"A book that radically changes our understanding of North America before and after the arrival of Europeans. Encounters at the Heart of the World concerns the Mandan Indians, iconic Plains people whose teeming, busy towns on the upper Missouri River were for centuries at the center of the North American universe. We know of them mostly because Lewis and Clark spent the winter of 1804-1805 with them, but why don't we know more? Who were they really?...

"From the author of 1491--the best-selling study of the pre-Columbian Americas--a deeply engaging new history that explores the most momentous biological event since the death of the dinosaurs. More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed totally different suites of plants and animals. Columbus's voyages brought them back together--and marked the beginning...

Draws on contemporary documents to examine the lives of an ordinary family, the Winslows, made less ordinary by their responses to the challenges of the New World after their passage on the Mayflower. "A vivid narrative history of the Mayflower and of the Winslow family, whi traveled to America in search of a new world. The voyage of the Mayflower and the founding of Plymouth Colony is one of the seminal events in world history. But the poorly equipped...

"A rising-star historian offers a significant new global perspective on the Revolutionary War with the story of the conflict as seen through the eyes of the outsiders of colonial society. Over the last decade, award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal has revitalized the study of early America's marginalized voices. Now, in Independence Lost, she recounts an untold story as rich and significant as that of the Founding Fathers : the history of the Revolutionary...

"A book on the American Revolution that looks at the critical "long year" of 1774, and the revolutionary change that took place from December 1773 to mid-April 1775, from the Boston Tea Party and the first Continental Congress to the Battle of Lexington and Concord."--

History remembers John Adams as a Founding Father and our country's second president. But in the tense years before the American Revolution, he was still just a lawyer, fighting for justice in one of the most explosive murder trials of the era. On the night of March 5, 1770, shots were fired by British soldiers on the streets of Boston, killing five civilians. The Boston Massacre has often been called the first shots of the American Revolution. As...