FREEDOM JUST AROUND THE CORNER

American history as epic: the first volume of a projected trilogy by a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian.

“The creation of the United States of America is the central event of the past four hundred years,” writes McDougall (Promised Land, Crusader State, 1997, etc.) in an opening salvo, adding that the continent “today hosts the mightiest, richest, most dynamic civilization in history.” But McDougall is no mere booster: attempting to steer a middle course, as he puts it, between the leftist histories of Howard Zinn and the rightist ones of Paul Johnson, he qualifies such statements letter by letter, carefully explaining why they should be received as true. North America, he writes, was a glittering prize, sought after for many reasons, one of them the European hunger for new farmland at a time when the agricultural market was rapidly growing and England alone had seen a “fourfold increase in prices for foodstuffs between 1540 to 1640.” That the English won this prize over the French and Spanish would have profound effects for subsequent world history. McDougall builds a sturdy narrative out of telling incidents and details: the arrival of English settlers by the thousands in the Virginia colony in the early 1620s, prompting an Indian uprising and a royal lawsuit alike; the prevalence of “smuggling, bribes, and fraudulent bookkeeping” in the economy of early New England, and competition for jobs with moonlighting British soldiers as yet another reason New Englanders resented the crown; the enticements offered to workers on the Erie Canal, adding up to not only the handsome wage of 80 cents a day, but also “a shot of whiskey every two hours, and all the eggs, pork, potatoes, and bread they could eat.” Throughout these details McDougall steadily works large themes, such as the “English notion of a racial hierarchy justifying expulsion or enslavement of lesser breeds”—an ideology Americans eagerly adopted in centuries to come.

A first-rate history, freshly told, with every promise of becoming a standard text.