Nancy Rhoden and Ian Steele edit The Human Tradition In The American Revolution gathering concise essays to explore many facts of the American Revolution. From Afro-American and Native American participants to a minister and frontiersmen, this focuses on individuals who made a difference.

Ballard Campbell edits The Gilded Age And Progressive Era, examining public figures at the turn of the 20th century. Biography blends with historical review and analysis in this important coverage.

Although this was a good book in itself, it covered too much of the French and Indian War to just have a title of Fort William Henry and the "Massacre". The book was interesting up to the point of the siege and massacre then it became very vague. It lacked details to the point of disappointment. It did not say what specific Indian tribes did most of the massacre, nor did it have a thorough account of actually what was happening! It told about some injured being killed in the fort , then it jumped to militia killed on the road to Ft Edward, then to the English officers dining with the French officers and chasing away Indians from their personal effects. In addition the author downplayed the massacre! Every time the word was used it was in quotation marks,making it seem the massacre was overplayed. But if 10 people are massacred instead of 200 does that make a difference? The book did inform the reader about the Canadien slave trade which was going on between them and some tribes, which other books clearly never bring up. Many English suffered because of it. It also made it clear that because of the French's terms at Ft. William Henry, many Indians then refused to help the French in the future. Sealing their fate in the French and Indian War.

The title of this perceptive book tells the gist of Professor Steele's investigation into the seige and subsequent murder or kidnapping of prisoners after the British garrison surrendered to Montcalm in 1757. In essence, the English prisoners were betrayed by the French by letting their Indian allies seek scalps, prisoners and plunder after being given parole to march to a British force on the Hudson. On a larger scale, the French betrayed the Indians by not allowing them to take what Indians assumed were rightfully theirs as a part of 18th century warfare: prisoners to replace tribal members killed in combat, plunder of European materials, and scalps. Steele asserts that the losses suffered by the British garrison were smaller than previously claimed (including a number of men who were forced to travel home with Indians from the Great Lakes)and that the incident was not the bloodbath of popular legend. The men taken to the Lakes kept turning up for years afterward. Many of the scalps taken were from the corpses in the fort's cemetery-the Indians who took these scalps therefore brought smallpox back home with them and might have inadvertently destroyed whole tribes. Steele tries to count the men killed during the "massacre" and I think he is successful in his enumeration. He does not overlook the wounded who were murdered in their beds, the man boiled and eaten by his captors, and the soldiers knocked out of line and killed because they resisted being plundered. I agree that Montcalm was not complicit in directing the massacre, but set up the conditions that caused it to happen.

The Massacre lives on in popular imagination, but so does the Boston Massacre, certainly one of the most non-massacres in American history.

On a personal note, my 7th generation great-grandfather Bernardus Bratt commanded the New York troops at Fort William Henry in the summer of 1756 and came out as a company commander in Sir William Johnson's regiment after the 1757 massacre.

Well-written and well-documented modern accounts of the French and Indian War are few and far between. Steele's book should remain the final word for some time to come.

Steele presents the reader with a masterful treatment of the events surrounding the "massacre" so familiar to viewers of the latest cinematic incarnation of Cooper's "The Last of the Mohicans." As a teacher, I can tell you it's a bit of a surprise for students to find out that Colonel Munro survived Magua's knife. Steele puts the events in historical and cultural context. A fine piece of work, one which should be of interest to a broader audience than the book will probably get.

As with any anthology, the 16 10-20 page biographies here are hit or miss. While the biographies don't do much in the way of helping the reader understand everyday colonial life, they do aid in allowing one to understand other aspects of colonial life.

The best written are the biographies of Pocahontas by Kathleen Brown; Rev. John Cotton, Jr. by Sheila McIntyre; Bryan Sheehan by Margaret Connell Szasz; and Lewis Morris, Jr. by Michael Watson. Brown presents an example of early European-Amerindian relations and shows us the difficulty of determining what sources are truth versus what is self-promotion or legend. Cotton is a pastor twice accused of marital infidelity. His story gives us examples of how Puritans dealt with sinful citizens, of efforts to spread the Word of God to Amerindians, and of the importance of communication between community leaders. The story of Bryan Sheehan is an intersting read. We so often read success stories in American immigration. Sheehan is definately a failure: Roman-Catholic (and thus treated poorly in New England) and unable to hold a job with any promise of financial security, Sheehan joins the British Army during the French and Indian War. He survives several horrible battles to discover that, upon hearing a rumor of Sheehan's death, Bryan Sheehan's wife married another man and had a child by him. The Lewis Morris biography gives us an example of pre-Revolution politics in America. Of special note was the Anne Hutchinson biography by Marilyn Westerkamp. While it is obvious that her research was excellent and she succeeded in showing the reader that Hutchinson's popularity threatened the social order (e.g. she became too powerful and the religious leaders felt threatened) and the depth of Hutchinson's intelligence, Westerkamp didn't quite succeed in proving that Hutchinson's activities were not tolerated because she was a woman.

The only two biographies I didn't enjoy were the biographies of French missionary Gabrial Segard and Amerindian translator Isabel Montour. The biographical information available on the former is not exactly extensive, making for a confusing biography. With regards to the latter, it is probably more a fault of the reader that he didn't care about the role of a translator in English-Native politics.

Finally, in my opinion, not enough attention was paid to slavery in the American colonies. Olaudah Equiano was the only biography of a slave in this anthology, and it can hardly be said that his life was typical. A biography of some other person involved in slavery would have been informative as well--be it a slave, slave owner, slave trader, slave-master, slave-owner-turned abolitionist, etc. This could have been done at the expense of one of the many European-American cultural brokers biographies.