Here are 100 books that George Croghan fans have personally recommended if you like
George Croghan.
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I grew up in western Pennsylvania where my dad loved history and always tried to stop at any battlefield or historic sign that happened to be within his field of vision. My mom was a passionate researcher of our family ancestry and I spent our childhood looking in cemeteries for specific names and gravestones. When I was ten years old, we joined a living history reenactment group that portrayed everyday life in the 1750s, and I was immediately hooked. I began researching about our group known as “Captain William Trent’s Company” and after almost thirty years of living and breathing summer weekends at 18th Century historic sites, the pages of Pittsburgh’s Lost Outpost: Captain Trent’s Fort came to life. I picked these five books because I want future readers to be transported like I was when I first read them.
Every author, when writing nonfiction about a particular time period, always hopes that one day readers will read their book and will declare it the best book written on the subject. For me, Dr. Preston’s book was the “mic drop” about a certain disaster in the backwoods of western Pennsylvania in the summer of 1755 that changed the life of a young George Washington and history altogether. His vast research on the battle inspired me to uncover every detail as I began my own journey in writing my first nonfiction book.
On July 9, 1755, British regulars and American colonial troops under the command of General Edward Braddock, commander in chief of the British Army in North America, were attacked by French and Native American forces shortly after crossing the Monongahela River and while making their way to besiege Fort Duquesne in the Ohio Valley, a few miles from what is now Pittsburgh. The long line of red-coated troops struggled to maintain cohesion and discipline as Indian warriors quickly outflanked them and used the dense cover of the woods to masterful and lethal effect. Within hours, a powerful British army was…
I grew up in western Pennsylvania where my dad loved history and always tried to stop at any battlefield or historic sign that happened to be within his field of vision. My mom was a passionate researcher of our family ancestry and I spent our childhood looking in cemeteries for specific names and gravestones. When I was ten years old, we joined a living history reenactment group that portrayed everyday life in the 1750s, and I was immediately hooked. I began researching about our group known as “Captain William Trent’s Company” and after almost thirty years of living and breathing summer weekends at 18th Century historic sites, the pages of Pittsburgh’s Lost Outpost: Captain Trent’s Fort came to life. I picked these five books because I want future readers to be transported like I was when I first read them.
This book is unique because it shows the reader how you can walk in the footsteps and travel like those trekking across Pennsylvania in the early 18th Century where there were no interstates or turnpikes, but instead, indigenous paths that influenced the roadways we know today. It also gave me a visual where I could experience firsthand what a traveler saw when he or she walked this route.
Since its original publication in 1965, Indian Paths of Pennsylvania has remained the standard volume for charting the foot trails forged and followed in Pennsylvania by Native Americans, documenting an era of interaction between Indians and European settlers in the 17th and 18th centuries. With the advent of European settlement, the Indian trails that laced the wilderness were so well-situated that there was little reason to forsake them until the age of the automobile. The trails that traverse the mountains “kept the level” so well that they remain an engineering curiosity. Equally as remarkable are the complexity of the system…
I grew up in western Pennsylvania where my dad loved history and always tried to stop at any battlefield or historic sign that happened to be within his field of vision. My mom was a passionate researcher of our family ancestry and I spent our childhood looking in cemeteries for specific names and gravestones. When I was ten years old, we joined a living history reenactment group that portrayed everyday life in the 1750s, and I was immediately hooked. I began researching about our group known as “Captain William Trent’s Company” and after almost thirty years of living and breathing summer weekends at 18th Century historic sites, the pages of Pittsburgh’s Lost Outpost: Captain Trent’s Fort came to life. I picked these five books because I want future readers to be transported like I was when I first read them.
This book to me was my first in-depth look at an Indian agent and trader during the 1750s and it didn’t disappoint. Though Christopher Gist’s life was cut short by illness, his contribution was nonetheless remarkable and allowed me to explore my own research to all the people Gist interacted with during his lifetime. I also credit the author for making the book so easy to read for anyone learning about Christopher Gist for the first time.
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
I grew up in western Pennsylvania where my dad loved history and always tried to stop at any battlefield or historic sign that happened to be within his field of vision. My mom was a passionate researcher of our family ancestry and I spent our childhood looking in cemeteries for specific names and gravestones. When I was ten years old, we joined a living history reenactment group that portrayed everyday life in the 1750s, and I was immediately hooked. I began researching about our group known as “Captain William Trent’s Company” and after almost thirty years of living and breathing summer weekends at 18th Century historic sites, the pages of Pittsburgh’s Lost Outpost: Captain Trent’s Fort came to life. I picked these five books because I want future readers to be transported like I was when I first read them.
