Published under the auspices of the American Revolution Institute of the Society of the Cincinnati, Freedom: The Enduring Importance of the American Revolution is a narrative history of the War for Independence. It tells the pivotal story of the courageous men and women who risked their lives to create a new nation based on the idea that government should serve people and protect their freedom. Written for Americans intent on understanding our national origins, but also appropriate for teachers and secondary classrooms, Freedom argues that the American Revolution is the central event in our history: the turning point between our colonial origins and our national experience. This volume includes 167 full-color paintings, maps, illustrations, and photos--many of them seen only in historical institutions across the country! The Freedom narrative spans from the American Revolution's origins in the nature of colonial British America--a society in which freedom was limited and in which everyone was the subject of a distant monarch--through the crisis in the British Empire that followed the French and Indian War, to the events of the War for Independence itself, and ultimately to the creation of the first great republic in modern history. This is the story of how Americans came to fight for their freedom and became a united people, with a shared history and national identity, and how a generation of founders expressed ideals of liberty, equality, natural and civil rights, and responsible citizenship: ideals that have shaped our history and will shape our future--and the future of the world.

Volume 7 of the Presidential Series presents documents written during the final sessions of the First Congress, a period of intense activity for Washington and his administration. Between December 1790 and March 1791, Congress passed legislation that established a national bank and a federal excise, dramatically increased the size of the army, and provided for the admission of Vermont to the Union. Filling the offices created by these and other acts occupied much of Washington's attention; the excise service alone was one of the largest bureaucracies created during the Early Republic. The Indian war on the northwest frontier continued to be a major concern. Washington received news of Josiah Harmar's defeat on the frontier shortly after arriving in Philadelphia in December and spent the succeeding months planning a larger military expedition for 1791. Washington also devoted a large part of his time to the new Federal City on the Potomac. He announced the location of the federal district, dispatched Andrew Ellicott and Pierre L'Enfant to lay out the city, and engaged in negotiations with local property owners for the necessary land. All of these activities were set against a background of increasing partisan division within the government, brought into high relief in February 1791 by the controversy over the bill to incorporate the Bank of the United States. This volume includes written opinions on the bill's constitutionality prepared for Washington by Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and Edmund Randolph (Randolph's opinion is published here for the first time). The volume closes on 21 March 1791, the day Washington left Philadelphia on the first leg of his triumphal Southern Tour.

This book is a fascinating re-creation of the lives of women in the time of great social change that followed the end of the French and Indian War in western Pennsylvania. Many decades passed before a desolate and violent frontier was transformed into a stable region of farms and towns. Keeping House: Women's Lives in Western Pennsylvania, 1790-1850 tells how the daughters, wives, and mothers who crossed the Allegheny Mountains responded and adapted to unaccustomed physical and psychological hardships as they established lives for themselves and their families in their new homes. Intrigued by late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century manuscript cookbooks in the collection of the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, Virginia Bartlett wanted to find out more about women living in the region during that period. Quoting from journals, letters, cookbooks, travelers' accounts - approving and critical - memoirs, documents, and newspapers, she offers us voices of women and men commenting seriously and humorously on what was going on around them. The text is well-illustrated with contemporaneous art-- engravings, apaintings, drawings, and cartoons. Of special interest are color and black-and-white photographs of furnishings, housewares, clothing, and portraits from the collections of the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania. This is not a sentimental account. Bartlett makes clear how little say women had about their lives and how little protection they could expect from the law, especially on matters relating to property. Their world was one of marked contrasts: life in a log cabin with bare necessities and elegant dinners in the homes of Pittsburgh's military and entrepreneurial elite; rural women in homespun and affluent Pittsburgh ladies in imported fashions. When the book begins, families are living in fear of Indian attacks; as it ends, the word "shawling" has come into use as the polite term for pregnancy, referring to women's attempt to hide their condition with cleverly draped shawls. The menacing frontier has given way to American-style gentility. An introduction by Jack D. Warren, University of Virginia, sets the scene with a discussion of the early peopling of the region and places the book within the context of women's studies.