The Birth of America

William R. Polk. The Birth of America: From Before Columbus to the Revolution. New York: Harper Collins, 2006.

Polk--a descendant of the American president with the same surname--has spent most of his long career as a diplomat and political scholar, but with this book he chose to, as he states in the introduction, offer a "different angle of vision" on the history of the colonial era of American history. The introduction presents a brief synopsis of American historiography, reinforcing his point that the story of America's founding still needs to be revisited and retold in the light of new sources, new points of view, and new interpretations. So, as a non-American historian but an experienced scholar, he offers his own version.

How does he do? To begin with, credit must be given--he has done his research. For a non-specialist, he has an impressive command of a wide range of sources. Polk is writing for a general audience, and his writing style is well-suited to finding a broader audience than many academics. He has a good eye for telling anecdotes and examples, and he utilizes them frequently to bring this far-reaching narrative to life. 

The story he tells is hardly comprehensive--Polk is very good at giving the Indian story its due, and he places slavery at the very center of the colonial saga, but he has little if anything to say about gender or family, nor does he trouble himself too much with culture or intellectual history. But these are observations, not criticisms. This is a "big picture" story which is deeply rooted in an Atlantic history perspective. Part I, "Europe and Africa Come to America" takes up the first 100 pages of a 309-page text, so that the book devotes fully a third of its length to the various actors who would collide, collude, and intermingle in what became British North America.

Even a specialist night enjoy his take. His eye for detail, noted above, keeps the story fresh even when the general outline is already known. True to his explanation at the very beginning that history is not fixed and is always affected by what is important in the present, some of the details he chooses to highlight are very pointed rejoinders to contemporary (mis-)readings. His assertion that most colonial Americans neither owned guns nor knew how to use them would be quite a surprise in many circles where references to the Founders are routine.

All in all, this is a lively and well-crafted book; Polk fulfills his promise to the reader to take a "fresh look" at a story all too many Americans think they know better than they actually do.