Books
Yale University Press
2019
“[This] brilliant riposte to scholarly conventions . . . reconstructs an early colonial experience that is troubled and contested, one that provides a powerful counter-narrative to the traditional accounts that have been institutionalized as cliches in the Thanksgiving tradition.”
“With verve, tact, and insight, Mancall has teased out those strands of Morton’s career that suggest an attractive alternative to some of the grim realities of early American history. As the most recent witness in Morton’s ongoing ‘trial,’ he has launched a vigorous, though not impartial, defense of a complicated man.”
University of Pennsylvania Press
2017
“In Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic, Peter Mancall offers a brief, elegant account of the environmental understandings of both the Europeans who came to settle and exploit the resources of North America and the Caribbean, and the native groups who were already doing those things. . . . The book features illustrations large enough to reward examination, underlining their role as integral components of the argument.”
Basic Books
2009
“A rich, exhilarating narrative of exploration, desperation, and ice-bound tragedy.”
“Rather than speculate, Mancall delivers the story of how Hudson’s crusade put him on a collision course with his. men.... But the story is perhaps most compelling it is descriptions of the Northern Territory itself.”
“Mancall vividly recreates the eager anticipation of the voyage, the lust for conquest and for spices, the voyage’s risks and the joy and terrors that Hudson and his crew faced....As Mancall so eloquently points out, the resolute will that had served Hudson so well in reaching this summit of exploration also made him unwilling to abandon his goal and led to his demise.”
Yale University Press
2007
“An impressive intellectual history of how Elizabethans attempted to explain a new world.”
“Remarkable.... An intellectual biography of extraordinary depth and luminosity.”
“Beautifully written and illustrated.”
Cornell University Press
1995
“Succinct summaries of... recent research on Native American drinking... are smoothly interwoven with the first serious attempt to chronicle the sad history from the time when Europeans introduced distilled beverages to this continent until the United States won independence from England.”
“This is a superb book that should be read by anyone interested in eastern woodland Indians, intercultural history, or early America.”
“Peter C. Mancall has mined a wide range of historical, anthropological, and clinical studies to produce a comprehensive account of British America’s most ubiquitous and deleterious commerce.”