The Puritans in America
The Puritans in America

Author: Alan Heimert

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-07-01

Total Pages: 458

ISBN-13: 0674038495

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The whole destiny of America is contained in the first Puritans who landed on these shores, wrote de Tocqueville. These newcomers, and the range of their intellectual achievements and failures, are vividly depicted in The Puritans in America. Exiled from England, the Puritans settled in what Cromwell called “a poor, cold, and useless” place—where they created a body of ideas and aspirations that were essential in the shaping of American religion, politics, and culture. In a felicitous blend of documents and narrative Alan Heimert and Andrew Delbanco recapture the sweep and restless change of Puritan thought from its incipient Americanism through its dominance in New England society to its fragmentation in the face of dissent from within and without. A general introduction sketches the Puritan environment, and shorter introductions open each of the six sections of the collection. Thirty-eight writers are included—among these Cotton, Bradford, Bradstreet, Winthrop, Rowlandson, Taylor, and the Mathers—as well as the testimony of Anne Hutchinson and documents illustrating the witchcraft crisis. The works, several of which are published here for the first time since the seventeenth century, are presented in modern spelling and punctuation. Despite numerous scholarly probings, Puritanism remains resistant to categories, whether those of Perry Miller, Max Weber, or Christopher Hill. This new anthology—the first major interpretive collection in nearly fifty years—reveals the beauty and power of Puritan literature as it emerged from the pursuit of self-knowledge in the New World.

The British Atlantic Empire Before the American Revolution
The British Atlantic Empire Before the American Revolution

Author: Glyndwr Williams

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2005-07-08

Total Pages: 142

ISBN-13: 113578051X

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First Published in 1980. The dynamism within the American colonies in the fifty years or so before the outbreak of the crisis of the 1760s that was to lead to the Revolution has never been in doubt. The articles written included in this text suggest a number of ways in which the ‘imperial factor’ was of real importance in colonial life and show that there was dynamism on the British side as well as in the colonies.

Becoming America
Becoming America

Author: Jon Butler

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2001-12-28

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0674006674

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Multinational, profit-driven, materialistic, politically self-conscious, power-hungry, religiously plural: America three hundred years ago -- and today. Here are Britain's mainland American colonies after 1680, in the process of becoming the first modern society -- a society the earliest colonists never imagined, a "new order of the ages" that anticipated the American Revolution. Jon Butler's panoramic view of the colonies in this epoch transforms our customary picture of prerevolutionary America; it reveals a strikingly "modern" character that belies the eighteenth-century quaintness fixed in history. Stressing the middle and late decades (the hitherto "dark ages") of the American colonial experience, and emphasizing the importance of the middle and southern colonies as well as New England, Becoming America shows us transformations before 1776 among an unusually diverse assortment of peoples. Here is a polyglot population of English, Indians, Africans, Scots, Germans, Swiss, Swedes, and French; a society of small colonial cities with enormous urban complexities; an economy of prosperous farmers thrust into international market economies; peoples of immense wealth, a burgeoning middle class, and incredible poverty. Butler depicts settlers pursuing sophisticated provincial politics that ultimately sparked revolution and a new nation; developing new patterns in production, consumption, crafts, and trades that remade commerce at home and abroad; and fashioning a society remarkably pluralistic in religion, whose tolerance nonetheless did not extend to Africans or Indians. Here was a society that turned protest into revolution and remade itself many times during the next centuries -- asociety that, for ninety years before 1776, was becoming America.

The Titans
The Titans

Author: John Jakes

Publisher: Open Road Media

Published: 2012-07-10

Total Pages: 681

ISBN-13: 145325594X

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The Kent family faces internal clashes as the Civil War ignites—from the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of North and South. In the hellish years of the Civil War, the Kent family faces its greatest trials yet. Louis, the devious son of the late Amanda Kent, is in control of the dynasty—and of its seemingly inevitable collapse. His cousin Jephtha Kent, meanwhile, backs the abolitionist cause, while his sons remain devoted Southerners. As the country fractures around the Kents, John Jakes introduces characters that include some of the most famous Americans of this defining era. Spanning the full breadth of the Civil War—from the brutal frontlines in the South to the political tangle in Washington—The Titans chronicles two struggles for identity: the country’s and the Kents’. This ebook features an illustrated biography of John Jakes including rare images from the author’s personal collection.

