Wilderness at Dawn: The Settling of the North American Continent

by Ted Morgan

Overview

This is the biggest, grandest, most sprawling epic ever told, filled with battles and hardship, courage, determination, daring voyages into the unknown, and eye-opening discoveries.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of FDR, Winston Churchill, and Somerset Maugham, Wilderness At Dawn is the sprawling, roughhouse epic of the unsung heroes, heroines, and rogues who tamed the rugged continent that became our country.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780671882372
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	04/26/1994
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	544
Sales rank:	837,447
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Ted Morgan is a biographer, journalist, and historian

Editorial Reviews

In this ``collective biography of ordinary Americans,'' Morgan ( FDR ) offers an involving, if a bit disjointed, popular history of North America to the end of the 18th century. He draws on memoirs, journals and academic studies for his colloquial, panoramic narrative; his anecdotes mainly eschew the famous for intriguing characters like William Fitzhugh, who in 1674 built a 13-room house, complete with Turkish carpets, on Virginia's ``gentrified'' northern frontier. As Morgan covers the advances of the European powers and the formation of the United States, he does not ignore the many depredations of the powerful. But the French-born author is, above all, an American enthusiast, and he concludes by celebrating the emerging nation's egalitarianism and ``spirit of enterprise.'' Sometimes, however, Morgan's search for relevance--as when he links colonial tobacco propaganda to 20th-century ads for ``Marlboro Country''--seems strained, and he makes few attempts to apprise the reader of ongoing debates about historical interpretation. BOMC main selection; History Book Club and QPB alternates. (May)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Morgan, the biographer of Klaus Barbie ( An Uncertain Hour , LJ 12/89), Franklin Roosevelt ( FDR , LJ 11/1/85), and others, here turns his attention to the settlement of the frontier. Drawing on diaries, journals, letters, and similar sources, he begins with the first people to cross the Bering land bridge about 15,000 years ago, continues with the story of the European settlement of those colonies that played the most significant roles in the struggle among Spain, France, and Britain for control of the continent, and concludes by surveying the Western lands in the decades following the American Revolution. He tells a good story, emphasizing the ordinary people who did the actual settlement, but does not provide the analysis needed by specialists. The account is comprehensive for the years up to 1630. While it gets sidetracked for the period after that, this book is recommended for undergraduate and public libraries as a useful survey of the colonial frontier.-- Stephen H. Peters, Northern Michigan Univ. Lib., Marquette

Library Journal