American Passage

By Katherine Grandjean,

Book cover of American Passage: The Communications Frontier in Early New England

Book description

New England was built on letters. Its colonists left behind thousands of them, brittle and browning and crammed with curls of purplish script. How they were delivered, though, remains mysterious. We know surprisingly little about the way news and people traveled in early America. No postal service or newspapers existed-not…

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Why read it?

1 author picked American Passage as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

American Passage’s portrayal of early New England as a fluid frontier where people, goods, and information traveled is excellent.

I like how Grandjean retells the English settlement of the region in terms of how people moved and communicated with one another. She forces readers to rethink our ideas of settler colonialism. In reality, English settlements were tiny islands in a vast sea of Indian lands.

From Mark's list on borderland mobility.

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