New World: An Epic of Colonial America from the Founding of Jamestown to the Fall of Quebec - Hardcover

Quinn, Arthur

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0571198376 ISBN 13: 9780571198375

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 1994

Synopsis

"I write of peoples and of a struggle." So begins A New World, an ambitious and extraordinary book that challenges conventional historical narrative by presenting episodes in North America's history through the eyes and voices of the Europeans who established the first colonial outposts here.
Beginning with the swaggering John Smith at Jamestown and ending with the beleaguered Montcalm at Quebec, Arthur Quinn allows towering historical figures to emerge from an often beautiful, sometimes forbidding early American landscape and speak. An elderly William Bradford looks back with growing despair at the early promise of the Pilgrim colony at Plymouth. Governor John Winthrop tries to administer a dose of practicality to the Puritans of Massachusetts. Jesuit missionaries bring Christianity and disaster to the Huron Confederacy. A blustering Peter Stuyvesant watches Manhattan slip from Dutch grasp. William Penn's Holy Experiment in Pennsylvania goes increasingly awry. And, finally, the British and the French fight history's first world war for supremacy in the New World.
Telling each story using the literary conventions of the day, Quinn casts North America's colonial beginnings as a multicultural epic, gripping the reader throughout with his uncanny eye and storytelling skill. The result is a history not just for scholars, but for all citizens of a nation whose birth came only through long struggle, and at a terrible cost to Europeans and Native Americans alike.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

A curious and ambitious book that sets out to map the beginnings of colonial America, from the founding of Virginia, Quebec, and Massachusetts to the Anglo-French war of the mid-17th century. Quinn (Rhetoric/Univ. of California, Berkeley) tries to do this by utilizing the rhetorical conventions of each era and culture being described, the whole based on a kind of Virgilian master plan that would have this historical ``epic'' echo The Aeneid. The problem is that this approach conflates fine, straightforward storytelling with passages of overblown pseudo-epic ``poetry.'' Does Virgil really provide us with the metaphysical key to unlocking America's ``mythic, wilderness time''? No: The rhetoric of one literary form has simply been stitched onto the fabric of another. In any event, the ``voices'' of the different chapters aren't very distinct; a few quaint stylistic decorations do not amount to telling each story ``according to the literary conventions of the day.'' The point is, Quinn doesn't actually need Virgil or epic poetry. He is doing something different--Romantic history--and doing it quite well, at times brilliantly. His portrait of Frontenac, Louis XIV's governor of New France, is delicious, as are his accounts of Stuyvesant's New Amsterdam and its downfall, the ferocious Indian wars of the 1650s, the Jesuit saga, and the confrontation between megalomaniacal Sir William Berkeley and iconoclastic Nathaniel Bacon in infant Virginia. With all its faults, full-blooded rhetoric pouring from the text as it thunders along makes this a wonderful relief from the usual dryness of contemporary historians. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Booklist:

Echoing Virgil's elevated treatment of his country's founding ("I write of peoples and a struggle"), Quinn depicts colonizers and Indians up to Wolfe's and Montcalm's deaths in 1759, and the well-paced result defies pigeonholing. It is partly adventure tale, partly dramatic tragedy, and occasionally a tease (Quinn once quotes Dietrich Knickerbocker's satirical profile of New Amsterdam's Peter Stuyvesant--without fessing up that Dietrich was Washington Irving's pen name for spoofing popular history). Predominantly, though, Quinn engages rather than tricks, and his work is an uncommonly interesting sort of history in its own manner. Chiefly, he lets the principals speak through their memoirs: the Pilgrim chapter rests on founder William Bradford's gloomy reminiscences about the seeming religious failings of his colony; and the Jesuit missionaries relate their incredible travails in proselytizing the Hurons. Indeed, the power of religious motivation in colonization, as Quinn examines the attempted establishment of cities of God, jostles for attention with dramas of avarice and viciousness, making an all too human stew of characters with vaulting imaginations contesting for continental control; Quinn's effort will please a variety of tastes. Gilbert Taylor

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0571198376
• ISBN 13: 9780571198375
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 600