The First Frontier: The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery and Endurance in Early America

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Feb. 2012

 From an acclaimed Pulitzer Prize finalist, a sweeping history of the largely forgotten time when the Eastern Seaboard marked the tense frontier between great colonial empires and countless Native tribes.

    Once, the East was frontier - the boundary between complex Native cultures and the first colonizing Europeans. How they adopted and adapted the ways and manners of the other, while contesting for control of what all considered to be their land, shaped societies on both sides in profound ways that still reverberate today.

The First Frontier: The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery and Endurance in Early America traces two
 and a half centuries of history through poignant, mostly unheralded stories - like that of a Harvard-educated Indian caught up in seventeenth-century warfare; a mixed-blood interpreter on the Pennsylvania frontier trying to straddle his white and Native heritage; Indian slave-hunters who turned on their colonial partners when they themselves feared enslavement; and a Puritan woman whose bloody acts with a scalping knife remain deeply divisive even today.

  The First Frontier is the first book in years to tell the far-reaching history of the Eastern frontier, combining vivid storytelling informed by the latest research to bring to life the tumultuous, uncertain times that were an inherent part of creating a new society.