My guest Peter C. Mancall’s new book is Contested Continent: The Struggle for North America, c. 1000–1680. It is, now, the first volume in the Oxford History of the United States, an ongoing multi-volume narrative series—a series whose story is worth an episode in and of itself.

In Contested Continent, Mancall describes the foundation of that place which would eventually become the United States. It is a long era of human history which foreshadowed that which was to come, one in which peoples from four continents came together in a collision of violence and mutuality in North America. “Much of what happened,” he writes, “came to define the American experience, including the rise of a booming transatlantic economy based on the extraction of abundant American natural resources, the central role European migrants and their descendants played in the enslavement of Africans, the displacement of Indigenous peoples, and the spread of self-governing polities where many people enjoyed religious liberty. None of those developments was inevitable. Nor did sweeping changes occur quickly.” Or we might say that like the glaciers of an advancing ice age, the events of this era often seem slow and ponderous, but ultimately they change everything that gets in their way.

Peter C. Mancall is Distinguished Professor, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, and Director of the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute at the University of Southern California. He is the author of numerous books, including Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson and Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America.