When I first found this gem at a colonial market fair, I was just overjoyed to read about a figure who fought with young George Washington at the beginning of the French and Indian War. When I began reading it, it exceeded all expectations. Here was a surprise adventure saga that kept me involved until the very last page. The best part was it is all true! I remember reading it and saying, wow this story should be made into a movie.
I knew I wanted to be a writer of fiction when I was 10 years old, being raised by my father. He thoughtfully gave me a typewriter, and plenty of other encouragement too. As a youngster, I couldn’t read enough about what youngsters read about: animals, sports, cowboys, child detectives. Soon, I came to love books that probed human conflict through characters who reached deeply into my soul. Not simplistic “good versus evil” driven principally by plot, but gut-pulling interpersonal struggle coming to life (and sometimes death) in characters facing moral and legal dilemma, and facing it with wit, humor, and human frailty.
I read it in high school, again in college, and still again (twice) as an adult, once aloud to my 3 young daughters over 3 weeks at bedtime. For me, it is the most powerful, frontier-themed American novel out there.
I love a novel that educates me and tells me things I am surprised I didn’t know because I should have, in beautifully constructed sentences.
The dialogue carries its characters so naturally that it is as if you are speaking with them yourself at your main room table in your 18th-century frontier home in Pennsylvania.
A beautifully illustrated edition of a novel that has enthralled young American readers for generations. It is the story of John Cameron Butler-captured as a small child in a raid on the Pennsylvania frontier by the Indian tribe Lenni-Lenape. Adopted by the great warrior Cuyloga and renamed True Son, he has spent 11 years living and thinking of himself as fully Indian. But when the tribe signs a treaty that requires them to return their white captives, 15-year-old True Son is returned against his will to the family he had long forgotten, and to a life that he no longer…
William Heath has a Ph.D. in American Studies at Case Western Reserve University. He has taught American history and literature as well as creative writing at Kenyon, Transylvania, Vassar, the University of Seville, and Mount Saint Mary’s University, retiring as a professor emeritus. He has published two poetry books, The Walking Man and Steel Valley Elegy; two chapbooks, Night Moves in Ohio and Leaving Seville; three novels: The Children Bob Moses Led (winner of the Hackney Award), Devil Dancer, andBlacksnake’s Path;a work of history, William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest(winner of two Spur Awards); and a collection of interviews, Conversations with Robert Stone.
Calloway has written a series of important books about the Great Lakes frontier, but this is a kind of capstone to his distinguished career. Building on Wiley Sword’s groundbreaking book, George Washington’s Indian Wars, Calloway discusses in detail the often overlooked importance of Indian affairs during the Washington administration. None of Washington’s biographers have adequately researched Washington’s frontier policy, which led to a horrific war for the Old Northwest (it’s almost the equivalent of discussing the LBJ presidency while leaving out the Vietnam War!). What Washington and Henry Knox, his secretary of war, thought they were doing and what was actually happening on the ground were appallingly at odds. Thanks to Calloway, this crucial dimension of the Washington administration can no longer be ignored.
George Washington's place in the foundations of the Republic remains unrivalled. His life story-from his beginnings as a surveyor and farmer, to colonial soldier in the Virginia Regiment, leader of the Patriot cause, commander of the Continental Army, and finally first president of the United States-reflects the narrative of the nation he guided into existence. There is, rightfully, no more chronicled figure.
Yet American history has largely forgotten what Washington himself knew clearly: that the new Republic's fate depended less on grand rhetoric of independence and self-governance and more on land-Indian land. Colin G. Calloway's biography of the greatest founding…
This irreverent biography provides a rare window into the music industry from a promoter’s perspective. From a young age, Peter Jest was determined to make a career in live music, and despite naysayers and obstacles, he did just that, bringing national acts to his college campus atUW-Milwaukee, booking thousands of…
I'm a huge self-proclaimed history dork. I love reading real stories of how God uses the ones that no one would expect in extraordinary ways. I love hearing how God turns horrible situations around. Even in my own manuscripts, from a historical fiction perspective, I love to immerse it in such truth that you think, “That couldn’t really happen... Could it?” I have an ongoing phrase in ministry and life that you need to take “The poo you walk through and let God turn it into fertilizer.” These book recommendations definitely do that. Bad things do happen. They don’t come from God but through Him we can overcome them.
This is one of my favorite books as a young child and has continued to be one of my favorite books. Based on a true story, it is about the capture of a young girl on the brink of love and womanhood. Her fight, spunk, and ability to sew are truly what help her and her family escape. I have always loved this book. I love it for its humanity and truth. I love it for its ability to take the reader and see that even in the worst circumstances, one can still find themselves and learn how to overcome.
From a Newbery Medal–winning author, an “exciting novel” about a colonial girl’s experience during the French and Indian War (Saturday Review).
