Taylor, Alan

". . . Thomas Jefferson shares center stage with his family and fellow planters, all dependent on the labor of enslaved black families. With a declining Virginia yielding to commercially vibrant northern states, Jefferson in 1819 proposed to build a university to educate and improve the sons of the planter elite. They, he hoped, might one day lead a revitalized Virginia free of slavery--and free of the former slaves. Jefferson's campaign to build the university was a contest for the future of a state and the larger nation. Although he prevails, Jefferson's vision of reform through education is hobbled by the actions of genteel students whose defiant sense of honor derived from owning slaves. It is the women of this hypermasculine society--particularly Jefferson's granddaughters--who redeem the best elements of his legacy"--.

Examines how the war of 1812 defined North America, addressed resentments left over from the American Revolution, and divided Americans.

The American Revolution is often portrayed as a high-minded, orderly event whose capstone, the Constitution, provided the ideal framework for a democratic, prosperous nation. Alan Taylor, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, gives us a different creation story in this magisterial history of the nation?s founding.

The first in a five-volume history of the United States, covering a period that ranges from 13,000 B.C. to 1820, looking at how the intermingling cultures, people, plants, and animals of England, Spain, Russia, France, and the Netherlands, as well as African slaves and Native Americans, influenced the development of the American colonies.

Details the story of a frontier village in the early American Republic, and the lives of Judge William Cooper and the novelist James Fenimore Cooper--father and son, through the development of Cooperstown and Templeton.

Presents a narrative that recreates the events during the War of 1812 that inspired hundreds of slaves to pressure British admirals into becoming liberators by using their intimate knowledge of the countryside to transform the war.

The first in a five-volume history of the United States, covering a period that ranges from 13,000 B.C. to 1820, looking at how the intermingling cultures, people, plants, and animals of England, Spain, Russia, France, and the Netherlands, as well as African slaves and Native Americans, influenced the development of the American colonies.

Uses the story of the friendship between a young Mohawk Indian named Joseph Brant and Samuel Kirkland, the son of a colonial clergyman, in eighteenth-century New England to highlight the interactions between Native Americans and colonists in the years following the American Revolution.