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› Find signed collectible books: '1831: Year of Eclipse'
EVERYONE KNEW THAT THE GREAT ECLIPSE of 1831 was coming -- and most Americans feared it. Newspapers and almanacs claimed it would be an unparalleled celestial event, and on February 12 citizen and slave alike, from New England to the South, anxiously gazed heavenward. In this remarkable new book, Louis P. Masur shows why Americans saw the eclipse as a portent of their future. The year 1831 was, for the United States, a crucial time when the nation was no longer a young, uncomplicated republic but, rather, a dynamic and conflicted country inching toward cataclysm. By the year's end, nearly every aspect of its political social and cultural life had undergone profound change. Masur organizes 1831 around the themes that he suggests underlie many of the tumultuous events of the year: slavery (or its abolition); the still unresolved tension between states' rights and national priorities; the competing passions of religion and politics; and the alarming effects of new machinery on Americans' relationship to the land. By the summer of 1831, Nat Turner's rebellion was sparking ever more violent arguments over the future of slavery; Andrew Jackson's administration threatened to unravel; and dissent over the economic future of the country festered. Religious revivalism sweeping the North inspired agitation in the working classes; steamboats, railroads, and mechanized reapers were introduced in the competitive rush for profits; and Jackson's harsh policies toward the Cherokee erased most Indians' last hopes of autonomy. Important visitors -- including Gustave Beaumont and Alexis de Toequeville -- watched the developments closely. Their views on this turbulent year would shape world opinion of the new American nation for generations to come. Masur weaves together these disparate events and shows that they shaped both the strategies by which the nation would survive and the very nature of the American character. His is an important and challenging interpretation of antebellum America. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Adams-Jefferson Letters : The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams'
An intellectual dialogue of the highest plane achieved in America, the correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson spanned half a century and embraced government, philosophy, religion, quotidiana, and family griefs and joys. First meeting as delegates to the Continental Congress in 1775, they initiated correspondence in 1777, negotiated jointly as ministers in Europe in the 1780s, and served the early Republiceach, ultimately, in its highest office. At Jefferson's defeat of Adams for the presidency in 1800, they became estranged, and the correspondence lapses from 1801 to 1812, then is renewed until the death of both in 1826, fifty years to the day after the Declaration of Independence.
Lester J. Cappon's edition, first published in 1959 in two volumes, provides the complete correspondence between these two men and includes the correspondence between Abigail Adams and Jefferson. Many of these letters have been published in no other modern edition, nor does any other edition devote itself exclusively to the exchange between Jefferson and the Adamses. Introduction, headnotes, and footnotes inform the reader without interrupting the speakers. This reissue of The Adams-Jefferson Letters in a one-volume unabridged edition brings to a broader audience one of the monuments of American scholarship and, to quote C. Vann Woodward, 'a major treasure of national literature.' [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth'
They began their existence as everyday objects, but in the hands of Bancroft Award-winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, fourteen domestic items from preindustrial Americaranging from a linen tablecloth to an unfinished sockrelinquish their stories and offer profound insights into our history.
