About this item
Highlights
- Frontier: the word carries the inevitable scent of the West.
- About the Author: Author and naturalist SCOTT WEIDENSAUL, who grew up in the heart of the old eastern frontier and has always been curious to learn more about it, has written more than two dozen books, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds.
- 496 Pages
- History, United States
Description
About the Book
An exploration of some of the most turbulent, fascinating years in American history: the 16th century into the mid-18th century in eastern North America.Book Synopsis
Frontier: the word carries the inevitable scent of the West. But before Custer or Lewis and Clark, before the first Conestoga wagons rumbled across the Plains, it was the East that marked the frontier--the boundary between complex Native cultures and the first colonizing Europeans.
Here is the older, wilder, darker history of a time when the land between the Atlantic and the Appalachians was contested ground--when radically different societies adopted and adapted the ways of the other, while struggling for control of what all considered to be their land. The First Frontier traces two and a half centuries of history through poignant, mostly unheralded personal stories--like that of a Harvard-educated Indian caught up in seventeenth-century civil warfare, a mixed-blood interpreter trying to straddle his white and Native heritage, and a Puritan woman wielding a scalping knife whose bloody deeds still resonate uneasily today. It is the first book in years to paint a sweeping picture of the Eastern frontier, combining vivid storytelling with the latest research to bring to life modern America's tumultuous, uncertain beginnings.From the Back Cover
Advance praise for "The First Frontier""Excitement abounds in Scott Weidensaul s detailed history of the first clashes between European settlers and Native Americans on the East Coast. By turns bloody and gruesome, poignant and haunting, The First Frontier reminds us that neither side in this 'disturbing, in-between world' was wholly in the right." Nancy Marie Brown, author of "The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman"
In this charming and fascinating chronicle . . . Weidensaul s delightful storytelling brings to life the terrors and hopes of the earliest days of America. "Publisher s Weekly"
In this comprehensive chronicle . . . Weidensaul weaves together an impressive number of true stories. . . . any reader who picks it up will get a very real picture of what it was like to live and die in the New World. "Kirkus Reviews"
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Review Quotes
"With a novelist's flair, he conveys the experiences of ordinary people pitted against powerful and unpredictable nature. . . Mr. Weidensaul invites readers to imagine the bloody ground beneath modern America's apparently tame landscape."
--The Wall Street Journal "Exhaustively researched and entertainingly written. . . Credit Weidensaul with proving once again that history does not have to be dull in order to be comprehensive. It would be difficult to find a work of either fact or fiction more filled with excitement and suspense than The First Frontier."
--The Seattle Times "With a novelist's flair, he conveys the experiences of ordinary people pitted against powerful and unpredictable nature. . . Mr. Weidensaul invites readers to imagine the bloody ground beneath modern America's apparently tame landscape."
--The Wall Street Journal --
About the Author
Author and naturalist SCOTT WEIDENSAUL, who grew up in the heart of the old eastern frontier and has always been curious to learn more about it, has written more than two dozen books, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds.