A New World: An Epic of Colonial America from the Founding of Jamestown to the Fall of Quebec
by: Quinn, Arthur

Hardcover. Boston, Faber and Faber, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, pages. "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. Clean copy.