Thomas E. Ricks offers a revelatory new book about the founding fathers, examining their educations and, in particular, their devotion to the ancient Greek and Roman classics—and how that influence would shape their ideals and the new American nation. Thomas Ricks considers a few questions: What kind of nation do now have? Is it what […]
Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World by Maya Jasanoff NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER At the end of the American Revolution, sixty thousand Americans loyal to the British cause fled the U.S. and became refugees throughout the British Empire. This is their story. This surprising new account of the founding of the […]
This is the first major biography of the free Black abolitionist William Still, who coordinated the Eastern Line of the Underground Railroad and was a pillar of the Railroad as a whole. Based in Philadelphia and well-connected to Chester County abolitionists, Still built a reputation as a courageous leader, writer, philanthropist, and guide for fugitive […]
Ida Tarbell, a native Pennsylvanian, lived during the era in which she was known as a “muckraker.” In our time she would have been known as an investigative reporter, with the celebrity of Woodward and Bernstein. Tarbell was one of the most powerful women of her time in the U.S.: admired, feared, hated. When her […]
A president who governed a divided country has much to teach us in a twenty-first-century moment of polarization and political crisis. Hated and hailed, excoriated and revered, Abraham Lincoln was at the pinnacle of American power when implacable secessionists gave no quarter in a clash of visions bound up with money, race, identity, and faith. […]
A groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology that radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492—from “a remarkably engaging writer” (The New York Times Book Review). Contrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness; rather, there […]
All are welcome to join the discussion! Lenape Country is a sweeping narrative history of the multiethnic society of the Delaware Valley in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. After Swanendael, the Natives, Swedes, and Finns avoided war by focusing on trade and forging strategic alliances in such events as the Dutch conquest, the Mercurius affair, […]
All are welcome to the discussion! "Crisp, concise and revealing history.... A fresh narrative that plumbs some of the most dramatic days in U.S. presidential history." —The Washington Post James Abram Garfield was one of the most extraordinary men ever elected president. Born into abject poverty, he rose to become a wunderkind scholar, a Civil War […]
Join the discussion! The bi-monthly CCHC Book Group selection for March is An Indigenous Peoples' History of the U.S. by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. "Today in the U.S. there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land....Now, for the first […]
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