The First Frontier Audiobook By Scott Weidensaul cover art

The First Frontier

The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery, and Endurance in Early America

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for $0.00
Offer ends July 31, 2025 at 11:59PM PT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 3 months. Cancel anytime.

The First Frontier

By: Scott Weidensaul
Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
Try for $0.00

$0.00/mo. after 3 months. Offer ends July 31, 2025 at 11:59PM PT. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $29.95

Buy for $29.95

Confirm purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use, License, and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
Cancel

Frontier: the word carries the inevitable scent of the West. But before Custer or Lewis and Clark, before the first Conestoga wagons rumbled across the Plains, it was the East that marked the frontier - the boundary between complex Native cultures and the first colonizing Europeans.Here is the older, wilder, darker history of a time when the land between the Atlantic and the Appalachians was contested ground - when radically different societies adopted and adapted the ways of the other, while struggling for control of what all considered to be their land.

The First Frontier traces two and a half centuries of history through poignant, mostly unheralded personal stories - like that of a Harvard-educated Indian caught up in seventeenth-century civil warfare, a mixed-blood interpreter trying to straddle his white and Native heritage, and a Puritan woman wielding a scalping knife whose bloody deeds still resonate uneasily today. It is the first book in years to paint a sweeping picture of the Eastern frontier, combining vivid storytelling with the latest research to bring to life modern America’s tumultuous, uncertain beginnings.

©2012 Scott Weidensaul (P)2012 Audible, Inc. Americas Colonial Period United States United Kingdom Latin America Africa Early America New England History
Comprehensive History • Fascinating Perspective • Above Average Performance • Vivid Storytelling • Educational Content
Highly rated for:
All stars
Most relevant  
The first couple chapters are dull but necessary to understand the book. When I got into it I found it absorbing and extremely well done. Well researched but with a few liberties. Overall a good listen.

Interesting

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
if your interested in this subject matter,great informative book. I read about such things for years and still learned a lot

great book

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
this a very good book. I have been researching heavily for my own book idea and this book has aided me. Buy it!

Yes

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I consider myself a decent student of History, but the overwhelming majority of this book has been completely missing form my education. the begging years of what I knew of America is completely different, new, and foreign to me.
This book was an eye opener to me and is a great summary of so many things I had no idea happened at all. Great reading, well researched, worthy of your time!

mind blown

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Well read Well written. Nice to hear different stories about the Era. Has personal stories not just accounts of war.

Haverhill HAY-Vrill not Have - her- hill

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This is exciting research, well written. The reading is droning, almost mechanical. The pronunciation of especially French names is utterly shameful.

Great text, tolerable reading

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The narrator often sounded like A.I. or computer generated. If you can get past the awkward narration, the story itself is fascinating.

Good story, bad narrator

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Excellent!! One of the best I have read on pre-Revolutionary America. I strongly recommend it. I bought the hardback version to read it again!

Great Book on Early America

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This is not your cliff-notes history book. The author takes a broad look at history, and then zooms in to incredible depth and detail that is sometimes hard to believe we even have.

The beginning of this book reminds me of the Sagan quote: “if you wish to bake an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” So to understand American history, you’ve got to go back 20-30,000 years, and I absolutely love it.

If you’re like me and you read/listen to history specifically to get the full-context, no detail or perspective spared approach, you will definitely enjoy this masterpiece.

Depth, Granularity, And Incredible detail

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The natives suffered for our success. That was innevitable, but regrettable. All of us here benefit now from that.

War and Conquest in the really old West

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews