Notes: This combination of history, research, and storytelling presents the collective biography of the ordinary people who tamed this rugged continent and formed our nation.

Notes: A history of early exploration in the Americas and Africa, and an examination of the slave trade that followed.

Notes: Looking west, the people of the gentle Mediterranean saw the Atlantic as the great unknown, obscured by storm cloud, without welcoming shores, and given to violence. Their ships were too light to withstand its waves; their navigation instruments were baffled by its immensity; their experience stopped short of its rocks and reefs. So fearful were they of losing touch with land that they coined for us the concept of being "disoriented."

Notes: Historian Edmund Sears Morgan collects 24 essays previously published in the New York Review of Books, providing a view of Morgan's thinking about early Americans from the Puritan governor of Massachusetts, John Winthrop, to the first president of the United States.

Notes: Pulitzer Prize winning author Walter A. McDougall describes the United States as "the central event of the past four hundred years." McDougall goes on to show that with their historically unequaled freedom, Americans found numerous ways to satisfy their desires--both good and bad.

Notes: It has often been said that early America was the "best poor man's country in the world." After all, wasn't there an abundance of land and a scarcity of laborers? The law of supply and demand would seem to dictate that most early American working people enjoyed high wages and a decent material standard of living. This book presents the evidence for poverty versus plenty and concludes that financial insecurity was a widespread problem that plagued many early Americans.

Notes: Taylor examines the complex mix of peoples, events, and influences that shaped the New World. He notes that the intermingling of cultures, people, plants, and animals from different parts of the world was unparalleled in speed and volume, and had devastating consequences for the environment and most of the participants.

Notes: Virginia Anderson, professor of history at the University of Colorado-Boulder, explores the complex interactions between colonists, Native Americans, and domestic animals, arguing that attention to domestic animals is essential to understanding the process of colonization. Focusing on the attitudes in early America toward animals, Anderson contrasts the attitudes of English colonials and Native Americans, and shows how those differences led to tension and conflict, occasionally driving colonist-Indian relations to the boiling point as in Bacon's Rebellion and King Philip's War.

Notes: "An acutely written, meticulously researched, scholarly history which closely examines the manifold causes of conflict between Native Americans and Europeans, as well as the ordinary situations of daily life which were to significantly contribute to the American Revolution." -- Midwest Book Review