The Battle For North America

Originally published in 1889 in 13 volumes, this brilliant, unequalled work by the most famous American historian of the age has now been skillfully edited into a single edition. The wonderfully readable result retains its sharp focus and wonderfully graceful style, while eliminating repetitions and archaic phrases. Playing out in the dramatic account is the struggle for a continent, and the brilliant men who dominated the conflict: Champlain, La Salle, Washington, Howe, and others. By ousting the French from the land, the British unwittingly set the stage for their own later defeat.

At once a grand tour of the battlefields of North America and an unabashedly personal tribute to the military prowess of an essentially unwarlike people. • "[A] magisterial narrative history, enriched by an authorial voice."--The Washington Post Fields of Battle spans more than two centuries and the expanse of a continent to show how the immense spaces of North America shaped the wars that were fought on its soil.

On September 13, 1759, after a daring and unexpected ascent up a steep bluff, Wolfe's English troops confronted Montcalm's French troops and Canadian irregulars on the Plains of Abraham. The battle that followed determined Canada's destiny, but it was only one of many confrontations on several continents in what historians consider the first global war. The central drama, the part of the conflict that took place in North America, has become known as the Seven Years' War. Empires at War captures the sweeping panorama of this first world war and the huge cast of characters who fought it. William Fowler's narrative is adept at describing the battles and portraying the important players on all sides, incorporating the perspectives of the First Nations leaders and Canadian volunteers so critical to French initiatives throughout the war. Among the war's many outcomes were the ceding of Quebec to Britain and the final destruction of Acadia. The war was also waged in Europe, the West Indies, Asia, India and Africa. Before it ended, nearly 1,000,000 men had died.

Perched atop a tall promontory and surrounded on three sides by the treacherous St. Lawrence River, Quebec City forms an almost impregnable natural fortress. But in 1759, with the Seven Years War raging around the globe, the capital city of New France came under attack. With the irascible British general James Wolfe in command, a force of more than 100 ships carrying nearly 9,000 men navigated the river, scaled the cliffs, and laid siege to the town in an audacious attempt to expel the French from North America forever. It would be a brutal battle, with British soldiers confronting the troops commanded by the French general, the marquis de Montcalm. They were on unfamiliar terrain and facing extreme weather, a colonial militia, and experienced First Nations warriors. Using original research and multiple perspectives, Dan Snow grippingly describes the events that would reshape North America and, eventually, change the British Empire forever. Death or Victory is history—military, political and human history—told on an epic and thrilling scale.

In this engrossing narrative of the great military conflagration of the mid-eighteenth century, Fred Anderson transports us into the maelstrom of international rivalries. With the Seven Years' War, Great Britain decisively eliminated French power north of the Caribbean — and in the process destroyed an American diplomatic system in which Native Americans had long played a central, balancing role — permanently changing the political and cultural landscape of North America. Anderson skillfully reveals the clash of inherited perceptions the war created when it gave thousands of American colonists their first experience of real Englishmen and introduced them to the British cultural and class system. We see colonists who assumed that they were partners in the empire encountering British officers who regarded them as subordinates and who treated them accordingly. This laid the groundwork in shared experience for a common view of the world, of the empire, and of the men who had once been their masters. Thus, Anderson shows, the war taught George Washington and other provincials profound emotional lessons, as well as giving them practical instruction in how to be soldiers. Depicting the subsequent British efforts to reform the empire and American resistance — the riots of the Stamp Act crisis and the nearly simultaneous pan-Indian insurrection called Pontiac's Rebellion — as postwar developments rather than as an anticipation of the national independence that no one knew lay ahead (or even desired), Anderson re-creates the perspectives through which contemporaries saw events unfold while they tried to preserve imperial relationships. Interweaving stories of kings and imperial officers with those of Indians, traders, and the diverse colonial peoples, Anderson brings alive a chapter of our history that was shaped as much by individual choices and actions as by social, economic, and political forces.

By 1756 the wilderness war for control of North America that erupted two years earlier between France and England had expanded into a global struggle among all of Europe's Great Powers. Its land and sea battles raged across the North American continent, engulfed Europe and India, and stretched from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, Indian, and Pacific waters. The new conflict, now commonly known as the Seven Years' War of 1756-1763, was a direct continuation of the last French and Indian War. This study explores the North American campaigns in relation to events elsewhere in the world, from the ministries of Whitehall and Versailles to the land and sea battles in Europe, Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean. Few wars have had a more decisive effect on international relations and national development. The French and Indian War resulted in France's expulsion from almost all of the Western Hemisphere, except for some tiny islands in the Caribbean and St. Lawrence. Britain emerged as the world's dominant sea power and would remain so for two centuries. Finally, within a generation or two the vast debts incurred by Whitehall and Versailles in waging this war would help to stimulate revolutions in America and France that would forever change world history.