Alan Taylor Archives

American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750 – 1804

rom the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, a fresh, authoritative history that recasts our thinking about America’s founding period.

The American Revolution is often portrayed as a high-minded, orderly event whose capstone, the Constitution, provided the ideal framework for a democratic, prosperous nation. Alan Taylor, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, gives us a different creation story in this magisterial history of the nation’s founding. […Learn More]

The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772 – 1832

Winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for History

This searing story of slavery and freedom in the Chesapeake by a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian reveals the pivot in the nation’s path between the founding and civil war.

Frederick Douglass recalled that slaves living along Chesapeake Bay longingly viewed sailing ships as “freedom’s swift-winged angels.” In 1813 those angels appeared in the bay as British warships coming to punish the Americans for declaring war on the empire. […Learn More]

Thomas Jefferson’s Education

From a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian comes a brilliant, absorbing study of Thomas Jefferson’s campaign to save Virginia through education.

By turns entertaining and tragic, this beautifully written history reveals the origins of a great university in the dilemmas of Virginia slavery. It offers an incisive portrait of Thomas Jefferson set against a social fabric of planters in decline, enslaved black families torn apart by sales, and a hair-trigger code of male honor. […Learn More]

American Republics: A Continental History of the United States 1783 – 1850

From a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, the powerful story of a fragile nation as it expands across a contested continent.

In this beautifully written history of America’s formative period, a preeminent historian upends the traditional story of a young nation confidently marching to its continent-spanning destiny. The newly constituted United States actually emerged as a fragile, internally divided union of states contending still with European empires and other independent republics on the North American continent. […Learn More]