This reader, superbly edited by Samuel Eliot Morison, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian in the Parkman tradition, comprises approximately one-seventh of the original. Rather than stitch together a patchwork of brief, disconnected extracts, Morison has chosen whole chapters or groups of chapters, thereby allowing the reader to follow a story from start to finish, and what stories they are; Champlain's efforts to establish a French empire in the vast forest wilderness; the torture and martyrdom of Father Jogues; La Salle's western expeditions and his murder by mutineers; the bloody Deerfield Massacre; the improbable, madcap, and successful siege of Louisbourg; the swift, dramatic battle on Quebec's Plains of Abraham, in which the fate of a continent was decided; and much more. The result is both an enthralling portrait of early North American colonial history and an unsurpassed introduction to the works of Francis Parkman.
