America250 Reading List • PBS Books

America's beloved and distinguished historian presents, in a book of breathtaking excitement, drama, and narrative force, the stirring story of the year of our nation's birth, 1776, interweaving, on both sides of the Atlantic, the actions and decisions that led Great Britain to undertake a war against her rebellious colonial subjects and that placed America's survival in the hands of George Washington.
In this masterful book, David McCullough...

A fierce group of rebels who will never surrender. An empire with an army that has never known defeat. And a war that changed the world forever.

As Thomas Jefferson's oldest daughter, Patsy becomes his helpmate, protector, and constant companion in the wake of her mother's death. She travels with him when he becomes American minister to France. It is in Paris that Patsy learns about her father's troubling liaison with Sally Hemings, a slave girl her own age. Meanwhile, Patsy has fallen in love with her father's protégé William Short, a staunch abolitionist and ambitious diplomat. Her choices...

"Rick Atkinson, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning An Army at Dawn and two other masterly books about World War II, has long been admired for his unparalleled ability to write deeply researched, stunningly vivid narrative history. Now he turns his attention to a new war, and in the initial volume of the Revolution Trilogy he tells the story of the first twenty months of the bloody struggle to shake free of King George's shackles. From the battles...

After being sold to a cruel couple in New York City, a slave named Isabel spies for the rebels during the Revolutionary War.

"Taking place during the most critical period of our nation's birth, The First Conspiracy tells a remarkable and previously untold piece of American history that not only reveals George Washington's character, but also illuminates the origins of America's counterintelligence movement that led to the modern day CIA.In 1776, an elite group of soldiers were handpicked to serve as George Washington's bodyguards. Washington trusted them; relied on them....

Brief portraits of women from the period of the Revolution and early United States.

Cobbs's (Broken Promises) second novel is a fictionalized biography that will appeal to both biography fans and general fiction readers. Cobbs's tale of Alexander Hamilton's life concentrates mostly on his wooing of future wife Elizabeth Schuyler. But it's when he is contemplating the future of a newly independent nation and questioning the morality of mankind that the story feels most alive. Beginning in 1768 and ending in 1854, the novel alternates...