Contested Continent: The Struggle for North America, c. 1000-1680

The newest volume in the acclaimed Oxford History of the United States series, Contested Continent recounts the origins of "America" and how it came to birth the United States.

The Oxford History of the United States is by far the most respected multi-volume history of our nation. The series includes three Pulitzer Prize winners, two New York Times bestsellers, and winners of the Bancroft and Parkman Prizes. In the newest volume in the series, Peter C. Mancall recounts how North America was forged from the experiences of millions of Indigenous women and men as well as Europeans and Africans.

The first volume of the Oxford History of the United States series, Contested Continent is also the most ambitiously far-ranging history of North America concentrating on the period from c. 1000 to 1680, from the arrival of Norse explorers to an explosion of revolts that underlined the stubborn struggle to master the continent some two centuries after Columbus's landfall. This history spans the continent from the North Atlantic to the West Indies and includes the entire Atlantic basin. Mancall emphasizes the experiences of diverse peoples while, at the same time, telling a new story about the origins of major aspects of American culture. He illuminates the rise of a booming trans-Atlantic economy based on the extraction of abundant American natural resources; the central role that European migrants and their descendants played in the enslavement of Africans and the displacement of Indigenous peoples; and the spread of self-governing polities where many enjoyed religious freedom. None of these developments was inevitable. Conflicts broke out frequently as different peoples battled over precious resources. Europeans' appetites for material gain and expanding Christendom brought horrific consequences for those brutalized, enslaved, and vulnerable to infectious diseases.

This is a sweeping history of developments crucial to the eventual founding of the United States. Contested Continent underscores the titanic struggles between the peoples who had populated the Americas for centuries and the migrants from the Old World who initiated changes that created a New World that offered boundless opportunities for some and crushed the aspirations of others.

Biography

Peter C. Mancall is Distinguished Professor; the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities; and Professor of History, Anthropology, and Economics at the University of Southern California; and the Linda and Harlan Martens Director of the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute. 

Professor Mancall is the author of seven books including The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England (Yale, 2019); Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic (Penn, 2018); and Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson – A Tale of Mutiny and Murder in the Arctic (Basic Books, 2009). His next book, to be published on June 1, 2026, is Contested Continent: The Struggle for North America, c. 1000-1680, which will be volume one of the Oxford History of the United States. 

He is an elected fellow of the Society of American Historians and the Royal Historical Society and an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society and the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. He was the Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University in the 2019-2020 academic year; delivered the Mellon Distinguished Lectures in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012; and was the Ritchie Distinguished Fellow at The Huntington Library in 2023-2024.