In an age when even meals are rarely made from scratch, homespun easily acquires the glow of nostalgia. The objects Ulrich investigates unravel those simplified illusions, revealing important clues to the culture and people who made them. Ulrich uses an Indian basket to explore the uneasy coexistence of native and colonial Americans. A piece of silk embroidery reveals racial and class distinctions, and two old spinning wheels illuminate the connections between colonial cloth-making and war. Pulling these divergent threads together, Ulrich demonstrates how early Americans made, used, sold, and saved textiles in order to assert their identities, shape relationships, and create history. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Alvin Journeyman'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The American Revolution: A History'
"An elegant synthesis done by the leading scholar in the field, which nicely integrates the work on the American Revolution over the last three decades but never loses contact with the older, classic questions that we have been arguing about for over two hundred years." -Joseph J. Ellis, author of Founding Brothers A magnificent account of the revolution in arms and consciousness that gave birth to the American republic. When Abraham Lincoln sought to define the significance of the United States, he naturally looked back to the American Revolution. He knew that the Revolution not only had legally created the United States, but also had produced all of the great hopes and values of the American people. Our noblest ideals and aspirations-our commitments to freedom, constitutionalism, the well-being of ordinary people, and equality-came out of the Revolutionary era. Lincoln saw as well that the Revolution had convinced Americans that they were a special people with a special destiny to lead the world toward liberty. The Revolution, in short, gave birth to whatever sense of nationhood and national purpose Americans have had. No doubt the story is a dramatic one: Thirteen insignificant colonies three thousand miles from the centers of Western civilization fought off British rule to become, in fewer than three decades, a huge, sprawling, rambunctious republic of nearly four million citizens. But the history of the American Revolution, like the history of the nation as a whole, ought not to be viewed simply as a story of right and wrong from which moral lessons are to be drawn. It is a complicated and at times ironic story that needs to be explained and understood, not blindly celebrated or condemned. How did this great revolution come about? What was its character? What were its consequences? These are the questions this short history seeks to answer. That it succeeds in such a profound and enthralling way is a tribute to Gordon Wood's mastery of his subject, and of [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence'
This is a well-written, well-researched, entertaining account of the creation of the United States' Declaration of Independence as well as an analysis of how the declaration has been enshrined as something of a sacred document (a place it did not always hold). Pauline Maier, a history professor at MIT, will no doubt surprise many readers with detective work demonstrating that Jefferson's Declaration of Independence was actually preceded by many local declarations, which have been generally overlooked by historians but which were published throughout the colonies and were well known in their day. American Scripture holds many surprises as it details Jefferson's drafting of the document, the editing process, and the varying regard with which the Declaration of Independence has been held in the past two centuries. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin'
From "the preeminent historian of the Revolution" (Jonathan Yardley), a groundbreaking study, many years in the making, of Benjamin Franklin the man, Benjamin Franklin the myth, and the roots of American character.
Central to America's idea of itself is the character of Benjamin Franklin. We all know him, or think we do: In recent works and in our inherited conventional wisdom, he remains fixed in place as a genial polymath and self-improver who was so very American that he is known by us all as the first American.
The problem with this beloved notion of Franklin's quintessential Americanness, Gordon Wood shows us in this marvelous, revelatory book, is that it's simply not true. And it blinds us to the no less admirable or important but far more interesting man Franklin really was and leaves us powerless to make sense of the most crucial events of his life. Indeed, thinking of Franklin as the last American would be less of a hindrance to understanding many crucial aspects of his life-his preoccupation with becoming a gentleman; his longtime loyalty to the Crown and burning ambition to be a player in the British Empire's power structure; the personal character of his conversion to revolutionary; his reasons for writing the Autobiography; his controversies with John and Samuel Adams and with Congress; his love of Europe and conflicted sense of national identity; the fact that his death was greeted by mass mourning in France and widely ignored in America.
But Franklin did become the Revolution's necessary man, Wood shows, second behind George Washington. Why was his importance so denigrated in his own lifetime and his image so distorted ever since? Ironically, Franklin's diplomacy in France, which was essential to American victory, was the cause of the suspicion that clouded his good name at home-and also the stage on which the "first American" persona made its debut. The consolidation of this mirage of Franklin would await the early nineteenth century, though, when the mask he created in his posthumously published Autobiography proved to be the model the citizens of a striving young democracy needed.
