At its best, The First Frontier is a gripping if scattershot account of the first steps taken by English settlers in New England and Virginia. Only the author can’t decide what it is he wants to write.
Is it about the displacement and slaughter of Native Americans? Or is it about how a new nation invented itself by first resisting, then selfishly rising up against the proper authority of its European overlord?
Published in 1978 when David Horowitz was a well-known leftist academic, The First Frontier echoes the social studies teacher in Dazed And Confused telling her class the upcoming Bicentennial is celebrating “the fact that a bunch of slave-owning, aristocratic white males didn’t want to pay their taxes.”
