Early America

Frontier: the word carries the inevitable scent of the West. But before Custer or Lewis and Clark, before the first Conestoga wagons rumbled across the Plains, it was the East that marked the frontier - the boundary between complex Native cultures and the first colonizing Europeans.Here is the older, wilder, darker history of a time when the land between the Atlantic and the Appalachians was contested ground - when radically different societies adopted and adapted the ways of the other, while struggling for control of what all considered to be their land.

In the beginning, North America was Indian country. But only in the beginning. After the opening act of the great national drama, Native Americans yielded to the westward rush of European settlers. Or so the story usually goes. Yet, for three centuries after Columbus, Native people controlled most of eastern North America and profoundly shaped its destiny. In Facing East from Indian Country, Daniel K. Richter keeps Native people center-stage throughout the story of the origins of the United States.

In Speaking with the Dead in Early America, historian Erik R. Seeman undertakes a 300-year history of Protestant communication with the dead. Seeman chronicles the story of Protestants' relationships with the deceased from Elizabethan England to puritan New England and then on through the American Enlightenment into the middle of the nineteenth century with the explosion of interest in Spiritualism. He brings together a wide range of sources to uncover the beliefs and practices of both ordinary people, especially women, and religious leaders.

Meet unforgettable people and animals in the What a Character! Notable Lives from History series as you enjoy 10 real stories within each book!

In this fascinating and highly original work of cultural history, Richard Cullen Rath recreates in rich detail a world remote from our own, one in which sounds were charged with meaning and power. This audiobook's stunning evidence of the importance of sound in early America - even among the highly literate New England Puritans - reminds us of a time before a world dominated by the visual, a young country where hearing was a more crucial part of living.

Many scholars assume that early American economists were committed to Adam Smith’s ideas of free trade and small government. Debunking this belief, Christopher W. Calvo provides a comprehensive history of the nation’s economic thought from 1790 to 1860, tracing the development of a uniquely American understanding of capitalism. The Emergence of Capitalism in Early America shows how American economists challenged, adjusted, and adopted the ideas of European thinkers such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Thomas Malthus to suit their particular interests.

The history of the United States is, to a large extent, a history of armed conflict. The nation was first forged in war, a tough fight for independence against one of the world’s largest empires, and that fight would resume less than a generation later with the War of 1812. Then, there were constant low-level conflicts with Native Americans as the nation expanded westwards, and occasionally, the country engaged in full-scale war against the Sioux, Comanche, and Apache.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that it is much easier to overthrow a government than form a new one, and that in turn it is easier to form a government than to govern. The men who founded America knew these facts in theory, but in the last decade of the 18th century, they learned them by experience when, just a few years after the new Constitution had been ratified, a rebellion arose over taxes.