From Columbus's voyage in 1492 to the publication of the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, a former slave, in 1789, Jill Lepore, winner of the distinguished Bancroft Prize for history, brings to life in exciting, first-person detail some of the earliest events in American history in Encounters in the New World. Providing fascinating commentary along the way, Lepore seamlessly links together primary sources that illustrate the powerful clash of cultures in the Americas. Through emotional eyewitness accounts -- memoirs, petitions, diaries, captivity narratives, private correspondence --...
From Columbus's voyage in 1492 to the publication of the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, a former slave, in 1789, Jill Lepore, winner of the disting...
Winner of the Bancroft Prize King Philip's War, the excruciating racial war colonists against Indians that erupted in New England in 1675, was, in proportion to population, the bloodiest in American history. Some even argued that the massacres and outrages on both sides were too horrific to "deserve the name of a war." The war's brutality compelled the colonists to defend themselves against accusations that they had become savages. But Jill Lepore makes clear that it was after the war and because of it that the boundaries between cultures, hitherto blurred, turned into rigid...
Winner of the Bancroft Prize King Philip's War, the excruciating racial war colonists against Indians that erupted in New England in 1675, ...
What ties Americans to one another? What unifies a nation of citizens with different racial, religious and ethnic backgrounds? These were the dilemmas faced by Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as they sought ways to bind the newly United States together. In A is for American, award-winning historian Jill Lepore portrays seven men who turned to language to help shape a new nation s character and boundaries. From Noah Webster s attempts to standardize American spelling, to Alexander Graham Bell s use of Visible Speech to help teach the deaf to talk, to Sequoyah s...
What ties Americans to one another? What unifies a nation of citizens with different racial, religious and ethnic backgrounds? These were the dilemmas...
Stewart Jameson, a Scottish portrait painter fleeing his debtors in Edinburgh, has washed up on the British Empire's far shores--in the city of Boston, lately seized with the spirit of liberty. Eager to begin anew, he advertises for an apprentice, but the lad who comes knocking is no lad at all. Fanny Easton is a fallen woman from Boston's most prominent family who has disguised herself as a boy to become Jameson's defiant and seductive apprentice. Written with wit and exuberance by accomplished historians, Blindspot is an affectionate send-up of the best of eighteenth-century...
Stewart Jameson, a Scottish portrait painter fleeing his debtors in Edinburgh, has washed up on the British Empire's far shores--in the city of Boston...
"A national language is a national tie, and what country wants it more than America?"
-- Noah Webster
What makes American English American? In 1800, irascible patriot Noah Webster set out to answer this question by tirelessly recording the vocabulary of a novel breed -- the American citizen. Though he was a political conservative, his "American Dictionary of the English Language" was born out of his deeply held and profoundly democratic conviction that language was by and for the people. A word's popularity, no matter how lowly its origins, was its criterion for inclusion. Webster's...
"A national language is a national tie, and what country wants it more than America?"
Renowned Harvard scholar and "New Yorker" staff writer Jill Lepore has written a strikingly original, ingeniously conceived, and beautifully crafted history of American ideas about life and death from before the cradle to beyond the grave. How does life begin? What does it mean? What happens when we die? All anyone can do is ask, Lepore writes. That s why any history of ideas about life and death has to be, like this book, a history of curiosity. Lepore starts that history with the story of a seventeenth-century Englishman who had the idea that all life begins with an egg, and ends it...
Renowned Harvard scholar and "New Yorker" staff writer Jill Lepore has written a strikingly original, ingeniously conceived, and beautifully crafte...
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR NPR "Time" Magazine "The Washington Post" "Entertainment Weekly" "The Boston Globe" A "NEW YORK TIMES" NOTABLE BOOK From one of our most accomplished and widely admired historians a revelatory portrait of Benjamin Franklin's youngest sister, Jane, whose obscurity and poverty were matched only by her brother s fame and wealth but who, like him, was a passionate reader, a gifted writer, and an astonishingly shrewd political commentator. Making use of an astonishing cache of little-studied material,...
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR NPR "Time" Magazine "The Washington Post" "Entertainment Weekly" "The Bosto...
A riveting work of historical detection revealing that the origin of Wonder Woman, one of the world's most iconic superheroes, hides within it a fascinating family story--and a crucial history of twentieth-century feminism
Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore has uncovered an astonishing trove of documents, including the never-before-seen private papers of William Moulton Marston, Wonder Woman's creator. Beginning in his undergraduate years at Harvard, Marston was influenced by early suffragists and feminists, starting with Emmeline Pankhurst, who was banned...
A riveting work of historical detection revealing that the origin of Wonder Woman, one of the world's most iconic superheroes, hides within it a fa...
