Last Wednesday of the Month at 6:30 PM (*except November, Third Wednesday); Call (440) 944-6010 to register and reserve your book.
6/24: The War Before Independence 1775-76 by Derek Beck – The United States was creeping ever closer to independence. The shot heard round the world still echoed in the ears of Parliament as impassioned revolutionaries took up arms for and against King and country. In this captivating blend of careful research and rich narrative, Derek W. Beck continues his exploration into the period preceding the Declaration of Independence, just days into the new Revolutionary War.The War Before Independence transports readers into the violent years of 1775 and 1776, with the infamous Battle of Bunker Hill — a turning point in the Revolution — and the snowy, wind-swept march to the frozen ground at the Battle of Quebec, ending with the exciting conclusion of the Boston Campaign.
7/29: American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804 by Alan Taylor – From the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, a fresh, authoritative history that recasts our thinking about America’s founding period.
8/26: The American Revolution and the Fate of the World by Richard Bell – Historian Richard Bell reveals the full breadth and depth of America’s founding event: the American Revolution was not only the colonies’ triumphant liberation from the rule of an overbearing England, it was also a cataclysm that pulled in participants from around the globe and threw the entire world order into chaos. Repositioning the Revolution at the center of an international web, Bell’s narrative ranges as far afield as India, Africa, Central America, and Australia. As his lens widens, the ‘War of Independence’ manifests itself as a sprawling struggle that upended the lives of millions of people on every continent and fundamentally transformed the way the world works, disrupting trade, restructuring penal systems, stirring famine, and creating the first global refugee crisis.
9/30: Revolutionaries: a new history of the invention of America by Jack Rakove – In Revolutionaries, we see Americas founders before they were fully formed leaders, as individuals whose lives were radically altered by the explosive events of the mid-1770s.
10/28: Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution by Simon Schama – The most dramatic account so far of the extraordinary expeience of slaves in and after the American Revolution. If you were black in America at the start of the Revolutionary War, whom would you want to win? In response to a declaration by the last governor of Virginia that any rebel-owned slave who escaped and served the King would be emancpated, tens of thousands of blacks voted with feet, escaping to fight beside the British. Originally designed to break the plantations of the American South, this military strategy instead unleashed one of the great exoduses in American history.
*11/18: Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788 by Pauline Maier* – When the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia adjourned late in the summer of 1787, the delegates returned to their states to report on the new Constitution, which had to be ratified by specially elected conventions in at least nine states. This is the first narrative history in decades of the ratification debate, with all its significance, and it draws on new scholarship about the ratification process.
12/30: Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic 1789-1815 by Gordon S. Wood – A brilliant account of the early American Republic, ranging from 1789 and the beginning of the national government to the end of the War of 1812. Integrating all aspects of life, from politics and law to the economy and culture, Empire of Liberty offers a marvelous account of this pivotal era when America took its first unsteady steps as a new and rapidly expanding nation.
