Books like John D by David Freeman Hawke

David McCullough’s *1776* chronicles the human drama surrounding the American Revolution’s pivotal year, tracing ordinary soldiers, notable leaders, and British forces as they shape the fate of the fledgling nation.

Paul Revere's midnight ride looms as an almost mythical event in American his- tory—yet it  has been largely ignored by scholars and left to patriotic writers and debunkers. Now one of the foremost American historians offers the first full-scale history of this monumental event.  In Paul Revere's Ride, David Hackett Fischer fashions an exciting narrative that offers deep insight into the outbreak of revolution and the emergence of the American republic. Beginning in the years before the war, Fischer illuminates the figure of Paul Revere, a man far more complex than the simple artisan and messen- ger of tradition. Drawing on intensive new research, Fischer guides readers through the world of Boston's revolutionary movement, recreates the fateful events of April 18th, and provides a fresh interpretation of the battle that began the war at Lexington and Concord.  Returning Paul Revere to center stage in these critical events, Paul Revere's Ride captures both the drama and the underlying developments in a triumphant return to narrative history at its finest. From the dust jacket

In 1778, George Washington unleashed an unlikely ring of spies in New York to discover British battle plans.

The life of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century businessman and philanthropist, tracing his rise from worker to oil multi-millionaire and founder of the Standard Oil Company.

Examines the life and career of the business tycoon and oilman who dominated one of the largest business empires ever built by a single man and died owning close to one billion dollars.

On November 25, 1783, the last British troops pulled out of New York City, bringing the American Revolution to an end. Patriots celebrated their departure and the confirmation of U.S. independence. But for tens of thousands of American loyalists, the British evacuation spelled worry, not jubilation. What would happen to them in the new United States? Would they and their families be safe? Facing grave doubts about their futures, some sixty thousand loyalists -- one in forty members of the American population -- decided to leave their homes and become refugees elsewhere in the British Empire. They sailed for Britain, for Canada, for Jamaica, and for the Bahamas; some ventured as far as Sierra Leone and India. Wherever they went, the voyage out of America was a fresh beginning, and it carried them into a dynamic if uncertain new world. A groundbreaking history of the revolutionary era, Liberty's Exiles tells the story of this remarkable global diaspora. Through painstaking archival research and vivid storytelling, award-winning historian Maya Jasanoff re-creates the journeys of ordinary individuals whose lives were overturned by extraordinary events. She tells of refugees like Elizabeth Johnston, a young mother from Georgia, who spent nearly thirty years as a migrant, searching for a home in Britain, Jamaica, and Canada. And of David George, a black preacher born into slavery, who found freedom and faith in the British Empire, and eventually led his followers to seek a new Jerusalem in Sierra Leone. Mohawk leader Joseph Brant resettled his people under British protection in Ontario, while the adventurer William Augustus Bowles tried to shape a loyalist Creek state in Florida. For all these people and more, it was the British Empire -- not the United States -- that held the promise of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Yet as they dispersed across the empire, the loyalists also carried things from their former homes, revealing an enduring American influence on the wider British world. Ambitious, original, and personality-filled, Liberty's Exiles is at once an intimate narrative history and a provocative new analysis -- a book that explores an unknown dimension of America's founding to illuminate the meanings of liberty itself. - Jacket flap.

A comprehensive biography of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., America's first billionaire, chronicling his rise from humble beginnings to founding Standard Oil and the empire’s controversial business tactics, drawn from an unparalleled trove of personal papers.