2 Books Like Continental Reckoning

As an early American historian, I assigned this book to a graduate seminar on the American Revolution, and it was the most readable version of a military history I've read from that war in a long time. Great pacing and really clear prose made it easily digestible, despite its length. The balance that the author brought between sharp historical analysis and narrative-driven story-telling made this a history book that I could assign to graduate students, undergraduates, or simply gift to my history buff dad. Plus, I learned so much about the significance of the larger Saratoga Campaign and the northern theatre of the war.

Sticking with the theme of history books I read this past year, Aron's Peace and Friendship certainly got me thinking about the "frontier" in a different way. Unlike the stereotypical violence one would expect with a history of frontier relations between Native peoples and Europeans, this book offers a story of "concord"--those fleeting moments when Indigenous people and Euro-American newcomers met, collaborated, an coexisted in the contact zones of North America. Aron is expansive in tracing these moments from early Kentucky to Missouri, the Pacific Coast, the Great Plains, and many points in between. But just as his book shows the possibilities of peaceful coexistence between cultures, it also charts how these potentially peaceful places in frontier America time and again fell apart and devolved into the more familiar violence of frontier tropes. But I found it compelling, as the author suggests, that these moments were possible and could have… show more.