USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

By Walter R. Borneman

FROM THE INTRODUCTION: “England and France had been at war since--well, it seemed like forever. For more than three centuries, Europe had known far more years of warfare than of peace. But no matter what the con- flict, or how causes and alliances changed, one pairing remained constant: England and France were always on opposite sides just as surely as they sat on opposite sides of the English Channel. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, this cross-Channel feud began to take on major global dimensions, as it became evident that far more than the mastery of Europe was at stake. The colonies that half a dozen nations had established in the New World were flourishing. By 1733, thirteen English colonies stretched along the Atlantic coast. But this territory was minuscule compared with French outposts and settlements that embraced half a continent--from the mouth of the Saint Lawrence River, westward across the Great Lakes, and down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico…”

NY. Harper. 2006. 407p.

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

By Bruce Lancaster and J. H. Plumb

FROM THE INTRODUCTION: “We had our American revolution nearly two centuries ago, and the years have done something to it. The legends remain, and the statues and the grassy earthworks and the great body of tradition, but a good deal of the reality has been filtered out. When we look back we see Washington crossing the Delaware on a cold winter night, or kneeling in prayer in the snow of Valley Forge; we see the Minuteman, or the lanky Virginia rifleman pictur- esquein fringed buckskin; but somehow it all seems to be out of a pageant, and neither Washington nor the men who followed him quite come alive for us. This is a pity, because the central reality in this great act that brought a nation to its birth was the living, aspiring, struggling people who were immediately involved in it. Aromantic haze has settled down over the whole affair….”

NY. Dell. 1958. 384p.

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

By Kenneth C. Davis

FROM THE INTRODUCTION: “Back in the early 1960s, when I was growing up, there was a silly pop song called What Did Washington Say When He Crossed the Delaware? Sung to a tarantella beat, the answer was something like "Martha, Martha, there'll be no pizza tonight." Of course, these lyrics were absurd; everybody knew Washington only ate cherry pie. On that December night in 1776, George may have told himself that if this raid on an enemy camp in Trenton, New Jersey, didn't work, he might be ordering a last meal before the British strung him up. But as the general rallied his ragged, barefoot troops across the icy Delaware, one of his actual com- ments was far more amusing than those lyrics. Stepping into his boat, Washington--the plainspoken frontiersman, not the marbleized demigod--nudged 280-pound General Henry "Ox" Knox with the tip of his boot and said, "Shift that fat ass, Harry. But slowly, or you'll swamp the damned boat.”

According to A. J. Langguth's fascinating history of the Revolution, Patriots, that is how Knox himself reported the story after the war. I certainly never heard that version of the crossing when I was in school. And that's too bad….”

NY. Avon. 1995. 489p.

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

By Howard Zinn

from chapter 1: “ Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log:

They . . . brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bels. They willingly traded everything they owned. . . . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out ofignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane. ... They would make fine servants. . . . With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want…”

NY. Harper Collins. 1999. 732p.

By Nancy Shields Kollmann

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Russians from all ranks of society were bound together by a culture of honor. Here one of the foremost scholars of early modern Russia explores the intricate and highly stylized codes that made up this culture. Nancy Shields Kollmann describes how these codes were manipulated to construct identity and enforce social norms—and also to defend against insults, to pursue vendettas, and to unsettle communities. She offers evidence for a new view of the relationship of state and society in the Russian empire, and her richly comparative approach enhances knowledge of statebuilding in premodern Europe. By presenting Muscovite state and society in the context of medieval and early modern Europe, she exposes similarities that blur long-standing distinctions between Russian and European history.

Through the prism of honor, Kollmann examines the interaction of the Russian state and its people in regulating social relations and defining an individual's rank. She finds vital information in a collection of transcripts of legal suits brought by elites and peasants alike to avenge insult to honor. The cases make clear the conservative role honor played in society as well as the ability of men and women to employ this body of ideas to address their relations with one another and with the state. Kollmann demonstrates that the grand princes—and later the tsars—tolerated a surprising degree of local autonomy throughout their rapidly expanding realm. Her work marks a stark contrast with traditional Russian historiography, which exaggerates the power of the state and downplays the volition of society.

Ithaca, NY; London: Cornell University Press, 1999. 311p.

