“The Seven Years War, Pontiac’s War, Lord Dunmore’s War, and the Revolutionary War were to the British a single, twenty-year conflict geared at preserving their hegemony in North America and, by extension, in the Caribbean and the Atlantic.” At the suggestion of a friend, I read “Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America,” by the Finnish academic Pekka Hämäläinen. This book would startle and seriously upset most Americans’ sense of U.S. history, if they troubled to read it. At least it did in my case. I write what follows, taking the book at its word, contrasting it with the blank canvas of my own knowledge of U.S. history prior to the Civil War. The author is a well-regarded Oxford professor, so I have some confidence in its accuracy, even though the feel-good elements provoke a bit of suspicion.
A Continent of Ghosts
A Continent of Ghosts
A Continent of Ghosts
“The Seven Years War, Pontiac’s War, Lord Dunmore’s War, and the Revolutionary War were to the British a single, twenty-year conflict geared at preserving their hegemony in North America and, by extension, in the Caribbean and the Atlantic.” At the suggestion of a friend, I read “Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America,” by the Finnish academic Pekka Hämäläinen. This book would startle and seriously upset most Americans’ sense of U.S. history, if they troubled to read it. At least it did in my case. I write what follows, taking the book at its word, contrasting it with the blank canvas of my own knowledge of U.S. history prior to the Civil War. The author is a well-regarded Oxford professor, so I have some confidence in its accuracy, even though the feel-good elements provoke a bit of suspicion.