America began, we are often told, with the Founding
Fathers, the men who waged a revolution and created a
unique place called the United States. We may
acknowledge the early Jamestown and Puritan colonists
and mourn the dispossession of Native Americans, but we
rarely grapple with the complexity of the nation's
pre-revolutionary past. In this pathbreaking revision,
Daniel Richter shows that the United States has a much
deeper history than is apparent--that far from beginning
with a clean slate, it is a nation with multiple pasts
that stretch back as far as the Middle Ages, pasts whose
legacies continue to shape the present. Exploring a vast
range of original sources, Before the Revolution spans
more than seven centuries and ranges across North
America, Europe, and Africa. Richter recovers the lives
of a stunning array of peoples--Indians, Spaniards,
French, Dutch, Africans, English--as they struggled with
one another and with their own people for control of
land and resources. Their struggles occurred in a global
context and built upon the remains of what came before.
Gradually and unpredictably, distinctive patterns of
North American culture took shape on a continent where
no one yet imagined there would be nations called the
United States, Canada, or Mexico. By seeing these
trajectories on their own dynamic terms, rather than
merely as a prelude to independence, Richter's epic
vision reveals the deepest origins of American
history.
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