The Forgotten History of America: Little-Known Conflicts of Lasting Importance From the Earliest Colonists to the Eve of the Revolution by Cormac OBrien

The Forgotten History of America: Little-Known Conflicts of Lasting Importance From the Earliest Colonists to the Eve of the Revolution Reviews

• 
  Jason Pierce

  Indians were terrible. Europeans were terrible. Colonists were terrible. All God's chillun suck. (For the record, Asians and Africans were terrible too, but they're off the hook in this book.)
  
  Are you ignorant of American history between the founding of Jamestown (or Plymouth Rock if you're a Yankee) and the American Revolution with the possible exception that you know there's a French and Indian War in there somewhere? Is there a gap in your knowledge between Columbus sailing the ocean blue in fourteen hundred ninety-two and the aforementioned foundings? Such was my dilemma, but this book fixed me right up, and it can do the same for you! I'm pleased to report that some parts were things I had just forgotten, but other incidents were new to me.
  
  Mr. O'Brien gives us 18 of the more violent/tragic episodes in American history before the Revolution, and does so in an easy to read format. He embellishes to make the subject matter more readable like a short story, but discerning eyes can easily pull out the facts. Think of it as "history lite," and if you want more details of what you just read, you can consult the select bibliography in the back which gives you 44 sources he used to get his information. Or you can just do like me and fire up the internet for a few extra, ahem, facts.
  
  Even though this is loaded with violence and horrible deeds by horrible people, or boneheaded maneuvers by well-meaning people that had unintended consequences, I found this quite refreshing because it was honest across the board. There's a lot of whitewashing in history nowadays, and it's been that way for a while. Here's the popular version of the time period in question: All the Indians were a loving, peaceful people spread throughout the Americas, just minding their own business, living in harmony with each other and nature, painting with the
  Colors of the Wind when one day along come the Europeans who commenced to slaughter them like Sauron on the slopes of Mount Doom.
  
  
  
  
  This continued through the centuries as we pushed and beat these gentle souls across the continent, and then they also had to suffer the indignity of us lying about how mean they were to us! And if these environmentally friendly, benign people ever did get up enough gumption to attack us, well, by-golly, we had it coming! This is all poppycock. (Except the bit about us having it coming; we asked for what we ended up getting, but so did the Indians. Eye for an eye, and now we're all blind.) I remember a bit of surprise I received when I toured the Cahokia Mounds and found that the city had a jail. I had been so brainwashed by the tripe above that the idea that there was such a thing as a pre-Columbian Indian criminal had never occurred to me. (I could still be rather naive even at age 25). But once I thought about it for a minute, it all made perfect sense because it's logical. The Indians suffer from the human-condition just like every other race or demographic, though it may manifest itself in different ways, and their moniker of "savage" was well earned.
  
  In the section where 22-year-old noob George Washington kind of accidentally starts the first real World War (The Seven Years War which spanned five continents to greater and lesser degrees and was called The French and Indian War in the North American theater), we have this incident which serves as the comparable Archduke Ferdinand moment. Washington has captured some French soldiers who had surrendered (insert the obligatory joke here) after a brief skirmish. Their leader is one Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville who was from a family of some importance across the foam. Suddenly one of Washington's Indian allies, Tanaghrisson (the Half King)

  ...gripping his hatchet, stepped over to Jumonville and said something. Then he sank his weapon into the Frenchman's skull.
  
  The tense quiet of the glen suddenly vanished with the noise of slaughter. As his warriors set upon the wounded French and began scalping them, the Iroquios Half-King reached into Jumonville's yawning cranium and ritually washed his hands in the gray matter. With awesome quickness, as the English stood frozen and agape, all but one of the wounded French were murdered.

  This account is disputed, and we will likely never know if it or one of the other versions of the story is true, but murdering an adversary and washing one's hands in his brains was a common Indian practice as was slowly torturing a captive over the course of several days until he died, then wearing the fingers and toes of the victim in one's hatband. Scalping was also par for the course, and the Europeans even got in on the action when they offered bounties for Indian scalps which became a lucrative business for some. The Europeans and colonists were just as horrible, but in a different way: "For Amerindians and English alike, warfare in seventeenth-century North America was characterized by shocking excess. If the Puritans were horrified by the native penchant for mutilation and scalping, the Indians found the European willingness to wage total war with enormous casualties almost insane."
  
  In 1637 Massachusetts, various Indian tribes had alliances with various colonial villages from various European nationalities, but not all of them got along, and some retaliatory killings were taking place between the Dutch and the Pequots. Since one European looked just like another to an Indian and vice versa, the Pequots killed a random trader named John Stone. However, John wasn't Dutch, he was English. This would be a costly oops. "Though widely considered a cad and a scoundrel throughout New England, Stone became a rallying cry - evidence of how unscrupulous the English could be when searching for a convenient cause celebre." Negotiations immediately went nowhere, and the Puritans figured it was time to bring the reckoning to these godless, demon worshipers, and it was on.

