At a time when surveys reveal that Americans know less and less about our past, Tony Williams provides entertaining and informative descriptions of 50 of the most important and dramatic events from the colonial and Revolutionary period—some known and some forgotten—from the Mayflower Compact to the Annapolis Convention. Published in association with The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, America's Beginnings takes the reader throughout the American colonies and introduces many leading figures, from John Smith and John Winthrop to the Founding Fathers. Along the way, Williams examines the principles that led colonists to come to America and succeeding generations to become a free and independent nation. Read individually or from cover to cover, these stories illuminate the founding principles and heroic struggles that established the country and shaped the American character.

During the last Ice Age, a thousand-mile-wide land bridge connected Siberia and Alaska, creating the region known as Beringia. Over twelve thousand years ago, a procession of large mammals and the humans who hunted them crossed this bridge to America. Much of the Russian evidence for this migration has until now remained largely inaccessible to American scholars. American Beginnings brings together for the first time in one volume the most up-to-date archaeological and palaeoecological evidence on Beringia from both Russia and America. "An invaluable resource. . . . It will no doubt remain the key reference book for Beringia for many years to come."—Steven Mithen, Journal of Human Evolution "Extraordinary. The fifty-six contributors . . . represent the most prominent American and Russian researchers in the region."—Choice "Publication of this well-illustrated compendium is a great service to early American and especially Siberian Upper Paleolithic archaeology."—Nicholas Saunders, New Scientist "This is a great book . . . perhaps the greatest contribution to the archaeology of Beringia that has yet been published. . . . This is the kind of book to which archaeology should aspire."—Herbert D.G. Maschner, Antiquity

An exploration of the dialogue that emerged after 1776 between different visions of what it meant to use new technologies to transform the land. After 1776, the former American colonies began to reimagine themselves as a unified, self-created community. Technologies had an important role in the resulting national narratives, and a few technologies assumed particular prominence. Among these were the axe, the mill, the canal, the railroad, and the irrigation dam. In this book David Nye explores the stories that clustered around these technologies. In doing so, he rediscovers an American story of origins, with America conceived as a second creation built in harmony with God's first creation. While mainstream Americans constructed technological foundation stories to explain their place in the New World, however, marginalized groups told other stories of destruction and loss. Native Americans protested the loss of their forests, fishermen resisted the construction of dams, and early environmentalists feared the exhaustionof resources. A water mill could be viewed as the kernel of a new community or as a new way to exploit labor. If passengers comprehended railways as part of a larger narrative about American expansion and progress, many farmers attacked railroad land grants. To explore these contradictions, Nye devotes alternating chapters to narratives of second creation and to narratives of those who rejected it.Nye draws on popular literature, speeches, advertisements, paintings, and many other media to create a history of American foundation stories. He shows how these stories were revised periodically, as social and economic conditions changed, without ever erasing the earlier stories entirely. The image of the isolated frontier family carving a homestead out of the wilderness with an axe persists to this day, alongside later images and narratives. In the book's conclusion, Nye considers the relation between these earlier stories and such later American developments as the conservation movement, narratives of environmental recovery, and the idealization of wilderness.

A provocative book that shows us why we must put American history firmly in a global context–from 1492 to today. Immerse yourself in an insightful exploration of American history in A Nation Among Nations. This compelling book by renowned author Thomas Bender paints a different picture of the nation's history by placing it within the broader canvas of global events and developments. Events like the American Revolution, the Civil War, and subsequent imperialism are examined in a new light, revealing fundamental correlations with simultaneous global rebellions, national redefinitions, and competitive imperial ambitions. Intricacies of industrialization, urbanization, laissez-faire economics, capitalism, socialism, and technological advancements become globally interconnected phenomena, altering the solitary perception of these being unique American experiences. A Nation Among Nations isn’t just a history book–it's a thought-provoking journey that transcends geographical boundaries, encouraging us to delve deeper into the globally intertwined series of events that spun the American historical narrative.

The Story of America tells our story because it is important in itself. It is a great epic and the unique tale of how hundreds of millions of people took possession of a vast continent, often at the expense of the original inhabitants. The Story of America contains many original documents and lengthy excerpts from primary and secondary sources. These include eyewitness accounts, poems, song lyrics, diary entries, and excerpts from a variety of other sources.