The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin is a landmark work, a magnificent fresh vision of Franklin's life and reputation, filled with profound insights into the Revolution and into the emergence of America's idea of itself. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Awash in a Sea of Faith: The Christianization of the American People 1550-1865'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Benjamin Franklin: An American Life'
Benjamin Franklin, writes journalist and biographer Walter Isaacson, was that rare Founding Father who would sooner wink at a passer-by than sit still for a formal portrait. What's more, Isaacson relates in this fluent and entertaining biography, the revolutionary leader represents a political tradition that has been all but forgotten today, one that prizes pragmatism over moralism, religious tolerance over fundamentalist rigidity, and social mobility over class privilege. That broadly democratic sensibility allowed Franklin his contradictions, as Isaacson shows. Though a man of lofty principles, Franklin wasn't shy of using sex to sell the newspapers he edited and published; though far from frivolous, he liked his toys and his mortal pleasures; and though he sometimes gave off a simpleton image, he was a shrewd and even crafty politician. Isaacson doesn't shy from enumerating Franklins occasional peccadilloes and shortcomings, in keeping with the iconoclastic nature of our time--none of which, however, stops him from considering Benjamin Franklin "the most accomplished American of his age," and one of the most admirable of any era. And heres one bit of proof: as a young man, Ben Franklin regularly went without food in order to buy books. His example, as always, is a good one--and this is just the book to buy with the proceeds from the grocery budget. --Gregory McNamee [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era'
"Taken together, these essays constitute a better summing up--part critique, part appreciation--than anything else in print of work done in any field of American history. Nowhere else can we learn so easily and so well what to read about colonial America. . . . A very useful volume of considerable distinction".--William Abbott, editor, "The Papers of George Washington". [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Colony of Citizens: Revolution & Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804'
The idea of universal rights is often understood as the product of Europe, but as Laurent Dubois demonstrates, it was profoundly shaped by the struggle over slavery and citizenship in the French Caribbean. Dubois examines this Caribbean revolution by focusing on Guadeloupe, where, in the early 1790s, insurgents on the island fought for equality and freedom and formed alliances with besieged Republicans. In 1794, slavery was abolished throughout the French Empire, ushering in a new colonial order in which all people, regardless of race, were entitled to the same rights.
But French administrators on the island combined emancipation with new forms of coercion and racial exclusion, even as newly freed slaves struggled for a fuller freedom. In 1802, the experiment in emancipation was reversed and slavery was brutally reestablished, though rebels in Saint-Domingue avoided the same fate by defeating the French and creating an independent Haiti.
The political culture of republicanism, Dubois argues, was transformed through this transcultural and transatlantic struggle for liberty and citizenship. The slaves-turned-citizens of the French Caribbean expanded the political possibilities of the Enlightenment by giving new and radical content to the idea of universal rights. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Common Sense: Library Edition'
"These are the times that try men's souls," begins Thomas Paine's first Crisis paper, the impassioned pamphlet that helped ignite the American Revolution. Published in Philadelphia in January of 1776, Common Sense sold 150,000 copies almost immediately. A powerful piece of propaganda, it attacked the idea of a hereditary monarchy, dismissed the chance for reconciliation with England, and outlined the economic benefits of independence while espousing equality of rights among citizens. Paine fanned a flame that was already burning, but many historians argue that his work unified dissenting voices and persuaded patriots that the American Revolution was not only necessary, but an epochal step in world history. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Common Sense: Addressed to the Inhabitants of America'
"These are the times that try men's souls," begins Thomas Paine's first Crisis paper, the impassioned pamphlet that helped ignite the American Revolution. Published in Philadelphia in January of 1776, Common Sense sold 150,000 copies almost immediately. A powerful piece of propaganda, it attacked the idea of a hereditary monarchy, dismissed the chance for reconciliation with England, and outlined the economic benefits of independence while espousing equality of rights among citizens. Paine fanned a flame that was already burning, but many historians argue that his work unified dissenting voices and persuaded patriots that the American Revolution was not only necessary, but an epochal step in world history. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787'
Gordon S. Wood--winner of the Pulitzer Prize and professor of American history at Brown University--had no idea what he was getting into when he began this 653-page book. Innocently, he wanted to write a "monographic analysis of constitution-making in the Revolutionary era." Little did he know he would discover an intellectual world where a complete transformation of political thought was occurring, one that would create "a distinctly American system of politics." As Wood explains, "Beneath the variety and idiosyncrasies of American opinion there emerged a general pattern of beliefs about the social process--a set of common assumptions about history, society, and politics that connected and made significant seemingly discrete and unrelated ideas. Really for the first time I began to glimpse what late eighteenth-century Americans meant when they talked about living in an enlightened age." This original study of the American political system is a strong contribution to the scholarly studies of the events surrounding the nation's independence. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Creation of the American Republic, Seventeen Hundred and Seventy-Six Thru Seventeen Hundred and Eighty-Seven'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Daughters of Light: Quaker Women Preaching and Prophesying in the Colonies and Abroad, 1700-1775'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Devil in the Shape of a Woman'
