American Colonies: The Settling of North America

The Penguin History of the United States #1

by Alan Taylor

AMERICAN COLONIES starts with the earliest years of human colonization of the American continent and environs with the Siberian migrations across the Bering Strait 15,000 years ago. It ends in around 1800 when the rough outline of the contemporary North America could be perceived.

Dropping the usual Anglocentric description of North America's fate, Taylor brilliantly conveys the far more vivid and startling story of the competing interests--Spanish, French, English, Native, Russian--that over the centuries shaped and reshaped both the continent and its 'suburbs' in the Caribbean and the Pacific. It is one of the greatest of all human stories.

Genres: History, American History, Nonfiction, American, 18th Century, Historical, Americana

526 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Alan Shaw Taylor is a historian specializing in early American history. He is the author of a number of books about colonial America, the American Revolution, and the Early American Republic. He has won a Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize for his work.

Taylor graduated from Colby College, in Waterville, Maine, in 1977 and earned his Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1986. Currently a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, he will join the faculty of the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia in 2014.