As an early American historian, I assigned this book to a graduate seminar on the American Revolution, and it was the most readable version of a military history I've read from that war in a long time. Great pacing and really clear prose made it easily digestible, despite its length. The balance that the author brought between sharp historical analysis and narrative-driven story-telling made this a history book that I could assign to graduate students, undergraduates, or simply gift to my history buff dad. Plus, I learned so much about the significance of the larger Saratoga Campaign and the northern theatre of the war.
Winner of the Gilder Lehrman Military History Prize, Winner of the Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award, Winner of The Society of the Cincinnati Prize & Winner of the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution 2024 NASDR Excellence in American History Book Award.
In the late summer and fall of 1777, after two years of indecisive fighting on both sides, the outcome of the American War of Independence hung in the balance. Having successfully expelled the Americans from Canada in 1776, the British were determined to end the rebellion the following year and devised what they believed a war-winning strategy,…
Sticking with the history book theme, I have always admired the work and writings of Elliott West, and this book pay prove to be his Magnum Opus. It posits that another through-line of American history from the 1840s to the 1870s is the integration and incorporation of the western half of the continent. This is a sweeping history that takes into account the growth of the federal government, westward expansion and exploration by American citizens, technological changes, environmental exploitation, and the experiences of Native nations and non-white populations in what would become the American West. If you need a single volume to understand the history of the American West, this might well be it.
Finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in History Winner of the 2024 Bancroft Prize in American History Winner of the 2024 Caughey Western History Prize Winner of the 2024 Spur Award Named a Best Civil War Book of 2023 by Civil War Monitor
In Continental Reckoning renowned historian Elliott West presents a sweeping narrative of the American West and its vital role in the transformation of the nation. In the 1840s, by which time the United States had expanded to the Pacific, what would become the West was home to numerous vibrant Native cultures and vague claims by other nations.…
Sticking with the theme of history books I read this past year, Aron's Peace and Friendship certainly got me thinking about the "frontier" in a different way. Unlike the stereotypical violence one would expect with a history of frontier relations between Native peoples and Europeans, this book offers a story of "concord"--those fleeting moments when Indigenous people and Euro-American newcomers met, collaborated, an coexisted in the contact zones of North America. Aron is expansive in tracing these moments from early Kentucky to Missouri, the Pacific Coast, the Great Plains, and many points in between. But just as his book shows the possibilities of peaceful coexistence between cultures, it also charts how these potentially peaceful places in frontier America time and again fell apart and devolved into the more familiar violence of frontier tropes. But I found it compelling, as the author suggests, that these moments were possible and could have led to different endings.
For over 35 years, the dominant histories of the American West have been narratives of horrific conflicts. Framed in terms of empire building, these histories use modern constructs of ethnic cleansing and genocide to reckon the costs of centuries of conquest and settler colonialism. This vocabulary, and the interpretation it supports, sharply contrasts with older accounts of the "winning of the West," which had exulted in the triumph of civilization over savagery, making America great -- and great again. As dark and as bloody as western grounds have often been…
Muddy Ground looks at how geography shaped relations between Indigenous peoples and Europeans, zooming in on the localized space of Chicago’s portages from early contact through the 1840s. Part history of early Chicago and part an exploration into Indigenous waterborne networks and ecological knowledge, the book details how the unique freshwater nature of the Great Lakes undergirded the power of Native peoples deep within the continent. The book challenges readers to reconsider the importance of environments in shaping history, because in the end, the United States’ conquest of the interior relied upon a series of environmental disruptions. This overhauling of local geographies, like the waterborne crossroads of Chicago, undermined Indigenous resistance and paved the way for American settlement.