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

By John Winthrop

FROM THE PREFACE: “The Puritans of New England are not in good repute today. Authors and critics who aspire to any degree of sophistication take care to repudiate them. Liberals and conservatives alike find it advantageous to label the meas- ures they oppose as Puritan. Whatever is wrong with the American mind is attributed to its Puritan ancestry, and anything that escapes these assaults is smothered under a homespun mantle of quaintness by lovers of the antique. Seventeenth-century Massachusetts has thus become in retrospect a preposterous land of witches and witch hunters, of kill-joys in tall-crowned hats, whose main occu- pation was to prevent each other from having any fun and whose sole virtue lay in their furniture.”

NY. Little, Brown and Company .1958.233p.

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

By Joseph E. Persico

FROM THE INTRODUCTION: “ThIs sook was writen in quest of an answer. What was it chat led Americans-dairy farmers from Wisconsin and dirt farmers from Georgia, New York urchins and Richmond patricians, shop- keepers and shoemakers--to gather at a small town in Pennsylvania in the summer of 1863 and slaughter each other in fearful numbers? Do the historic roots of the Civil War provide a satisfying answer as to what motivated the ordinary soldier at Gettysburg, or on the other battlefields of that conflict? Was it slavery? Abolition? States' rights? The Union? These reasons may have sufficed for politicians and the power classes, both North and South. Perhaps for the profes- sional soldier, once he determined his loyalty to state or nation, no further motive was necessary. Battle was his craft. But what of more than three million citizen-soldiers, the over- whelming number of whom voluntarily answered the call to arms? What would induce young men today, from, say, New Jersey and California, to battle each other to such bloody effect? There is a lingering unbelievability about this American fratricide…”

NY. Da Capo Press. 1988. 284p.

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

By Murray Morgan

FROM THE FOREWORD: “My first memories of childhood are of vacations spent on the Olympic Peninsula. I remember standing knee-deep in the icy water of theLilliwaup. The salmon were running,and the great fish bumped my legs as they charged at the falls. There were Indians, real Indians, with dip nets and spears, and an Indian woman, brown as a teddy bear, speared a salmon and handed it to me, and I wrestled it ashore. I remember to a beach resort on a lagoon somewhere along the canal. They were logging the east shore in those days, and there was a show on the bank across from the re sort. The logs were dragged to a flume, which shot them over the cliff and into the canal. We would sit for hours watching the great brown logs appear on the flume, leap into space, and disappear in a white splash that had rainbows in it if the sun was right; then bob up, whale-big, as the thundering crash rolled across the water. You couldn't have planned it better for kids. So this is a love story. I have been in love with the Olympics for as long as I can remember…”

Seattle. University of Washington Press. 1955. 284p.

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

By David McCullough

FROM THE INTRODUCTION: “Half a century ago this year, Simon & Schuster published my first effort as an author, a book that, I am proud to say, has never gone out of print and that Simon & Schuster, still my publisher, has honored with this anniversary edition. When I think of the circumstances by which the book came to be so long ago, I cannot help but feel more than ever a sense of genuine amazement. The year was 1961. Aset of old photographs lay spread out on a large table before me in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress, and I stopped to look. They were, I was told, taken by a photographer who managed to climb over the mountains of western Pennsylvania down into what remained of Johnstown within a day or so after the terrible flood of 1889 hit that city…”

NY. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks. 1968. 300p.

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP.

By Cadwallader Colden

From the author to His Excellency William Burnet Esq. Captain General and Governor in Chief of the Provinces of New-York, New-Jersey, and Territories thereon depending, in America, and Vice-Admiral of the same, &c. “Sir: the Indian Affairs of this Province have appear'd to your Excellency of such Importance to the Wellfare of the People here, that you have carefully apply'd your Thoughts to them, in which I hope your Excellency will have such Success, that not only the present Generation shall enjoy the Benefit of your Care, but our latest Posterity likewise may bless your Memory under their Happiness, the Foundation of which may be laid under your Excellency's Administration, if the People here, who's Interest is chiefly concern'd, do on their parts second your Endeavours, as their Duty requires, towards securing the Peace and advancing the Prosperity of their Country. The following Account of the Five Nations will show what Dangerous Neighbours the Indians have been, what Pains a Neighbouring Colony (who's Interest is Opposit to ours) has taken to withdraw their Affections from Us, and how dread- ful the Consequences may be, if that Colony should succeed in their Designs: and therefore how much we ought to be on our Guard. If we only consider the Riches which a People…”

Ithaca. Cornell Paperbacks. 1958 (1866). 198p.

