The Upper Country

Skinner’s ambitious survey history of the upper country is timely... One major contribution this book makes is that it will likely expose more American students to the notion that the history of America is not just the story of the British colonists.

Skinner provides a welcome introduction to many of those who made the Upper Country an important part of colonial North America... For those needing an introduction to the Upper Country of New France, this a good place for you to begin your quest.

Provides a fine, detailed analysis of French efforts to appropriate this region, to control and extract the greatest possible benefit from it, all the while emphasizing the importance of Amerindian alliances in both exploiting this region and in denying access to the British.

The French enterprise in the Upper Country was complex. Still, Skinner makes admirable sense of it within about two hundred pages by using both American and French historiographies to present a work that accurately summarizes the innovative research of the past two decades on this topic. In The Upper Country Skinner offers a survey that will be of great help to undergraduate students not only in the United States but in Canada as well.

Skinner is particularly adept at expressing the shifting dynamic of French-Indian affairs and the fur trade, as well as the movements of allied forces in response to wars with the Fox, Chickasaw, and Natchez... An affordable, lively, well-mapped, and reasonably comprehensive synthesis of events in the upper country on the eve of a war that ultimately determined control of a continent.

Claiborne Skinner's The Upper Country offers a succinct overview of one of the great, if too often untold, theaters of North American history.

An informative volume that would be a useful tool for the teaching of early Canadian, American, or North American pasts.

A historical narrative that is very readable, engaging, and coherent... What Skinner accomplishes in less than two hundred pages is really quite remarkable.

An informative volume.

Skinner’s work is a superb, even masterful, synthesis that testifies to the importance of New France and the history of French colonization to the overarching narrative of early America.

A great analysis of the French colonial model and an historiographic leap forward... The best and most reliable synthesis I have read on the subject yet.

A very useful synthesis... From this story of an embattled Pax Gallica emerge larger-than-life characters like Nicolas Perrot, Duluth, Tonti 'Iron Hand,' Cadillac, Louvigny, the Huron Kondiaronk, and the Iroquois Black Kettle—important men too often neglected in American historiography.

The Upper Country presents an impressive scope of the past in an easy-to-read, accessible style that is sometimes laced with wonderfully dry humor. Clearly a passionate labor of love, it is a story masterfully told which brings this era and its participants to life again.

An excellent book.

An easily accessible handbook for historians.