New World: An Epic of Colonial America from the Founding of Jamestown to the Fall of Quebec- Hardcover
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New World: An Epic of Colonial America from the Founding of Jamestown to the Fall of Quebec- Hardcover

New World: An Epic of Colonial America from the Founding of Jamestown to the Fall of Quebec- Hardcover

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Description

"I write of peoples and of a struggle." So begins A New World, an ambitious and extraordinary book that challenges conventional historical narrative by presenting episodes in North America's history through the eyes and voices of the Europeans who established the first colonial outposts here.
Beginning with the swaggering John Smith at Jamestown and ending with the beleaguered Montcalm at Quebec, Arthur Quinn allows towering historical figures to emerge from an often beautiful, sometimes forbidding early American landscape and speak. An elderly William Bradford looks back with growing despair at the early promise of the Pilgrim colony at Plymouth. Governor John Winthrop tries to administer a dose of practicality to the Puritans of Massachusetts. Jesuit missionaries bring Christianity and disaster to the Huron Confederacy. A blustering Peter Stuyvesant watches Manhattan slip from Dutch grasp. William Penn's Holy Experiment in Pennsylvania goes increasingly awry. And, finally, the British and the French fight history's first world war for supremacy in the New World.
Telling each story using the literary conventions of the day, Quinn casts North America's colonial beginnings as a multicultural epic, gripping the reader throughout with his uncanny eye and storytelling skill. The result is a history not just for scholars, but for all citizens of a nation whose birth came only through long struggle, and at a terrible cost to Europeans and Native Americans alike.

From Library Journal


Writing off the top of the best historical scholarship of the past 50 years, Quinn (rhetoric, Univ. of California, Berkeley) tells the story of John Smith, William Penn, Samuel de Champlain, John Winthrop, William Bradford, and others in lavish detail and epic sweep. When his writing is good, as in his depiction of the Jesuit fathers in the cruel climes of frigid Canada, his narrative is engrossing. Elsewhere, as in his portrayal of Puritan John Winthrop, Quinn overwrites, piling phrase upon phrase in a gorgeous exercise of pleonasm. Although Quinn's narratives are driven by the particular vision of 17th-and 18th-century white men, his stories are leavened by depictions of the annihilation of the Pequots, the tragic fall of Huronia, and the travails of the Acadians. In contrast to the usual drab historical study, this is a crazy quilt of a book, full of vivid colors and dramatic patterns, sure to please a general audience.
David B. Mattern, Univ. of Virginia, Charlottesville
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.



Review









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"I write of peoples and of a struggle." So begins A New World, an ambitious and extraordinary book that challenges conventional historical narrative by presenting episodes in North America's history through the eyes and voices of the Europeans who established the first colonial outposts here.
Beginning with the swaggering John Smith at Jamestown and ending with the beleaguered Montcalm at Quebec, Arthur Quinn allows towering historical figures to emerge from an often beautiful, sometimes forbidding early American landscape and speak. An elderly William Bradford looks back with growing despair at the early promise of the Pilgrim colony at Plymouth. Governor John Winthrop tries to administer a dose of practicality to the Puritans of Massachusetts. Jesuit missionaries bring Christianity and disaster to the Huron Confederacy. A blustering Peter Stuyvesant watches Manhattan slip from Dutch grasp. William Penn's Holy Experiment in Pennsylvania goes increasingly awry. And, finally, the British and the French fight history's first world war for supremacy in the New World.
Telling each story using the literary conventions of the day, Quinn casts North America's colonial beginnings as a multicultural epic, gripping the reader throughout with his uncanny eye and storytelling skill. The result is a history not just for scholars, but for all citizens of a nation whose birth came only through long struggle, and at a terrible cost to Europeans and Native Americans alike.

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