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How do we know what happened in the past? We cannot go back, and no amount of historical data can enable us to understand with absolute certainty what life was like -then.- It is easy to demolish the very idea of historical knowing, but it is impossible to demolish the importance of historical knowing. In an age of cable television pundits and anonymous bloggers dueling over history, the value of owning history increases at the same time as our confidence in history as a way of knowing crumbles. Historical knowledge thus presents a paradox -- the more it is required, the less reliable it...

In the 1740s, two quite different developments revolutionized Anglo-American life and thought--the Enlightenment and the Great Awakening. This book takes an encounter between the paragons of each movement--the printer and entrepreneur Benjamin Franklin and the British-born revivalist George Whitefield--as an opportunity to explore the meaning of the beginnings of modern science and rationality on one hand and evangelical religious enthusiasm on the other.

There are people who both represent the times in which they live and change them for the better. Franklin and Whitefield were two...

-A learned, lively, and witty review of the history of historical writing... A deeply insightful analysis of the never-ending challenge that historians face in getting their story right.- - Richard R. Beeman, John Welsh Centennial Professor of History Emeritus, University of Pennsylvania

-I cannot imagine a reader of this book who will not learn from it and be provoked to a new level of thoughtfulness by it.- - Michael Zuckerman, University of Pennsylvania

-Students and general readers will find no more engaging guide to the value and distinctiveness of what historians do.- -...

The suspected conspiracy in New York prompted one of the most extensive slave trials in colonial history and some of the most grisly punishments ever meted out to individuals. Peter Hoffer now retells the dramatic...

Burr was finally arrested as a threat to national security, under suspicion of fomenting insurrection against the young republic, and then held without bail for months. His trial, witnessing the unfortunate intrusion of partisan politics and personal animosity into...

The distillation of four decades of stellar writing, Hoffer's book is a wise and illuminating meditation on the key concepts, history, evolution, and...

Before colonial Americans could declare independence, they had to undergo a change of heart. Beyond a desire to rebel against British mercantile and fiscal policies, they had to believe that they could stand up to the fully armed British soldier. Prelude to Revolution uncovers one story of how the Americans found that confidence.

On April 19, 1775, British raids on Lexington Green and Concord Bridge made history, but it was an episode nearly two months earlier in Salem, Massachusetts, that set the stage for the hostilities. Peter Charles Hoffer has discovered records and...

Peter Charles Hoffer, a historian long familiar with the Salem witchcraft trials, now reexamines this notorious episode in American history and presents many of its legal details in correct perspective for the first time. He tells the real story of how...