2 Books Like The Compleat Victory

Sticking with the history book theme, I have always admired the work and writings of Elliott West, and this book pay prove to be his Magnum Opus. It posits that another through-line of American history from the 1840s to the 1870s is the integration and incorporation of the western half of the continent. This is a sweeping history that takes into account the growth of the federal government, westward expansion and exploration by American citizens, technological changes, environmental exploitation, and the experiences of Native nations and non-white populations in what would become the American West. If you need a single volume to understand the history of the American West, this might well be it.

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.