"From the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, an entwined narrative of the most adventurous year of all time, when three expeditions simultaneously raced to the top, bottom, and heights of the world. As 1909 dawned, the greatest jewels of exploration--set at the world's frozen extremes--lay unclaimed: the North and South Poles and the so-called Third Pole, the "pole of altitude," located in unexplored heights of the Himalayas. Before the calendar turned,...

New attention from historians and journalists is raising pointed questions about the founding period: was the American revolution waged to preserve slavery, and was the Constitution a pact with slavery or a landmark in the antislavery movement? Leaders of the founding who called for American liberty are scrutinized for enslaving Black people themselves: George Washington consistently refused to recognize the freedom of those who escaped his Mount...

The 1800 presidential election, the last great contest of the founding period, was so convulsive and so momentous for American democracy that Jefferson would later dub it "America's second revolution." America's first true presidential campaign gave birth to our two-party system and etched the lines of partisanship that have shaped American politics ever since. The contest featured two of our most beloved Founding Fathers, once warm friends, facing...

"Few issues besides evolution have so strained Americans' professed tradition, of tolerance. Few historians besides Pulitzer Prize winner Edward J. Larson have so perceptively chronicled evolution's divisive presence on the American scene. This slim volume reviews the key aspects, current and historical, of the creation-evolution debate in the United States." "By looking at the changing motivations and backgrounds of the stakeholders in the creation-evolution...