Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: WILDERNESS AT DAWN: THE SETTLING OF THE NORTH AMERICAN CONTINENT by Ted Morgan ISBN: 0-671-88237-6 Publisher: Touchstone Books Pub. Date: 26 April, 1994 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (7 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: One of the best recent North American colonial histories.
Comment: Ted Morgan's "Wilderness at Dawn" is one of the best of a crop of North American colonial histories published since 1990. Rather than a comprehensive history, it is a series of incidents that add up to a very readable whole. Morgan begins with pre-Columbian history and goes on to relate the experiences of the Spanish, French, Dutch, and various flavors of English colonies. One of my favorite stories is how the godly Pilgrims found themselves neighbors to a riotous colony led by one Thomas Morton. Before Miles Standish put their rivals out of business, Morton's drunken crew traded guns and booze to the Indians in exchange for beaver pelts and sexual favors. Anyone who believes history is boring has not read Ted Morgan's and other recent works about the American colonies. The last section of this book addresses the problems of post-Revolutionary War colonization, including chapters about the appalling dangers of trans-Appalachian settlement and about how the Old Northwest was surveyed.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Great Collective Biography of Noted & Ordinary Americans
Comment: Ted Morgan, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist from New York City, who has written biographies of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Sir Winston Churchill, and Somerset Maughan, organizes his "story of an empty continent filling with people" (p. 11) by the usual chronological structure (from ca. 1490 to the early 1800s). Yet his frontier approach is quite fragmented, and therefore very realistic. He includes the Spanish presence, the French, Jamestown, Pilgrim, Dutch, Puritan, Manorial, Chesapeake, Black, Salzburger, and Quaker frontiers. His careful distinction between pilgrim and puritan is to be applauded, and his viewing the Virginia tobacco planters (Manorial), the Charlestown rice culture (Black), and Austrian Lutherans in Georgia (Salzburger) as their own "frontier" gives an important geographical specificity to the peculiar characteristics of the various areas of settlement. Of note is Morgan's interweaving native interaction with the Europeans. This he does frequently, so a separate chapter about any Indian counter frontier is unnecessary. However, the idea of a moving "frontier" against an established Indian presence does belie the Eurocentric perspective of the author. WILDERNESS AT DAWN is chocked full of compelling stories of "known" and "unknown" players in the American drama. These stories cover a broad gamut of human experience. In essence, nothing is left untouched, and the verisimilitude simply oozes forth from the narrative. The story flows beautifully while the veracity of the events is not at all compromised. Ample anecdotes from diaries, monographs, and public records move the reader through gripping eyewitness accounts. While the lack of footnotes might frustrate the technical historian, such certainly enhances the readibility of the book, especially as story. Primary and secondary sources for each chapter are listed appropriately at the end of the book. Worthy of special mention are Morgan's excellent brief broad syntheses--sometimes historical, sometimes geographical, sometimes a mixture of both. One excellent example is the importance of Pope's rebellion in the present Southwest as illustrative of geograpical persistence, i.e., the Indians could not completely purge Spanish influence, as they were "Hispanicized beyond return" and had become "irretrievably hybrid" (p. 216). While some generalizations in the narrative do exist, Morgan is not prone to such as his rich details about people, places, and events paints a full, realistic portrait. On the deficit side, however, is his unfortunate rehashing of the Bering Strait origin myth (chapter one), without any reference to alternative explanations from Indian traditions. Otherwise, the book is really a mine of excellent information. These are stories to be passed on. They are worth the telling and worthy of hearing. Maps in the work are good, but sparse, as there are only eight. More would be better. The only illustrations are black and white, and they depict relevant art, relics, photos, letters, documents, quotes, etc. at the beginning of each chapter. Notes are provided at the end as well as a fine index. In summary, while the critical revisionist scholar might bewail Morgan for his portrayal of a different America, and charge him as guilty of a gullible swallowing of Turner's "frontierism", the reality of America as "no one's clone" and as "self-invented, sui generis, underivative and wholly original" (p. 492), in the mind of this reviewer, remains valid and intact. "America was a smoking test tube, a braying infant, a blank page; it was change made palpable, change glorified, change as a stated goal, fluid, undetermined, unfixed, defying the logic of the centuries, observing its distant horizon lines, a ship that had strayed from the fleet and was off on its own uncharter course" (p. 493).
Rating: 5
Summary: New approach to American history
Comment: Breathtaking approach to a well known subject. History from the people's viewpoint. No dull dates, battles, generals, presidents; but living, breathing stories by and of the most unique and most common. Must also read Shovel of Stars, the sequel (also 10)
 |
Title: Shovel Of Stars : The Making of the American West 1800 to the Present by Ted Morgan ISBN: 0684814927 Publisher: Touchstone Books Pub. Date: 10 April, 1996 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
 |
Title: America: A Narrative History (Vol. 2) by George Tindall, David Shi, David Emory Shi, George B. Tindall ISBN: 0393973492 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: 01 January, 1999 List Price(USD): $49.70 |
 |
Title: America: A Narrative History (Vol. 1) by David Shi, George Tindall, George B. Tindall, David Emory Shi ISBN: 0393973336 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: 01 January, 1999 List Price(USD): $34.85 |
 |
Title: The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon S. Wood ISBN: 0679736883 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 02 March, 1993 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
 |
Title: A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic by John E. Ferling ISBN: 0195159241 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: June, 2003 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