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

By Howard Thomas

FROM THE FOREWORD: “A book should have a reason for publication. The purpose of this series of folklore tales is to bring to the attention of the present gener- ation a way of life which has almost departed from the Adirondack foot- hills. Logs no longer hurtle down the amber rivers in the spring, the horse-drawn vehicle seldom is seen on the roads, and the wheels of the gristmills and sawmills have long been inactive. Cracker-barrel sages have departed from the country stores, and those peculiar breeds of men, the tramps and the hermits, have disappeared from the highways and the forests. In Tales from the Adirondack Foothills, published two years ago, I tried to give an overall picture of the chronology of the foothills through the use of short tales. Folklore from the Adirondack Foothills attempts to portray phases of life in the area which extends from the Mohawk River to the Adirondack Mountains. Purists may argue that all of the yarns are not folklore, but most of the tales have found their roots in the lives of the people. The use of poetry and fiction in a book of folklore is also open to criticism which I shall make no attempt to defend….”

NY. Prospect Books. 1962. 154p.

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

By Richard Berleth

FROM THE PREFACE: “This book is a narrative history of the Mohawk Valley and region over eight Indian Wars and battles ofthe American Revolution were critical to the foundation of New York State and the creation of a new nation. People of the Mohawk River--Native Americans, colonial settlers, officials of the Crown Colony of New York, great landowners, and patriot leaders struggled mightily during this period to impose their visions for the future on a wilderness that would some day become the cradle of the new nation's industry and ingenuity. Between the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) and the signing of the Treaty of Canandaigua (1794), the boundaries of the Mohawk region took shape. French intrusions were turned back with great loss of blood and treasure, but British triumph proved temporary. In the War of Independence, patriots wrenched the valley from British interests and the Iroquois nations at fearsomecost. At the end, victors inhab- ited a valley of ashes, while the defeated lost friends, homes, and tribal lands forever…”

NY. Black Dome. 2009. 383p.

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

By Stephen E. Gottlieb

FROM THE PREFACE; “Why This Book. Notwithstanding common descriptions of the justices, there is no center on this Court, and there are no moderates. When the Court's "conservatives" find common ground with the Court's "liberals," they have arrived at their conclusions from essentially unrelated premises. Analysis of the Court as if there were a continuum from Rehnquist to Breyer is a serious misunderstanding. This book is intended to clarify the thinking of the nine current members of the Court and the significance of their ways of thinking for the rest of us. We like to think of judges and justices as deciding cases on the facts and the law. Thus some may find upsetting the suggestion although it is surely not new-that justices decide cases in line with their own private, preexisting philosophies of law….”

NY. New York University Press. 2000. 360p

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

By Michael Shaara

FROM THE PREFACE: “This is the story of the Battle of Gettysburg, told from viewpoints of Robert E. Lee and James Longstreet and some of the other men who fought there. Stephen Crane once said that he wrote The Red Badge of Courage because reading the cold history was not enough. He wanted to know what it was like to be there, what the weather was like, what men's faces looked like. In order to live it he had to write it. This book was written for much the same reason. You may find it a different story from the one you leamed at school. There have been many versions of that battle and the war. I have therefore avoided historical opinions and gone primarily to the words of the men themselves, their letters and other documents…”

NY. Ballantine. 2003. 375p.

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

By David McCullough

FROM THE COVER: “In this stirring book, David McCullough tells the intensely human story of those who marched with General George Washington in the year of the Declaration of Independence when the whole American cause was riding on their success, without which al hope for independence would have been dashed and the noble ideals of the Declaration would have amounted tolittle more than words on paper. Based on extensive researchi n both American and British archives, 1776 si apowerful drama written with extraordinary narrative vitality. It is the story of Americans in the ranks, men of every shape, size, and color, farmers, schoolteachers, shoemakers, no- accounts, and mere boys turned soldiers. And it is the story of the King's men, the British commander, William Howe, and his highly disciplined redcoats who looked on their rebel foes with contempt and fought with a valor too little known. Here also is the Revolution as experienced by American Loyalists, Hessian mercenaries, politicians, preachers, traitors, spies, men and women of all kinds caught in the paths of war. At the center of the drama, with Washington, are two young American patriots, who, at first, knew no more of war than whaat they had read in books—Nathaniel Greene, a Quaker who was made general at thirty-three, and Henry Knox, a twenty-five-year-old bookseller who had the preposterous idea of hauling the guns of Fort Ticonderoga overland to Boston in the dead of winter.”

NY. Simon and Schuster. 2005. 423p.

