The Divided Ground

In 1990 Alan Taylor published Liberty Men and Great Proprietors, a vigorous and highly detailed study of Maine in the postrevolutionary era. Five years later, his William Cooper's Town, a brilliant examination of the development of New York in the years after the American Revolution, received the Pulitzer and Bancroft (among other) prizes. With The Divided Ground, Taylor has now completed a trilogy tracing the history of the northern hinterland. He has made a more permanent mark on our understanding of that region than any earlier historian. Unlike Richard White's The Middle Ground (1991), which suggested that Europeans and native peoples in the north could at times get along (though the chances for comity declined substantially after the American Revolution), Taylor's study of the Iroquois and their neighbors shows time and again how the descendants of European colonizers did all they could to limit indigenous opportunities. He could have painted this story in broad strokes. But Taylor instead reconstructs events as they unfolded, thereby crafting a gripping narrative

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