McCullough continued that the early Ohio settlers he writes about “go out there and there’s nothing: no highways, no roads, no bridges, no hospitals, to say the least, and no anesthetic. And how they run into more complicated turns and tests of their fortune than they ever imagined or expected, and how they don’t give up,” he said. “I like to write about people who set out to do something that is thought to be impossible. The author told The Associated Press in a recent interview that he wanted to write about people not widely known to the general public. Manasseh Cutler, who in the late 18th century ventured into the Northwest Territory - now Ohio - to create communities. McCullough tells the story of a group of New Englanders, led by The Rev. “He also states that the Ohio Territory was ‘unsettled.’ No, it had people in it, as he slightly admits in a paragraph on how the Indians ‘considered’ the land to be theirs.” Chaplin wrote in a review for The Times on Monday. “He adopts settlers’ prejudiced language about ‘savages’ and ‘wilderness,’ words that denied Indians’ humanity and active use of their land,” Harvard history professor Joyce E. Criticism also has come from many reviewers, including in The Washington Post and The New York Times. (AP) - David McCullough is one of the country’s most beloved historians, known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning biographies of Harry Truman and John Adams, acclaimed works on the Brooklyn Bridge and Panama Canal, and for narrating such famous documentaries as Ken Burns’ “The Civil War.”īut with his latest book, “The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West,” McCullough is seeing some of the sharpest criticism of his career.ĭays after the book was released and reached ’s top 20 best-seller list, a new generation of historians, scholars and activists took to social media to accuse McCullough of romanticizing white settlement and downplaying the pain inflicted on Native Americans.

The pioneers mccullough summary