Nelson Runger

Drawing from the newly catalogued Washington papers at the University of Virginia, the author paints a full portrait of Washington's life and career in the context of eighteenth-century America, richly detailing his private life and illustrating the ways in which it influenced his public persona.

From the publisher. Six months after the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution was all but lost. A powerful British force had routed the Americans at New York, occupied three colonies, and advanced within sight of Philadelphia. George Washington lost ninety percent of his army and was driven across the Delaware River. Panic and despair spread through the states. Yet, as David Hackett Fischer recounts in this riveting history, Washington--and...

This second volume in Bruce Catton's American Civil War trilogy shows how the Union and Confederacy slowly reconciled themselves to all-out war.

The first of John McPhee's works in his series on geology and geologists, Basin and Range is a book of journeys through ancient terrains, always in juxtaposition with travels in the modern world--a history of vanished landscapes, enhanced by the histories of people who bring them to light. The title refers to the physiographic province of the United States that reaches from eastern Utah to eastern California, a silent world of austere beauty, of hundreds...

At various times in a span of fifteen years, John McPhee made geological field surveys in the company of Eldridge Moores, a tectonicist at the University of California at Davis. The result of these trips is Assembling California, a cross-section in human and geologic time, from Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada through the golden foothills of the Mother Lode and across the Great Central Valley to the wine country of the Coast Ranges, the rock of San...

A therapist draws on the world's religions, music, art, and his own experiences with patients to examine the connections between spirituality and the problems of individuals and society.

First published in 1653, Izaak Walton's "The Compleat Angler" is a classic and much-loved treatise on the art of fishing. Immediately popular after its publication, "The Compleat Angler" was reprinted and updated numerous times by Walton. Written as a conversation between the fictional characters of the experienced angler Piscator and his student Viator, which was changed to a hunter named Venator in later editions, the treatise is part an instructional...

A biography of the nineteenth-century Frenchman who, having been blinded himself at the age of three, went on to develop a system of raised dots on paper that enabled blind people to read and write.

Imagine a plague so horrific, only forty percent of the population lived to tell the tale. Written as a first-person account of the world's most dangerous pandemic, the mysterious narrator bears witness to a society that has seemingly given up hope during terrifying times. . From mounting death tolls, to horrific bodily ailments, contracting the Black Plague was considered a fate worse than death. Combining his own experiences within each of the...

The Delaware Water Gap, where the Delaware River cuts through the Appalachian Mountains, is a bucolic and peaceful landscape. However, the calm landscape conceals the tortuous geological history of this region and the equally complex debates concerning the geological past of the eastern United States.