A Puritan Outpost
A Puritan Outpost

Author: Herbert C. Parsons

Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing

Published: 2018-03-12

Total Pages: 919

ISBN-13: 1789120535

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A Puritan Outpost by Herbert C. Parsons, which was originally published in 1937, is the history of Northfield, Massachusetts, “a distinctive New England town, the farthest venture of Puritan pioneering to the west and north in the seventeenth century, which had to be claimed by venturesome settlers three times before its foothold was even relatively secure. Through nearly a century it was exposed to the recurrent assaults and the constant peril of French and Indian invasion, with intermissions when the settlers were dislodged, during one of which it was the thronging seat of the command of the arch-enemy of white occupation, the dubiously crowned King Philip. “Toughened through generations of hardihood, its people developed the sturdy, self-reliant, pious, prudent and independent community, thoroughly characteristic of their unmixed British blood and Puritan heritage. Consistently with such background and distinctly out of such breeding, one of the sons it sent out to varied careers in the world’s affairs came to fame and widespread service as an evangelistic leader and by his hand the added feature was bestowed upon it of being a school and religious centre. “The town’s respect for its historic past has led to the writing of the story.”

New England Outpost
New England Outpost

Author: Richard I. Melvoin

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 1992-02

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 9780393308082

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Deerfield's first half-century, starting in 1670, was a struggle to survive numerous Indian attacks. But more than a site of bloodshed, Deerfield offers an extraordinary opportunity to study larger issues of colonial war and society.

Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin

Author: Walter Isaacson

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2004-05-04

Total Pages: 628

ISBN-13: 9780743258074

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Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us, the one who seems made of flesh rather than marble. In this authoritative and engrossing full-scale biography, Walter Isaacson shows how the most fascinating of America's founders helped define our national character. In a sweeping narrative that follows Franklin's life from Boston to Philadelphia to London and Paris and back, Isaacson chronicles the adventures of the spunky runaway apprentice who became, during his 84-year life, America's best writer, inventor, media baron, scientist, diplomat, and business strategist, as well as one of its most practical and ingenious political leaders. He explores the wit behind Poor Richard's Almanac and the wisdom behind the Declaration of Independence, the new nation's alliance with France, the treaty that ended the Revolution, and the compromises that created a near-perfect Constitution. Above all, Isaacson shows how Franklin's unwavering faith in the wisdom of the common citizen and his instinctive appreciation for the possibilities of democracy helped to forge an American national identity based on the virtues and values of its middle class.

Indian New England Before the Mayflower
Indian New England Before the Mayflower

Author: Howard S. Russell

Publisher: University Press of New England

Published: 2014-07-22

Total Pages: 403

ISBN-13: 1611686369

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In offering here a highly readable yet comprehensive description of New England's Indians as they lived when European settlers first met them, the author provides a well-rounded picture of the natives as neither savages nor heroes, but fellow human beings existing at a particular time and in a particular environment. He dispels once and for all the common notion of native New England as peopled by a handful of savages wandering in a trackless wilderness. In sketching the picture the author has had help from such early explorers as Verrazano, Champlain, John Smith, and a score of literate sailors; Pilgrims and Puritans; settlers, travelers, military men, and missionaries. A surprising number of these took time and trouble to write about the new land and the characteristics and way of life of its native people. A second major background source has been the patient investigations of modern archaeologists and scientists, whose several enthusiastic organizations sponsor physical excavations and publications that continually add to our perception of prehistoric men and women, their habits, and their environment. This account of the earlier New Englanders, of their land and how they lived in it and treated it; their customs, food, life, means of livelihood, and philosophy of life will be of interest to all general audiences concerned with the history of Native Americans and of New England.

Reformations
Reformations

Author: Carlos M. N. Eire

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2016-06-28

Total Pages: 914

ISBN-13: 0300220685

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This fast-paced survey of Western civilization’s transition from the Middle Ages to modernity brings that tumultuous period vividly to life. Carlos Eire, popular professor and gifted writer, chronicles the two-hundred-year era of the Renaissance and Reformation with particular attention to issues that persist as concerns in the present day. Eire connects the Protestant and Catholic Reformations in new and profound ways, and he demonstrates convincingly that this crucial turning point in history not only affected people long gone, but continues to shape our world and define who we are today. The book focuses on the vast changes that took place in Western civilization between 1450 and 1650, from Gutenberg’s printing press and the subsequent revolution in the spread of ideas to the close of the Thirty Years’ War. Eire devotes equal attention to the various Protestant traditions and churches as well as to Catholicism, skepticism, and secularism, and he takes into account the expansion of European culture and religion into other lands, particularly the Americas and Asia. He also underscores how changes in religion transformed the Western secular world. A book created with students and nonspecialists in mind, Reformations is an inspiring, provocative volume for any reader who is curious about the role of ideas and beliefs in history.

Ebony and Ivy
Ebony and Ivy

Author: Craig Steven Wilder

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2014-09-02

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 1608194027

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A leading African-American historian of race in America exposes the uncomfortable truths about race, slavery and the American academy, revealing that our leading universities, dependent on human bondage, became breeding grounds for the racist ideas that sustained it.

The Oxford Illustrated History of the Reformation
The Oxford Illustrated History of the Reformation

Author: Peter Marshall

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2015-01-22

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 0191045500

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The Reformation was a seismic event in history, whose consequences are still working themselves out in Europe and across the world. The protests against the marketing of indulgences staged by the German monk Martin Luther in 1517 belonged to a long-standing pattern of calls for internal reform and renewal in the Christian Church. But they rapidly took a radical and unexpected turn, engulfing first Germany and then Europe as a whole in furious arguments about how God's will was to be 'saved'. However, these debates did not remain confined to a narrow sphere of theology. They came to reshape politics and international relations; social, cultural, and artistic developments; relations between the sexes; and the patterns and performances of everyday life. They were also the stimulus for Christianity's transformation into a truly global religion, as agents of the Roman Catholic Church sought to compensate for losses in Europe with new conversions in Asia and the Americas. Covering both Protestant and Catholic reform movements, in Europe and across the wider world, this beautifully illustrated volume tells the story of the Reformation from its immediate, explosive beginnings, through to its profound longer-term consequences and legacy for the modern world. The story is not one of an inevitable triumph of liberty over oppression, enlightenment over ignorance. Rather, it tells how a multitude of rival groups and individuals, with or without the support of political power, strove after visions of 'reform'. And how, in spite of themselves, they laid the foundations for the plural and conflicted world we now inhabit.

Before the Flood
Before the Flood

Author: Elisabeth C. Rosenberg

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2021-08-03

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 1643136453

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In the tradition of Silent Spring, a modern parable of the American experience and our paradoxical relationship with the natural world. Though it seems a part of the "natural" landscape of New England today, the Swift River Valley reservoir, dam, dike, and nature area was a triumph of civil engineering. It combined forward-looking environmental stewardship and social policy, yet the “little people”—and the four towns in which they lived—got lost along the way. Elisabeth Rosenberg has crafted Before the Flood to be both a modern and a universal story in a time when managed retreat will one day be a reality. Meticulously researched, Before the Flood, is the first narrative book on the incredible history of the Swift River Valley and the origins Quabbin Reservoir. Rosenberg dive into the socioeconomic and psychological aspects of the Swift River Valley’s destruction in order to supply drinking water for the growing populations of Boston and wider Massachusetts. It is as much a human story as the story of water and landscape, and Before the Flood movingly reveals both the stories and the science of the key players and the four flooded towns that were washed forever away.

The Oxford History of the Reformation
The Oxford History of the Reformation

Author: Peter Marshall

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-09-01

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 0192648373

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'a vital resource' TLS 'Compelling collection' Literary Review The Reformation was a seismic event in history whose consequences are still unfolding in Europe and across the world. Martin Luther's protests against the marketing of indulgences in 1517 were part of a long-standing pattern of calls for reform in the Christian Church. But they rapidly took a radical and unexpected turn, engulfing first Germany, and then Europe, in furious arguments about how God's will was to be 'saved'. However, these debates did not remain confined to a narrow sphere of theology. They came to reshape politics and international relations; social, cultural, and artistic developments; relations between the sexes; and the patterns and performances of everyday life. They were also the stimulus for Christianity's transformation into a truly global religion, as agents of the Roman Catholic Church sought to compensate for losses in Europe with new conversions in Asia and the Americas. Covering both Protestant and Catholic reform movements, in Europe and across the wider world, this compact volume tells the story of the Reformation from its immediate, explosive beginnings, through to its profound longer-term consequences and legacy for the modern world. The story is not one of an inevitable triumph of liberty over oppression, enlightenment over ignorance. Rather, it tells how a multitude of rival groups and individuals, with or without the support of political power, strove after visions of 'reform'. And how, in spite of themselves, they laid the foundations for the plural and conflicted world we now inhabit.