"From the great historian of the American Revolution, New York Times-bestselling and Pulitzer-winning Gordon Wood, comes a majestic dual biography of two of America's most enduringly fascinating figures, whose partnership helped birth a nation, and whose subsequent falling out did much to fix its course. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams could scarcely have come from more different worlds, or been more different in temperament. Jefferson, the optimist...

In 1774, American independence was hardly inevitable--indeed, most Americans found it neither desirable nor likely. Beeman tells the remarkable story of how the delegates to the Continental Congress, through courage and compromise, came to dedicate their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to the forging of American independence.

"In 1776, an elite group of soldiers were handpicked to serve as George Washington's bodyguards. Washington trusted them; relied on them. But unbeknownst to Washington, some of them were part of a treasonous plan. In the months leading up to the Revolutionary War, these traitorous soldiers, along with the Governor of New York William Tryon and Mayor David Mathews, launched a deadly plot against the most important member of the military: George Washington...

The story of the Astors is a quintessentially American story--of ambition, invention, destruction, and reinvention. From 1783, when German immigrant John Jacob Astor first arrived in the United States, until 2009, when Brooke Astor's son, Anthony Marshall, was convicted of defrauding his elderly mother, the Astor name occupied a unique place in American society. The family fortune, first made by a beaver trapping business that grew into an empire,...

"In his epic new book, Russell Shorto takes us back to the founding of the American nation, drawing on diaries, letters and autobiographies to flesh out six lives that cast the era in a fresh new light. They include an African man who freed himself and his family from slavery, a rebellious young woman who abandoned her abusive husband to chart her own course, and a certain Mr. Washington, who was admired for his social graces but harshly criticized...

Theirs was a three-decade-long bond that, more than any other pairing, would forge the United States. Vastly different men, Benjamin Franklin—an abolitionist freethinker from the urban north—and George Washington—a slavehold­ing general from the agrarian south—were the indispensable authors of American independence and the two key partners in the attempt to craft a more perfect union at the Constitutional Convention, held in Franklin’s...

James Madison is remembered primarily as a systematic political theorist, but this bookish and unassuming man was also a practical politician who strove for balance in an age of revolution. In this biography, Jeff Broadwater focuses on Madison's role in the battle for religious freedom in Virginia, his contributions to the adoption of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, his place in the evolution of the party system, his relationship with Dolley...

Stirring the Pot with Benjamin Franklin conveys all of Franklin's culinary adventures, demonstrating that Franklin's love of food shaped not only his life but also the character of the young nation he helped build.

What if the year that has long been commemorated as America's defining moment was in fact, misleading? In this book the author, a historian punctures the myth that 1776 was the watershed year of the American Revolution. 1775 was the year in which Patriots captured British forts and fought battles from the Canadian border to the Carolinas, obtained the needed gunpowder, and orchestrated the critical months of nation building in the backrooms of a...

Discusses the history of America's Founding Fathers through their words and actions but also through the architectural treasures of the homes they built while they conspired to change the world.