Volume 56, Number 10 · June 11, 2009
A Heroic Historian on Heroes
By Russell Baker
American Heroes: Profiles of Men and Women Who Shaped Early America
by Edmund S. Morgan
Norton, 278 pp., $27.95
The European invasion of North America began in earnest when Columbus, searching for Asia, blundered into the Caribbean. The newcomers, mostly Spanish, English, and French, found a continental vastness sparsely populated by farming and hunting people whose primitive technology was hopelessly inferior to the Europeans'. In the limitless and unspoiled world stretching from tropical jungle to the frozen north, there may have been scarcely more than a million inhabitants. They lived mostly in small tribal units often quite hostile to one another even when living close together, and they spoke an astonishing number of languages, perhaps as many as 375. Nowhere did they constitute anything like the European nation-state that was about to fall upon them in murderous excesses of Christian love and ancient greed.
Review, 3787 words
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