Ocean State Libraries

The ideals of freedom and individual rights that inspired America's Founding Fathers did not spring from a vacuum. Along with many other defining principles of our national character, they can be traced directly back to one of the most pivotal events in British history-the late-seventeenth-century uprising known as the Glorious Revolution.In a work of popular history that stands with recent favorites such as David McCullough's 1776 and Joseph J. Ellis's...

Historians have viewed England's Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689 as an un-revolutionary revolution--bloodless, consensual, aristocratic, and above all, sensible. Steve Pincus refutes this traditional view. He demonstrates that England's revolution was a European event, that it took place over a number of years, and that it had repercussions in India, North America, the West Indies, and throughout continental Europe. His rich narrative, based on new...

Ackroyd takes readers from William of Orange's accession following the Glorious Revolution to the Regency, when the flamboyant Prince of Wales ruled in the stead of his mad father, George III. Late Stuart and Georgian England marked the creation of the great pillars of the English state, and was also a revolutionary era in English letters. It was also a time of extraordinary and unprecedented technological innovation, which saw England utterly and...