North American history is inextricably intertwined with colonization and genocide, and this book charts and analyzes that history by taking a more indigenous-centric and holistic approach. Starting in prehistory, Hämäläinen reviews the archaeological evidence of North American civilizations and the spread of people, agricultural practices, and technologies. With the arrival of Europeans the method shifts to one that reviews the written historical record, and it's here that my most significant issue with this book lies.

As far as I can tell, no oral history sources are included from indigenous peoples. I get why - it's much harder to collect and contextualize that kind of data - but it leaves much of this book still smacking of Eurocentrism until the 19th century.

Leaving that aside, this book provides an extremely rich, fresh analysis of the arc of North American development through the millennia and recent centuries, effectively putting to bed many self serving US and European narratives and highlighting the power and agency of indigenous people even through the heyday of US expansion. Highly recommend.