“Book Descriptions: From an acclaimed Pulitzer Prize finalist, a sweeping history of the largely forgotten time when the eastern seaboard marked the tense frontier between great colonial empires and countless native tribes Once, the East was frontier—the boundary between complex native cultures and the first colonizing Europeans. How they each adopted and adapted the ways and manners of the other, while contesting for control of what all considered to be their land, shaped both societies in profound and lasting ways. The First Frontier traces two and a half centuries of history through poignant, mostly unheralded personal stories—like that of a Harvard-educated Indian caught up in seventeenth-century warfare, a mixed-blood interpreter trying to straddle his white and native heritage, and a Puritan woman wielding a scalping knife. It is the first book in years to tell the far-reaching story of the eastern frontier, combining vivid storytelling with the latest research to bring to life modern America’s tumultuous, uncertain beginnings.” DRIVE