Wilderness at Dawn, Ted Morgan

[ellarien]

I finally finished this last night, after nearly two weeks. This was part of my continuing quest to educate myself on American history; a chatty, anecdotal account of the settling of the American continent from the point of view of ordinary people, starting with the end of the last Ice Age and petering out in the early 1800's. Pilgrims and preachers; farmers and explorers; slaves and surveyors; and always the Indians -- neither glamorized nor villainized, in these accounts, and not examined in any systematic way -- mostly getting the short end of the stick.

Some of the anecdotes I recognized from other books; others, like the almost-state of Franklin, were new to me. This is, as far as I can tell, history almost without an agenda, which in some ways makes it easier to read and in others leaves it feeling a little diffuse, lacking an 'organizing principle'.