front cover of Guns at the Forks
Guns at the Forks
Walter O'Meara
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1965
Guns at the Forks is a special reissue commemorating the 250th anniversary of the French and Indian War.  In a spirited, intelligent, and informative history, O’Meara tells the story of five successive forts, particularly Fort Duquesne and Fort Pitt, and the dramatic part they played in the war between 1750 and 1760. He describes Washington’s capitulation at Fort Necessity, Braddock’s defeat at the Monongahela, and Forbes’s successful campaign to retake Fort Duquesne.  Although most of the action in the book takes place at the strategically important forks of the Ohio, where present-day Pittsburgh stands, O’Meara’s narrative relates the two forts to the larger story of the French and Indian War and elucidates their roles in sparking a global conflict that altered the course of world events and decided the fate of empires.
[more]

front cover of Ill Starred General
Ill Starred General
Braddock of the Coldstream Guards
Lee Mccardell
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986
A rare combination of documented fact and good storytelling, Ill-Starred General is the biography of a much maligned man from one of history's most vital eras. The career of Edward Braddock began during the court intrigues of Queen Anne and George I, gained momentum in continental military campaigns in the early 1750s, and ended abruptly in the rout of his American army near present-day Pittsburgh in 1755. This highly acclaimed biography reveals the man--and the politics--behind his defeat, one of the major setbacks to British imperial power in the American colonies.
[more]

front cover of The Last of the Mohicans
The Last of the Mohicans
James Fenimore Cooper
Harvard University Press, 2011
Set in 1757 during the French and Indian War, as Britain and France fought for control of North America, The Last of the Mohicans is a historical novel and a rousing adventure story. It is also, Wayne Franklin argues in his introduction, a probing examination of the political and cultural contest taking shape more than half a century later in the author’s own day as European settlement continued to relentlessly push Native Americans westward. The John Harvard Library edition reproduces the authoritative text of the novel from The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper, published by the State University of New York Press.
[more]

front cover of Sixty Years' War for the Great Lakes, 1754-1814
Sixty Years' War for the Great Lakes, 1754-1814
David Curtis Skaggs
Michigan State University Press, 2001

The Sixty Years' War for the Great Lakes contains twenty essays concerning not only military and naval operations, but also the political, economic, social, and cultural interactions of individuals and groups during the struggle to control the great freshwater lakes and rivers between the Ohio Valley and the Canadian Shield. Contributing scholars represent a wide variety of disciplines and institutional affiliations from the United States, Canada, and Great Britain.
     Collectively, these important essays delineate the common thread, weaving together the series of wars for the North American heartland that stretched from 1754 to 1814. The war for the Great Lakes was not merely a sideshow in a broader, worldwide struggle for empire, independence, self-determination, and territory. Rather, it was a single war, a regional conflict waged to establish hegemony within the area, forcing interactions that divided the Great Lakes nationally and ethnically for the two centuries that followed. 

[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter