Contested Continent: Peter Mancall on the Struggle for North America, c. 1000–1680

About this episode

Peter C. Mancall discusses his book 'Contested Continent' which explores the early history of North America and its implications for the future.

My guest Peter C. Mancall’s new book is Contested Continent: The Struggle for North America, c. 1000–1680 . It is, now, the first volume in the Oxford History of the United States, an ongoing multi-volume narrative series—a series whose story is worth an episode in and of itself. In Contested Continent, Mancall describes the foundation of that place which would eventually become the United States. It is a long era of human history which foreshadowed that which was to come, one in which peoples from four continents came together in a collision of violence and mutuality in North America. “Much of what happened,” he writes, “came to define the American experience, including the rise of a booming transatlantic economy based on the extraction of abundant American natural resources, the central role European migrants and their descendants played in the enslavement of Africans, the displacement of Indigenous peoples, and the spread of self-governing polities where many people enjoyed religious liberty. None of those developments was inevitable. Nor did sweeping changes occur quickly.” Or we might say that like the glaciers of an advancing ice age, the events of this era often seem slow…

People in this episode

Host: Al Zambone

Guest: Peter C. Mancall

Topics covered

• North America
• history
• colonialism
• Indigenous peoples
• transatlantic economy

Keywords

• North America
• history
• Peter C. Mancall
• colonialism
• Indigenous peoples
• transatlantic economy
• Oxford History of the United States

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: University of Southern California, Oxford History of the United States

Books & works: Contested Continent: The Struggle for North America, c. 1000–1680

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