In the year 1754, the stillness of Charlestown, New Hampshire, is shattered by the terrifying cries of an Indian raid. Young Miriam Willard, on a day that had promised new happiness, finds herself instead a captive on a forest trail, caught up in the ebb and flow of the French and Indian War.
It is a harrowing march north. Miriam can only force herself to the next stopping place, the next small portion of food, the next icy stream…
I’m a born-and-bred New Englander and I teach history at Barnard College, Columbia University. I have always loved sailing and the ocean, so I’m fascinated with the early modern Age of Sail. My focus is the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic World, when the histories of the Americas, Europe, and Africa became permanently entangled. My first book, The Saltwater Frontier, won the Bancroft Prize in American History in 2016. My second book, The Life and Times of Squanto, is hitting bookshelves in Fall 2024.
The Seven Years’ War is obscure in the American historical imagination: if it’s remembered at all, it’s as a hazy, unimportant flintlocks-and-tomahawks event.
In this gripping, masterful narrative, Fred Anderson leaves his reader with no doubt of just how momentous this conflict was. He examines imperial, colonial, and indigenous actors to explain how the French were expelled from North America and how the war’s aftermath was a catalyst for both Native and colonial resistance to British rule.
Arguably the first world war, it could also be called the war that made America.
In this vivid and compelling narrative, the Seven Years' War–long seen as a mere backdrop to the American Revolution–takes on a whole new significance. Relating the history of the war as it developed, Anderson shows how the complex array of forces brought into conflict helped both to create Britain’s empire and to sow the seeds of its eventual dissolution.
Beginning with a skirmish in the Pennsylvania backcountry involving an inexperienced George Washington, the Iroquois chief Tanaghrisson, and the ill-fated French emissary Jumonville, Anderson reveals a chain of events that would lead to world conflagration. Weaving together the military, economic, and…
For 23 years, I was a staff historian at the Fortress of Louisbourg National Historic Site. In the decade that followed, I worked for Parks Canada on other French colonial and Acadian sites in Atlantic Canada. Along the way and since, I wrote hundreds of articles and 21 books. Some of those books have won prizes, and the government of France honored me by making me a chevalier of its Ordre des Palmes académiques.
Most historians see the 1759 siege of Québec as the ultimate battle in the Seven Years’ War. The pivotal character in that real-history drama was Major General James Wolfe, who died just as the battle on the Plains of Abraham was won. The story of Wolfe (and his French counterpart Montcalm) and the titanic struggle they were involved in has been told many times. What Stephen Brumwell adds in this multiple award-winning book is a fascinating biography of the figure at the center of it all. The author follows Wolfe from childhood to death and readers don’t want to miss a thing. It’s a brilliant, fast-paced, highly readable book.
WINNER: 2008 C. P. STACEY PRIZE (Best book in Canadian Military History) WINNER: 2008 DISTINGUISHED BOOK AWARD, SOCIETY OF COLONIAL WARS Ugly, gangling, and tormented by agonising illness, Major General James Wolfe was an unlikely hero. Yet in 1759, on the Plains of Abraham before Quebec, he won a battle with momentous consequences. Wolfe's victory, bought at the cost of his life, ensured that English, not French, would become the dominant language in North America. Ironically, by crippling French ambitions on this continent Wolfe paved the way for American independence from Britain. Already renowned for bold leadership, Wolfe's death at…
Benghazi: A New History is a look back at the enigmatic 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, its long-tail causes, and devastating (and largely unexamined) consequences for US domestic politics and foreign policy. It contains information not found elsewhere, and is backed up by 40 pages of…
For 23 years, I was a staff historian at the Fortress of Louisbourg National Historic Site. In the decade that followed, I worked for Parks Canada on other French colonial and Acadian sites in Atlantic Canada. Along the way and since, I wrote hundreds of articles and 21 books. Some of those books have won prizes, and the government of France honored me by making me a chevalier of its Ordre des Palmes académiques.
For any who might feel that Anderson’s 900-page Crucible of War might be a bit too long, the historian thoughtfully produced this 382-page book on the same topic. There’s less detail, obviously, but Anderson still covers essentially the same ground and does so once again in highly readable fashion. It’s a journey in which Anderson explains how the conflict destroyed the French empire in North America, overturned the balance of power on two continents, altered the roles of Indigenous peoples, and contributed toward what a generation later would become the American Revolution. The book is well illustrated.
The globe's first true world war comes vividly to life in this "rich, cautionary tale" (The New York Times Book Review)
The French and Indian War -the North American phase of a far larger conflagration, the Seven Years' War-remains one of the most important, and yet misunderstood, episodes in American history. Fred Anderson takes readers on a remarkable journey through the vast conflict that, between 1755 and 1763, destroyed the French Empire in North America, overturned the balance of power on two continents, undermined the ability of Indian nations to determine their destinies, and lit the "long fuse" of the…
