The First Frontier

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

By: Scott Weidensaul

Narrated by: Paul Boehmer

Length: 16 hrs and 16 mins

Publisher's summary

Frontier: the word carries the inevitable scent of the West. But before Custer or Lewis and Clark, before the first Conestoga wagons rumbled across the Plains, it was the East that marked the frontier - the boundary between complex Native cultures and the first colonizing Europeans.Here is the older, wilder, darker history of a time when the land between the Atlantic and the Appalachians was contested ground - when radically different societies adopted and adapted the ways of the other, while struggling for control of what all considered to be their land.

The First Frontier traces two and a half centuries of history through poignant, mostly unheralded personal stories - like that of a Harvard-educated Indian caught up in seventeenth-century civil warfare, a mixed-blood interpreter trying to straddle his white and Native heritage, and a Puritan woman wielding a scalping knife whose bloody deeds still resonate uneasily today. It is the first book in years to paint a sweeping picture of the Eastern frontier, combining vivid storytelling with the latest research to bring to life modern America’s tumultuous, uncertain beginnings.

©2012 Scott Weidensaul (P)2012 Audible, Inc.

Interesting

The first couple chapters are dull but necessary to understand the book. When I got into it I found it absorbing and extremely well done. Well researched but with a few liberties. Overall a good listen.

great book

if your interested in this subject matter,great informative book. I read about such things for years and still learned a lot

Great text, tolerable reading

This is exciting research, well written. The reading is droning, almost mechanical. The pronunciation of especially French names is utterly shameful.

Good story, bad narrator

The narrator often sounded like A.I. or computer generated. If you can get past the awkward narration, the story itself is fascinating.

Great Book on Early America

Excellent!! One of the best I have read on pre-Revolutionary America. I strongly recommend it. I bought the hardback version to read it again!

Yes

this a very good book. I have been researching heavily for my own book idea and this book has aided me. Buy it!

mind blown

I consider myself a decent student of History, but the overwhelming majority of this book has been completely missing form my education. the begging years of what I knew of America is completely different, new, and foreign to me.
This book was an eye opener to me and is a great summary of so many things I had no idea happened at all. Great reading, well researched, worthy of your time!

Haverhill HAY-Vrill not Have - her- hill

Well read Well written. Nice to hear different stories about the Era. Has personal stories not just accounts of war.

Covers many people and events. It’s strength and weakness

Three and a half stars. Providing a historical review of European/American Indian relations from contact to the pre-revolutionary era, The First Frontier covers a lot of ground. As a result of it’s wide range, my personal attention waxed and waned as different events and individuals were discussed. It can be difficult for nonfiction works that cover so much to be consistent in their presentation, and that was the case here to an extent. Still worth checking out however as it’s history that deserves to be more widely known.

Early History of America and the first settlers

I found this book very en lighting and enjoyed it very much. I recommend it to those who enjoy American history.