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

By Herbert Agar Ray Billington, Denis Brogan, David Daiches, Corwin D. Edwards, John Hope Franklin, Graham Hutton, Gordon C. Lee And Frank Thistlethwaite

FROM THE PREFACE: “ThE chapters of this book were originally delivered as broadcast talks to the sixth forms of the schools of England and Wales during the spring term of 1955. The British sixth form are a tough-minded crew, and their class room a very lively forum; it is less surprising, therefore, than it might seem, that a series of talks beamed at them should also have been heard by adult cavesdroppers and should now find its way into print to reach a wider public. The talks have been printed as they were spoken, except for the elimination of certain oralisms and the inclusion, here and there, of passages fromthe B.B.C. pamphlet designed to accompany them. They have therefore the limitations of the spoken word in print. Their script-writers had to solve the problem of con- veying a few important truths about the American people in twenty minutes. …”

Melbourne. Cheshire. 1956. 130p.

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

By Stephen E. Ambrose

FROM THE INTRODUCTION: “On the nation's twenty-seventh birthday, July 4, 1803, President Thomas Jefferson proclaimed, in the pages of the Washington, D.C., National Intelligencer, that the United States had just purchased from Napoleon "Louisiana." It was not only New Orleans, but all the country drained from the west by the Mississippi River, most especially all the Missouri River drainage. That was 825,000 square miles, doubling the size of the country for a price of about fifteen million dollars the best land bargain ever made. That same July 4, the president gave to Meriwether Lewis a letter authorizing him to draw on any agency of the U.S. government anywhere in the world anything he wanted for an exploring expedition to the Pacific Ocean. He also authorized Lewis to call on "citizens of any nation to furnish you with those supplies which your necessities may call for" and signed "this letter of general credit for you with my own hand," thus pledging the faith of the United States government. This must be the most unlimited letter of credit ever issued by an American president. The next day, July 5, 1803, Lewis set off. His purpose was to look for an all water route across the western two-thirds of the continent, and to discover and describe what Jefferson had bought from Napoleon.”

NY. Simon & Schuster. 2003. 526p.

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

By Nathaniel Philbrick.

FROM THE COVER FLAP: “How did America begin? This simple question launches acclaimed author Nathaniel Philbrick on an extraordinary journey to understand the truth behind our most sacred national myth: the voyage of the Mayflower and the settlement ofPlymouth Colony. As Philbrick reveals in this electrifying new book, the story of the Pilgrims does not end with the First Thanksgiving; instead, it is a fifty-five-year epic that is at once tragic and heroic, and still carries meaning for us today.

The account begins in the cold and dripping confines of the Mayflower, where 102 passengers tensely await the conclusion of an arduous, two-month voyage. The Pilgrims arrived in Plymouth Harbor during a period of crisis for the Native Americans as disease spread by European fishermen devastated their populations. Initially the two groups--the Wampanoags, under the charismatic and calculating leader Massasoit, and the Pilgrims, whose pugnacious military officer Miles Standish was barely five feet tall--maintained a fragile working relationship. But within decades, New England erupted into King Philip's War, a savage conflict that nearly wiped out English colonists and natives alike, and forever altered the face of the fledgling colonies and the country that would grow from them.

NY. Viking. 2006. 479p.

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

By Robert M. Utley, Maps by Peter H. Dana

FROM THE INTRODUCTION: “For Americans, the history of the Trans-Mississippi West dawned with the nineteenth century. The Louisiana Purchase opened fresh vistas beyond a western boundary that traced the course of the mighty river bisecting most of the North American continent. President Thomas Jefferson knew not what he had bought from Napoleon, but he had long been interested in lifting the veil from the western reaches of the continent. Spaniards, Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Russians knew some of the geography, but mainly around the fringes. Indian tribes, their cul- tures reflecting the immense geographical diversity, knew the heartland. All, in their respective regions, had imprinted human history on the land- scape, the Europeans for three centuries, the natives for millennia. For the first half of the nineteenth century, much of the young American republic's energies concentrated on discovering and recording the contours of this immense land.”

Lincoln And London. University Of Nebraska Press. 2004. 413p.

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

By G. R. Elton

FROM THE PREFACE: “The writing of yet another history of the sixteenth century may seem to require justification, I can only say that I should not have written this book if I had thought so. There is much yet to discover about that well-worked period, and - m ore important--much of what has been discovered in the last thirty years has not yet reached the more general accounts. Only Professor Bindoff's brilliant short study of Tudor England provides an introduction to modern views; and he has left room for a book on a somewhat larger scale, with rather more detail in. Inevitably the different aspects of that crowded century could not all be given equal treatment: I can only hope that there is enough of them all to avoid at least the charge of deliberate obtuseness. …”

London. Methuen & Co. Ltd. 1959. 621p