  The Pequots, nonplussed by the issue over Stone's nationality, were further hampered by an inability to comprehend why a whole people would push the death of an unpopular sea captain to the point of war. Stone's murder, after all, was merely the final in a series of retaliatory slayings - personal vendettas that were ubiquitous in Algonquin culture. What did this have to do with war?

  We don't seem to have evolved very much in the past 400 years, and there is nothing new under the sun. In 2020 George Floyd, hardly an upstanding citizen, was needlessly murdered and the US tore itself apart. (I'm sorry if such a comparison is too soon for some of you, but it crossed my mind, and I call it like I see it.)
  
  Given the Indians' barbarity, one wonders how Europeans ever had a chance of gaining a foothold on the continent, but conditions had been inadvertently primed for them by Columbus and friends when they brought with them a host of diseases against which the Indians had no immunity.

  Smallpox, influenza, measles, typhus, malaria, bubonic and pneumonic plague, and yellow fever - this was the rogue's gallery that fell so hard upon the Amerindians, brought unwittingly from Eurasia by Christian adventurers who had no reason to suspect that their own germs could wreak such havoc...
  
  Up to 90 percent of the population of the Americas died within two generations of 1492, the diseases racing from one village to the next, running wild among populations with no defense whatsoever against them. In much of North America, this fate befell peoples for whom white-skinned travelers from afar were still the stuff of rumors.

  Population loss estimates actually range between 50-90%, but that was certainly enough. There simply weren't enough people to fight back effectively should they have chosen to fight, but this book makes quite clear that yes, indeed, the Indians were willing to fight. The Indians got us back, though, when they introduced syphilis to the Europeans which started wreaking havoc in the old world a mere three years after Columbus' first journey. This hardly seems like an even trade, but whatcha gonna do?
  
  Slavery was also discussed in this, but it took a backseat to the wars and other conflicts. There was one line in here about it that amused me, though. George Chicken, a commander during the Yemassee War in South Carolina, had a mixed crew of white militia and black slaves who were waiting to ambush some approaching Indians. "We may never know whether they understood the greater absurdity of this moment: that Englishmen, thousands of miles from their homeland, found themselves defending a hostile wilderness they had taken from somebody else with soldiers they'd stolen from another continent - and led by a man named 'Chicken.'"
  
  This is just a sample of the fun facts you can find in this book, and I don't want to give everything away, so check it out if you like what you've seen so far.
• 
  Paul Lunger

  Cormac O'Brien's "The Forgotten History of America: Little Known Conflicts of Lasting Importance from the Earliest Colonists to the Eve of the Revolution" takes us on a 200 year trek across the founding of the colonies in the New World en route to the Revolutionary War. Across not quite 300 pages O'Brien examines 18 different events (some known & some unknown) that changed the course of North American history forever. Each chapter is well done & contains enough information for we the reader to understand just why these events are as important as they are. A very interesting read for anyone interesting in Colonial American history & a bargain at any price.
• 
  Emily

  Two centuries of historical vignettes about the earliest history of the European occupation of what is now the United States. This book was pretty good. Every chapter starts with the main historical figure standing in the morning cold and looking out over the horizon, or standing in the afternoon heat and looking out past the earthen ramparts or something similar, but the historiography is good and I learned things. This book doesn't piece together a full narrative of the time between the conquest of Spanish Florida and George Washington's early whoopsie-doodle, but it selects some major events and tells them well and in a generally non-biased way, with plenty of drama. There are also great reproductions of historic depictions of events here; some are contemporary, some are patriotic guesses from the 19th and 20th centuries. This book also has information boxes that are barely delineated from the actual text, which can be slightly confusing sometimes. The dramatic narration, the art, the three quarters format, the side-bars: Cormac O'Brien is a good writer and historian, but this book is not history to be read, this book is intended as a birthday gift for your grandpa. Your grandpa will be impressed by the color pictures, and he'll like the overly descriptive narratives because they're like a mid-century school book. The font is not for your grandpa, but he has cheaters.
• 
  Anthony

  A surprisingly illuminating and very readable survey of pre-Revolutionary "American" history (it focuses almost entirely on the eastern half of North America after a brief bit about the Spanish colonial enterprise).
  
  I think if the goal is to get beyond the usual enthusiast spheres, this book is successful. I could imagine a class discussing a chapter and having a lot to talk about. O'Brien fleshes out the world of pre-revolutionary America, reminding readers that history is not neatly divided in the before and after of Yorktown.
  
  Thinking critically, I'd like to have seen some sourcing or even a further reading section. The author undoubtedly drew upon a healthy list of drier manuscripts, research, and primary sources and those should have been credited. A few of the illustrations might have been sacrificed in favor of maps, especially when conflicts involving Indian tribes were discussed.
  
  Overall though, very good. Something I'll be keeping in my library.
• 
  Jake Watmore

  Really well written and fun to read about the lesser known figures of the colonization of the Americas.
• 
  Barbara

  This was a pretty good book. Its font was really small and I thought it was going to be difficult due to that, but it was actually a very quick read.
  
  "The forgotten history" isn't quite accurate. I knew most of the incidents that were covered, although it's been many years since I first read about them. I certainly don't know this period of US history as well as I know the 19th and 20th centuries.
  
