Showing results by author "Alan Taylor" in All Categories

From the Pulitzer-Prize–winning historian, an absorbing family saga of Virginia slavery and the earthshaking rebellion led by Nat Turner. This powerful history of Virginia slavery is grounded in the daily life of a struggling plantation, Tower Hill, owned by generations of a local merchant...

Thirteen outstanding authors. Thirteen aviation stories that never happened. Throughout the human experience, historians have wondered, “What if?” What if Americans had fought on the side of Germany in World War I? What if Germany had invested in naval aviation in World War II? What if Russia had started World War III? Wonder no more, for these questions, along with many others, are answered within this audiobook.

Over the last generation, historians have broadened our understanding of colonial America by adopting both a trans-Atlantic and a trans-continental perspective, examining the interplay of Europe, Africa, and the Americas through the flow of goods, people, plants, animals, capital, and ideas. In this Very Short Introduction, Alan Taylor presents an engaging overview of the best of this new scholarship.

The American Civil War stands at the center of the story, its military history and the drama of emancipation the highlights. Taylor relies on vivid characters to carry the story, from Joseph Hooker, whose timidity in crisis was exploited by Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in the Union defeat at Chancellorsville, to Martin Delany and Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Black abolitionists whose critical work in Canada and the United States advanced emancipation and the enrollment of Black soldiers in Union armies.

From 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...

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. A man of “deft evasions” who was both courtly and withdrawn, Jefferson sought control of his family and state from his lofty perch at Monticello.

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.

On April 19, 1775, the American Revolution began at the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts. The "shot heard round the world" catapulted this sleepy New England town into the midst of revolutionary fervor, and Concord went on to become the intellectual capital of the new republic. In The Minutemen and Their World, Robert Gross has written a remarkably subtle and detailed reconstruction of the lives and community of this special place, and a compelling interpretation of the American Revolution as a social movement.

This searing story of slavery and freedom in the Chesapeake 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. Drawn from new sources, Alan Taylor's riveting narrative re-creates the events that inspired black Virginians, haunted slaveholders, and set the nation on a new and dangerous course.

In the first volume in the Penguin History of the United States series, edited by Eric Foner, Alan Taylor challenges the traditional story of colonial history by examining the many cultures that helped make America, from the native inhabitants from millennia past through the decades of Western colonization and conquest and across the entire continent, all the way to the Pacific coast.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Alan Taylor tells the riveting story of a war that redefined North America. In a world of double identities, slippery allegiances, and porous borders, the leaders of the American Republic and the British Empire struggled to control their own diverse peoples. Taylor’s vivid narrative of an often brutal—sometimes farcical—war reveals much about the tangled origins of the United States and Canada.

Ten renowned teachers and Hay House authors offer practical advice and inspirational teachings to hone and develop your psychic tools. Hay House is honored to present Matt Kahn, Colette Baron-Reid, John Holland, James Van Praagh, Diane Cooper, Radleigh Valentine, Alan Cohen, Sandra Anne Taylor...

Fifteen outstanding authors. Fourteen extraordinary stories. One best-selling universe. It’s the 22nd century. The galaxy has opened up to humanity as a hyperactive beehive of stargates and new technologies, and we suddenly find ourselves in a vast playground of different races, environments, and cultures. Enter the Four Horsemen universe, where only a willingness to fight and die for money separates humans from the majority of the other races. Enter a galaxy not only of mercenaries, but also of aliens, hired assassins, and accountants. Accountants?

Alan Rickman remains one of the most beloved actors of all time across almost every genre, from his breakout role as Die Hard's villainous Hans Gruber to his heart-wrenching run as Professor Severus Snape, and beyond. But Rickman's artistry wasn't confined to just his performances. Fans of memoirs at large will delight in the intimate experience of Rickman detailing the extraordinary and the ordinary in a way that is 'anecdotal, indiscreet, witty, gossipy and utterly candid'.

Short Stories by Texas Authors – Volume 10 (2025) showcases the range and punch of contemporary Texas storytelling—gritty realism, luminous literary work, and bold imagination—curated by Texas Authors Press, a division of the Texas Authors Museum & Institute of History. Drawn from the annual short story contest and arranged by score, this limited 2025 edition moves from a motel-room survival in Cheryl King’s “A Wonderful Horrible Life” to myth-forged courage in Emeryl Williams’s “Guardian of the High Reaches: The Story of Jul and Ari,” then roots itself in place with B. ...

In the simmering heat of August 1967, a kaleidoscopic minivan carrying a band of hippies – adorned with long hair, beards, beads, sandals, and granny dresses – pulls up at the gates of Ft. Gordon, Augusta, GA, then the heartland of the Military Police. Their mission is unconventional: to instruct the 25th Infantry Division, 60th Mine Scout Dog Platoon in harnessing the keen senses of dogs to detect landmines, trip wires, and hidden tunnels. The air crackles with animosity as two worlds collide: the free-spirited and the regimented.

Stay is a powerful, deeply human novella about love, healing, and the resilience found in community. AJ, a middle-aged gay man, has spent years searching for belonging in the leather world—often at the cost of his own voice. When a dangerous scene forces him to confront the lies he’s believed about love, he begins a journey of rediscovery, guided by mentors, peers, and his own hard-won courage. This is not a story of spectacle, but of presence: saying no and still being wanted, saying yes and still being yourself. With lyrical prose and raw honesty, Stay offers readers an intimate ...

Love doesn’t follow a script. It grows in the quiet moments, the broken places, and the brave decisions to try again. In this powerful and emotionally resonant collection, B Alan Bourgeois weaves together four unforgettable stories that explore queer love in all its depth—from magical beginnings to soul-deep healing and the hard-won trust that comes after. In Gift of the Magi, a lonely candle maker casts a wish into wax and flame—and finds that magic answers in ways he never expected. In The Apron and the Pen, a writer mourning the one who slipped away tries to reshape grief into ...

A gripping collection of Victorian supernatural stories from the greatest ghost story writers of the age. 'Room Number Ten' by Bessie Kyffin-Taylor, 'Kerfol' by Edith Wharton, 'A Child of the Rain' by Elia W. Peattie, 'The Cold Embrace' by Mary E. Braddon, 'The Mummy of Thompson-Pratt' by Charles John Cutcliffe Hyne, 'When I Was Dead' by Vincent O'Sullivan, 'The Everlasting Club' by Arthur Gray, 'The Story of the Spaniards' by E & H Heron, 'The Staircase' by Hugh Walpole....

This book is an intimate, fond and funny memoir of one of the greatest novelists of the last century. This colourful, personal, anecdotal, indiscrete and admiring memoir charts the course of Muriel Spark's life, revealing her as she really was. Once, she commented, sitting over a glass of chianti at the kitchen table, that she was upset that the academic whom she had appointed her official biographer did not appear to think that she had ever cracked a joke in her life. Alan Taylor sets the record straight.