Confessing to "Familiarity with the Devils." Mary Johnson, a servant, was executed by Connecticut officials in 1648. A wealthy Boston widow, Ann Hibbens, was hanged in 1656 for casting spells on her neighbors. In 1662, Ann Cole was "taken with very strange Fits," and fueled an outbreak of witchcraft accusations in Hartford a generation before the notorious events in Salem took place. The witch-hunting hysteria that seized New England in the late seventeenth century still haunts us today. Why were these and other women likely witches? Why were certain people vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft and possession? In this fascinating work, Professor Carol Karlsen of the University of Michigan draws a compelling, richly detailed portrait of the women who were persecuted as witches. And in what Kirkus Reviews calls "an enlightening contribution to U.S. historical studies." The Devil in the Shape of a Woman gives us an unforgettable look at a society in transition, where fears and witch hunts were manifestations of much deeper sexual, religious, and economic tensions. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750'
This enthralling work of scholarship strips away those abstractions to reveal the hidden -- and not always stoic -- face of the "goodwives" of colonial America. In these pages we encounter the awesome burdens -- and the considerable power -- of a New England housewife's domestic life and witness her occasional forays into the world of men. We see her borrowing from her neighbors, loving her husband, raising -- and, all too often, mourning -- her children, and even attaining fame as a heroine of frontier conflicts or notoriety as a murderess. Painstakingly researched, lively with scandal and homely detail, Good Wives is history at its best. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia'
Kathleen Brown examines the origins of racism and slavery in British North America from the perspective of gender. Both a basic social relationship and a model for other social hierarchies, gender helped determine the construction of racial categories and the institution of slavery in Virginia. But the rise of racial slavery also transformed gender relations, including ideals of masculinity.
In response to the presence of Indians, the shortage of labor, and the insecurity of social rank, Virginia's colonial government tried to reinforce its authority by regulating the labor and sexuality of English servants and by making legal distinctions between English and African women. This practice, along with making slavery hereditary through the mother, contributed to the cultural shift whereby women of African descent assumed from lower-class English women both the burden of fieldwork and the stigma of moral corruption.
Brown's analysis extends through Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, an important juncture in consolidating the colony's white male public culture, and into the eighteenth century. She demonstrates that, despite elite planters' dominance, wives, children, free people of color, and enslaved men and women continued to influence the meaning of race and class in colonial Virginia. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Heartfire'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution'
The leaders of the American Revolution, writes the distinguished historian Bernard Bailyn, were radicals. But their concern was not to correct inequalities of class or income, not to remake the social order, but to "purify a corrupt constitution and fight off the apparent growth of prerogative power." They wished, in other words, to mend a broken system and improve upon it. In doing so they drew on many traditions of political and social thought, ranging from English conservative philosophers to exponents of the continental Enlightenment, from backward-looking interpretations of ancient Roman civilization to forward-looking views of a new American people. Bailyn carefully examines these sources of sometimes conflicting ideas and considers how the framers of the Constitution resolved them in their inventive doctrine of federalism. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Jefferson and His Time'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty'
This is the third volume in Dumas Malone's monumental multi-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson and His Time. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Jefferson and the Rights of Man'
The second volume in this Pulitzer Prize-winning biography tells the story of the eventful middle years in the life of Thomas Jefferson: his ministry to France in the years just before the French Revolution and during the early stages of that conflict; his service as secretary of state in President George Washington's first cabinet; the crucial period of his first differences with Alexander Hamilton and the beginnings of his long struggle with the Federalists. . [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Jefferson the President Second Term 1805-1809'
Dumas Malones classic six-volume biography Jefferson and His Time was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in history and became the standard work on Jeffersons life.
Volume 4. Jefferson the President; First Term, 18011805
Examining the first four years of Jeffersons presidency, this volume provides a fascinating account of the Louisiana Purchase, Jeffersons continuing opposition to Hamiltons charge for an overriding central government, and his battle with the Supreme Court.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Jefferson the Virginian'
Dumas Malones classic six-volume biography Jefferson and His Time was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in history and became the standard work on Jeffersons life.
Volume 1. Jefferson the VirginianThis first volume explores the early phases of Jeffersons life, from his youth, education, legal career, and marriage, to the building of Monticello, writing of the Declaration of Independence and his highly contentious governorship.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Jefferson, the Virginian'
The first of five volumes in a full-length biography of Jefferson. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'John Adams'
Left to his own devices, John Adams might have lived out his days as a Massachusetts country lawyer, devoted to his family and friends. As it was, events swiftly overtook him, and Adams--who, David McCullough writes, was "not a man of the world" and not fond of politics--came to greatness as the second president of the United States, and one of the most distinguished of a generation of revolutionary leaders. He found reason to dislike sectarian wrangling even more in the aftermath of war, when Federalist and anti-Federalist factions vied bitterly for power, introducing scandal into an administration beset by other difficulties--including pirates on the high seas, conflict with France and England, and all the public controversy attendant in building a nation.
Overshadowed by the lustrous presidents Washington and Jefferson, who bracketed his tenure in office, Adams emerges from McCullough's brilliant biography as a truly heroic figure--not only for his significant role in the American Revolution but also for maintaining his personal integrity in its strife-filled aftermath. McCullough spends much of his narrative examining the troubled friendship between Adams and Jefferson, who had in common a love for books and ideas but differed on almost every other imaginable point. Reading his pages, it is easy to imagine the two as alter egos. (Strangely, both died on the same day, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.) But McCullough also considers Adams in his own light, and the portrait that emerges is altogether fascinating. --Gregory McNamee [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800'
First published in 1980 and recently out of print, Liberty's Daughters is widely considered a landmark book on the history of American women and on the Revolution itself. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Little House on the Prairie'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America'
When Americans look at slavery, they conjure up images of tired black bodies picking cotton from sunup to sundown under Southern skies. That image is partly true, but, as the noted history professor Ira Berlin details, the lives of slaves in America's racist system were complex and diverse. "Viewing slavery through the perspective of what slaves did most of the time," Berlin writes, "provides a means to draw some fundamental distinctions and find some essential commonalities among the various experiences of North America."
Berlin reveals the color-caste codes of the Afro-Creoles of the Chesapeake, the survival of African culture in the South Carolina-Georgia-Florida coastal area, and the intermingling of Africans with French and Spanish in the Mississippi Delta area. He weaves a woeful and wondrous tale of the mores, occupations, conflicts, wars, and rebellions that made up the ongoing relationships between masters and slaves. Many Thousands Gone is an excellent companion to Philip D. Morgan's Slave Counterpoint, revealing the influence the "peculiar institution" of slavery had on those of African and European descent alike. --Eugene Holley Jr. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Midwife's Tale : The Life of Martha Ballard Based O'
Drawing on the diaries of a midwife and healer in eighteenth-century Maine, this intimate history illuminates the medical practices, household economies, religious rivalries, and sexual mores of the New England frontier.
From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812'
Drawing on the diaries of a midwife and healer in eighteenth-century Maine, this intimate history illuminates the medical practices, household economies, religious rivalries, and sexual mores of the New England frontier. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Name of War : King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Prentice Alvin'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Radicalism of the American Revolution'
In a grand and immemsely readable synthesis of historical, political, cultural, and economic analysis, a prize-winning historian depicts much more than a break with England. He gives readers a revolution that transformed an almost feudal society into a democratic one, whose emerging realities sometimes baffled and disappointed its founding fathers. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Red Prophet'
The first tale of Alvin Maker, "Seventh Son", introduced people to a very familiar but just slightly different pioneer America where magic works, and many people have special talents. In "Red Prophet", listeners learn more about those talents, both the minor gifts of the white people and the much grander gifts of the Indians. Abridged. November '98 publication date. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities'
This lively and authoritative volume makes clear that the quest for taste and manners in America has been essential to the serious pursuit of a democratic culture. Spanning the material world from mansions and silverware to etiquette books, city planning, and sentimental novels, Richard L. Bushman shows how a set of values originating in aristocratic court culture gradually permeated almost every stratum of American society and served to prevent the hardening of class consciousness. A work of immense and richly nuanced learning, The Refinement of America newly illuminates every facet of both our artifacts and our values. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America's Independence'
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 husbands place beside a cannon at Fort Monmouth. This incisive and comprehensive history illuminates a fascinating and unknown side of the struggle for American independence.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775-1783'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Sage of Monticello'
Dumas Malones classic six-volume biography Jefferson and His Time was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in history and became the standard work on Jeffersons life.
Volume 6. The Sage of Monticello
This final volume provides an all-encompassing account of Jeffersons accomplishments, friendships, and family difficulties in his last seventeen years, revealing his shift from the realm of politics to his roles as family man, architect, and educational enthusiast. Describing Jeffersons retirement from Washington, this volume recounts the events that formed Jeffersons final years, particularly the founding of the Library of Congress and the University of Virginia, in which he played a major role.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Seventh Son'

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Tales of Alvin Maker'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790'
In this Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Rhys Isaac describes and analyzes the dramatic confrontations-primarily religious and political-that transformed Virginia in the second half of the eighteenth century. Making use of the observational techniques of the cultural anthropologist, Isaac vividly recreates and painstakingly dissects a society in the turmoil of profound inner change. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Women of the Republic: Intellect, and Ideology in Revolutionary America'
Women of the Republic views the American Revolution through women's eyes. Previous histories have rarely recognized that the battle for independence was also a woman's war. The "women of the army" toiled in army hospitals, kitchens, and laundries. Civilian women were spies, fund raisers, innkeepers, suppliers of food and clothing. Recruiters, whether patriot or tory, found men more willing to join the army when their wives and daughters could be counted on to keep the farms in operation and to resist enchroachment from squatters. "I have Don as much to Carrey on the warr as maney that Sett Now at the healm of government," wrote one impoverished woman, and she was right.
Women of the Republic is the result of a seven-year search for women's diaries, letters, and legal records. Achieving a remarkable comprehensiveness, it describes women's participation in the war, evaluates changes in their education in the late eighteenth century, describes the novels and histories women read and wrote, and analyzes their status in law and society. The rhetoric of the Revolution, full of insistence on rights and freedom in opposition to dictatorial masters, posed questions about the position of women in marriage as well as in the polity, but few of the implications of this rhetoric were recognized. How much liberty and equality for women? How much pursuit of happiness? How much justice?
When American political theory failed to define a program for the participation of women in the public arena, women themselves had to develop an ideology of female patriotism. They promoted the notion that women could guarantee the continuting health of the republic by nurturing public-spirited sons and husbands. This limited ideology of "Republican Motherhood" is a measure of the political and social conservatism of the Revolution. The subsequent history of women in America is the story of women's efforts to accomplish for themselves what the Revolution did not. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgement: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England'
This book tells an extraordinary story of the people of early New England and their spiritual lives. It is about ordinary people--farmers, housewives, artisans, merchants, sailors, aspiring scholars--struggling to make sense of their time and place on earth. David Hall describes a world of religious consensus and resistance: a variety of conflicting beliefs and believers ranging from the committed core to outright dissenters. He reveals for the first time the many-layered complexity of colonial religious life, and the importance within it of traditions derived from those of the Old World. We see a religion of the laity that was to merge with the tide of democratic nationalism in the nineteenth century, and that remains with us today as the essence of Protestant America.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'LA Casa De LA Pradera/Little House on the Prairie'
A family travels from the big woods of Wisconsin to a new home on the prairie where they build a house, meet neighboring Indians, build a well, and fight a prairie fire. In Spanish. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Tambores De Otono'
The book is retained as new. In perfect condition [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'UN Granjero De Diez Anos'
El sueno de Almanzo, el mas joven de la familia, seria poder cuidar de los caballos, y sobre todo, poder domar un potro y poderlo montar a su antojo. Para su padre esa es una tarea que necesita madurez, ya que los caballos son unos animales muy fragiles y nerviosos. Almanzo se esfuerza cada dia en obtener la confianza de su padre, hasta que este, cuando se acerca el aniversario de Almanzo, le estimula a tomar una decision por si mismo, una decision que sera fundamental para su futuro, ir a la ciudad o quedarse en el campo. [via]
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