Reaching broadly across Native American, Spanish, French, and English cultures, Professor Holifield writes with both authority and grace.

Edwin S. Gaustad, University of California, Riverside

We have come to expect the highest standards of historical scholarship from Holifield, and again he does not disappoint us. Here in short compass he offers fresh insights into the intellectual life of seventeenth-century America. Holifield's focus upon the exercise of persuasion among writers and thinkers allows him to embrace the widest possible range of intellectual sources-geography, history, science, theology, political discourse, and social criticism-within one volume. It is especially noteworthy that he has integrated Native American materials and perspectives in this work. In his choice of category of persuasion Holifield has added a significant term to the lexicon of early American history.

Stephen J. Stein, Indiana University

Era of Persuasion presents a strikingly original argument. E. Brooks Holifield invites us to see the frontiers of seventeenth-century America as fields of persuasion where people of different race and background battled more often with words than with arms. Holifield explores how these strangers imagined themselves in time and space, and how, in their search for meanings, they invented as many new worlds as there were opportunities for cultural interaction. This is an impressive synthesis of a rich and complex historical literature.

T. H. Breen, Northwestern University

With characteristic intelligence and lucidity, Holifield convincingly describes how the art and act of persuasion was at the center of early American thought and culture. . . . This work is a welcome addition to the intellectual history of the earliest years of America's development. Holifield has the eye for the unnoticed but important source, and the all-telling quotation, and thus Era of Persuasion should delight as it instructs.

Philip F. Gura, William S. Newman Distinguished Professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill