching experience, Thomas S. Kidd offers students an...

#1 New York Times Bestseller OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK “Extraordinary.”—Stephen King “This book is not simply the great American novel; it’s the great novel of las Americas. It’s the great world novel! This is the international story of our times. Masterful.”—Sandra Cisneros...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. The unbelievable true story of the man who built a billion-dollar online drug empire from his bedroom—and almost got away with it In 2011, a twenty-six-year-old libertarian programmer named Ross Ulbricht launched the ultimate free market: the Silk Road, a clandestine...

The setting for this haunting and encyclopedically researched work of history is colonial Massachusetts, where English Puritans first endeavored to "civilize" a "savage" native populace. There, in February 1704, a French and Indian war party descended on the village of Deerfield, abducting a Puritan minister and his children. Although John Williams was eventually released, his daughter horrified the family by staying with her captors and marrying a Mohawk husband.

A top conservative scholar reveals the Constitution’s remarkable power to repair our broken civic culture, rescue our malfunctioning politics, and unify a fractious America Common ground is hard to find in today’s politics. In a society teeming with irreconcilable political perspectives...

Life has dealt him an unfair hand, leaving him with few options. Will a chance encounter with a caring American colonial family provide a poor English boy with a stable home, or will the boy be lost in events that are spiraling out of control? Peter Smith, a boy of humble beginnings, is a testament to the human spirit. Despite his impoverished upbringing, abduction, and mistreatment, he refuses to be defined by his circumstances. Born into poverty and hopelessness on the streets of Portsmouth, England, Peter is forced into a life of crime just to survive. His resilience is tested when he is...

The American Classics Collection is a century-spanning collection of 17 classic novels, short stories, essay, and poetry by American authors, read by a cast of incredible narrators including Kobna Holdbrook-Smith; Nathan Osgood; Robert G. Slade; Jonathan Keeble, and more. Included here are stories by some of the greatest writers of all time, including Ernest Hemingway; Mark Twain; F. Scott Fitzgerald; Edith Wharton; Frederick Douglass; and H.P. Lovecraft, amongst a host of others.

America’s beloved and distinguished historian presents, in a book of breathtaking excitement, drama, and narrative force, the stirring story of the year of our nation’s birth, 1776, interweaving, on both sides of the Atlantic, the actions and decisions that led Great Britain to undertake a...

Four centuries ago, an entire colony vanished. Only one word remained, carved into a tree: CROATOAN. When a desperate mentor arrives at Jude Carrick and Miri Kovács’ Charleston office with whispers of her missing protégé, the investigators of impossible legends are drawn into America’s oldest unsolved mystery. Their search carries them from coastal ruins to swamp-choked chambers, where spirals carved in stone whisper warnings that are more than echoes. The deeper they follow Daniel Harker’s trail, the more they uncover a truth the world was never meant to hear: the colonists did ...

In the shadows of Salem Village in 1692, one young girl must navigate the complexities of a divided society. Often cold and hungry, eight-year-old Verity Manton, an orphaned ragpicker, clings to the scraps of love and kindness in her harsh world. Things get tangled as the village Puritans' strange behavior grows more alarming. Verity is caught between the safety of her life and the promise of a better future with a Quaker family who reaches out to her. Yet, she has been warned her whole life that Quakers are evil. Will Verity have the courage to trust her heart and choose a path that defies...

More than half of American adults and more than 75 percent of young Americans believe in intelligent extraterrestrial life. This level of belief rivals that of belief in God. American Cosmic examines the mechanisms at work behind the thriving belief system in extraterrestrial life, a system that is changing and even supplanting traditional religions.

The Sunday Times Bestseller A new assessment of the West’s colonial record In the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet empire in 1989, many believed that we had arrived at the ‘End of History’ – that the global dominance of liberal democracy had been secured forever. Now however, with...

Said to cure almost any illness, the new street drug Glow has attained almost mythical status in America. The key ingredient in Glow is the Living Blood, which courses through the veins of 17-year-old Washington state resident Fana Wolde. Distrustful of her parents and eager to share her healing powers via an elaborate underground network, Fana sets out on her own. But what she doesn't know is she's being hunted by a mysterious and homicidal group with ties to the Vatican.

Fifteen-year-old Gabe and his sister Emma are swept into the American Revolution, where spies, soldiers, and the fight for freedom will change the United States forever. It's winter in New England and snow is falling on the American colonists. In a rustic cabin in the woods, Gabe and his sister Emma are left to fend for themselves when their father, a Son of Liberty, is arrested during the Boston Tea Party. After the British Army burns down their farm, the two siblings are swept into a journey that begins with Paul Revere's midnight ride and leads straight to the battlefields of Lexington ...

It was a war that would change America—forever. But for those caught in between, it was a battle for their land—and their survival... At the dawn of the 18th century, while the French and English are locked in a battle for the northeast territory, the ancient Indian tribes begin a savage brother-against-brother conflict—forced to take sides in the white man’s war—pushed into an era of great heroism and greater loss. In the tradition of The Last of the Mohicans, the First Frontier Series is a stunningly realistic adventure saga set on America’s earliest battleground. BOOK THREE ...