Alan Taylor

In a fast-paced narrative of soaring ideals and sordid politics, of civil war and foreign invasion, the award-winning historian Alan Taylor presents a pivotal twenty-year period in which North America's three largest countries—the United States, Mexico, and Canada—all transformed themselves into nations. American Civil Wars stands at the centre of the story, with its military history and the drama of...

From one of the earliest mentions of its name in the sixth century to the Covid lockdowns of the twenty-first, this is a magnificent portrait of one of the world's great cities in its many iterations, from Edinburgh, the sink of abomination, to the Athens of the North and everything, including the home of the Enlightenment, the Festival City, the...

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. Native peoples sought to defend...

In a fast-paced narrative of soaring ideals and sordid politics, of civil war and foreign invasion, the award-winning historian Alan Taylor presents a pivotal twenty-year period in which North America's three largest countries—the United States, Mexico, and Canada—all transformed themselves into nations. American Civil Wars stands at the centre of the story, its military history and the drama of emancipation...

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. Native peoples sought to defend...

The American Revolution is often portrayed as a high-minded, orderly event whose capstone, the Constitution, provided the nation with its democratic framework. Alan Taylor, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, offers a different creation story in this magisterial history. American Revolutions builds like a ground fire overspreading Britain’s colonies, fuelled by local conditions and resistant to control. Emerging from the continental...

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 honour. A man of "deft evasions" who was...

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 honour. A man of "deft evasions" who was...