Peter Mancall on Contested Continent: The Struggle for North America, c. 1000-1680
Join us on Thursday, October 8, 2026 at 5 p.m. for a presentation of Contested Continent: The Struggle for North America, c. 1000-168, the newest volume in the acclaimed Oxford History of the United States series. (That series also includes Gordon S. Wood's Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815.)
About the book
Contested Continent narrates the history of North America from the perspectives of its Indigenous peoples and the earliest Europeans to arrive on the continent. Historian Peter Mancall covers the beginnings of human migrations across the Atlantic Ocean to the 1680s, when a series of revolts threatened the future of European colonies.
For more information, visit https://global.oup.com/academic/product/contested-continent-9780195372786.
About the speaker
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.
He 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).
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.