VC
VC

Author: Tom Nicholas

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2019-07-09

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 0674988000

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“An incisive history of the venture-capital industry.” —New Yorker “An excellent and original economic history of venture capital.” —Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution “A detailed, fact-filled account of America’s most celebrated moneymen.” —New Republic “Extremely interesting, readable, and informative...Tom Nicholas tells you most everything you ever wanted to know about the history of venture capital, from the financing of the whaling industry to the present multibillion-dollar venture funds.” —Arthur Rock “In principle, venture capital is where the ordinarily conservative, cynical domain of big money touches dreamy, long-shot enterprise. In practice, it has become the distinguishing big-business engine of our time...[A] first-rate history.” —New Yorker VC tells the riveting story of how the venture capital industry arose from America’s longstanding identification with entrepreneurship and risk-taking. Whether the venture is a whaling voyage setting sail from New Bedford or the latest Silicon Valley startup, VC is a state of mind as much as a way of doing business, exemplified by an appetite for seeking extreme financial rewards, a tolerance for failure and experimentation, and a faith in the promise of innovation to generate new wealth. Tom Nicholas’s authoritative history takes us on a roller coaster of entrepreneurial successes and setbacks. It describes how iconic firms like Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia invested in Genentech and Apple even as it tells the larger story of VC’s birth and evolution, revealing along the way why venture capital is such a quintessentially American institution—one that has proven difficult to recreate elsewhere.

The Late Great Planet Earth
The Late Great Planet Earth

Author: Hal Lindsey

Publisher: Zondervan

Published: 2016-10-11

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 0310531063

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The impact of The Late Great Planet Earth cannot be overstated. The New York Times called it the "no. 1 non-fiction bestseller of the decade." For Christians and non-Christians of the 1970s, Hal Lindsey's blockbuster served as a wake-up call on events soon to come and events already unfolding -- all leading up to the greatest event of all: the return of Jesus Christ. The years since have confirmed Lindsey's insights into what biblical prophecy says about the times we live in. Whether you're a church-going believer or someone who wouldn't darken the door of a Christian institution, the Bible has much to tell you about the imminent future of this planet. In the midst of an out-of-control generation, it reveals a grand design that's unfolding exactly according to plan. The rebirth of Israel. The threat of war in the Middle East. An increase in natural catastrophes. The revival of Satanism and witchcraft. These and other signs, foreseen by prophets from Moses to Jesus, portend the coming of an antichrist . . . of a war which will bring humanity to the brink of destruction . . . and of incredible deliverance for a desperate, dying planet.

Neighborhood of Fear
Neighborhood of Fear

Author: Kyle Riismandel

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2020-11-24

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 1421439557

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How—haunted by the idea that their suburban homes were under siege—the second generation of suburban residents expanded spatial control and cultural authority through a strategy of productive victimization. The explosive growth of American suburbs following World War II promised not only a new place to live but a new way of life, one away from the crime and crowds of the city. Yet, by the 1970s, the expected security of suburban life gave way to a sense of endangerment. Perceived, and sometimes material, threats from burglars, kidnappers, mallrats, toxic waste, and even the occult challenged assumptions about safe streets, pristine parks, and the sanctity of the home itself. In Neighborhood of Fear, Kyle Riismandel examines how suburbanites responded to this crisis by attempting to take control of the landscape and reaffirm their cultural authority. An increasing sense of criminal and environmental threats, Riismandel explains, coincided with the rise of cable television, VCRs, Dungeons & Dragons, and video games, rendering the suburban household susceptible to moral corruption and physical danger. Terrified in almost equal measure by heavy metal music, the Love Canal disaster, and the supposed kidnapping epidemic implied by the abduction of Adam Walsh, residents installed alarm systems, patrolled neighborhoods, built gated communities, cried "Not in my backyard!," and set strict boundaries on behavior within their homes. Riismandel explains how this movement toward self-protection reaffirmed the primacy of suburban family values and expanded their parochial power while further marginalizing cities and communities of color, a process that facilitated and was facilitated by the politics of the Reagan revolution and New Right. A novel look at how Americans imagined, traversed, and regulated suburban space in the last quarter of the twentieth century, Neighborhood of Fear shows how the preferences of the suburban middle class became central to the cultural values of the nation and fueled the continued growth of suburban political power.