  It was mostly the appalling story of the Europeans' racism and mistreatment of Native Americans, with a bit about Africans as well. Interesting to read about the Native Americans' inability to get along among themselves as well. And of course there stories of religious prejudice as well. Not exactly an uplifting tale of human kindness and enlightenment!
• 
  Jeff

  Good collection of lesser-know early North American history. Each chapter is a self-contained episode of history so the book is only unified by the fact that these events took place in NA before the revolution. So if you're looking for a systematic historical treatment of these events this isn't the book for you, and why I couldn't give it five stars.
  
  But the chapters are well written and insightful into not only the events they cover but also the greater context and significance of those events. And the narratives are all lesser known stories than most books of this type so I really enjoyed it.
• 
  Rob Hammond

  I found the stories about the French and Indian War to be especially interesting. The history classes I took in high school and college didn't really cover this period of time in-depth. There's a lot that happened between the age of discovery and the revolutionary war, and understanding it gives a better insight into the origins of the American ethos.
• 
  June Baer

  Found the book a little to dry to enjoy reading. Topics covered were interesting.
• 
  Todd Stockslager

  Not as good as I'd hoped, O'Brien's history tells the tales of battles on American soil from 1528, as the Spanish conquerors of Mexico first ventured northward into Florida and across the Southwest, through 1763, after the French and Indian war on the doorstep of revolution.
  
  The story of each battle is told in a separate chapter, and O'Brien never weaves together a consistent thread to connect the events. In some of the accounts of events in the New England region, he does suggest that the events were a possibly inevitable result of cultural conflict as French, English, native American, and the emerging colonial American cultures clashed over land ownership, land use, religion, and political borders. More often his stories are just episodic and narrative. The problem is that the chapters, each 15 to 20 pages in length with numerous illustrations, are too short to develop the narrative enough to understand the people, places, and forces in play.
  
  In some ways, this reads like an upper-level high school or lower-level college textbook for a survey course of American pre-colonial history--for which it might be useful, but the bibliography is probably too sparse to merit academic value. For example, in telling the story of lost Spanish conquistador De Vaca's incredible journey across the Southwestern United States in the 1500s, O'Brien does not reference Brutal Journey: The Epic Story of the First Crossing of North America, a 2006 book-length account of the event.
  
  I'll give credit for three stars here for the focus on some important events nearly lost to history. O'Brien's stories prove that during the 250 years they cover America was not a trackless wilderness waiting for discovery or revolution. But the book would have been better with fewer illustrations to allow more development of the narratives, and with the addition of an epilogue to bring together the threads into a common set of themes and show how those themes led to the Revolution soon to come.
• 
  Mike Cook

  This is absolutely one of the best history books I've ever read, bar none. It's like reading the DNA combinations of our ancestors' conflicts that determined how this country of ours turned out to be the way it is. Find out why we don't speak French, and why we're not all Puritans. The pre-Revolution years were much more violent and contentious than I ever imagined. I have two knocks against the author. He overuses the word "slaughtered." One side is always "slaughtering" the other side. There are many other ways to convey the same message without using the same word over and over. By the end of the book, it becomes a distraction that should have been caught by the editor. The other glitch is the use of a term that didn't come into existence for almost two hundred years after the time period in which the author uses it. He purports that Robert Rogers is thinking that his future story about walking into an enemy city to reconnoiter will be a real "duzy." It had to be an unconscious use of a familiar term without thinking of its origin. The word "duzy" was a slang superlative that was derived from the Duesenburg automobile that became very popular with the rich and famous in the 1920s and 30s. Robert Rogers would never have heard of the term. Other than those two things, this is a very entertaining and educational book.
• 
  Craig Patton

  A lot of times, studies of American history skips or completely ignores the colonial period with the exception of Plymouth Rock and Jamestown. This is where this book is a great read in that you get a better picture of what America was really like up to the point of the American Revolution.
  
  Many of the histories within this book I was somewhat familiar with but did not have the full understanding on how many of the conflicts depicted came into being and what impact it had on shaping American history.
  
  As the title states, it really is a Forgotten History of America
• 
  Mickey

  A tough read but a good insight to a period of American colonial history generally overlooked. Worth wading through the details to better understand to evolution of the mistrust and double dealing among the European and Native cultures of the new world. Graphic historical violence at places not dissimilar to what is in current Middle-eastern news. A bit more disconcerting, though, when perpetuated by our Puritan forebears or a colonial Governor Penn.
• 
  Roland Bruno

  While many of the tales within were well known to me, there were several less familiar stories that I enjoyed the author's deftly written descriptions of. A solid overview and introduction to a period of "American history".
• 
  Stacie

  $11.99
• 
  Mike

  Pretty good. Descriptions were shorter than I would have liked and had less continuity, but a good primer on early American conflicts and colonization.
• 
  Dana

  Great little stories of colonial America, although I wouldn't call the majority of them "forgotten." This was not heavy on citations or nuance.
• 
  Rebes

  I really wanted to like this book. I did. But I got annoyed with the style, then I couldn't un-annoy myself.