Extremely detailed history of the exploration of North America from early Spanish to Lewis & Clark. Fascinating stories of men transversing the wilds of the western US and the ramifications on world politics at the time. Also the never ending myth of the Northwest Passage which was always over the next ridge or around the next bend of the river

Reading Bernard De Voto's The Course of Empire put me in mind of the computer game Empire Earth. Empire Earth is a real time strategy game that begins in the Stone Age and spans 500,000 years. You are given a certain number of settlers, with which to gather resources, build armies, and crush your enemies (your enemies being everyone who isn't your country, which makes it a tougher sell in schools than, say, Oregon Trail). The game allows you to be an overbearing, genocidal dictator within the co...

Probably one of the best histories of Western exploration and expansion, an all-encompassing narrative that takes us from the mid-1400s up to 1806 and the end of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.The level of detail about explorers in America and the American West in the 1500s and 1600s was amazing. I had no idea about some of the places these people went to, and how much we knew. That detail continues right up into the 1700s and 1800s, and even having read and researched dozens of books on fur tra...

Laborious reading, more like poetry than prose.

I liked this book a lot because it taught me about people discovering new lands and what hardships they went through to discover new land.

This is a magisterial history of the exploration of the west by an icon of western histiography. DeVoto takes in the whole sweep of New World history, from the conquistadors up to Lewis and Clark. Lewis and Clark are the clear apogee of the narrative, and the hundred or so pages on their expedition function as a hundred page mini book within a book.I learned alot about the exploration of the west in this book, especially in the sections devoted to spanish (inept) and french (daring but lacking a...

This is a history of seriously epic proportions. DeVoto covers 278 years of exploration over a massive continent in 550 pages--and makes it interesting. I read this as part of a project this semester to explore some narrative histories, which were done very well in the 1950s when this was published (as opposed to thesis-driven history, which has dominated academia since the 1960s and which I feel has had more than its fair share of time in the limelight and ought to be done away with [Heresy!])....

Bernard Devoto is a great storyteller, it’s like sitting around a campfire listening to stories about explores of North America. This story begins in the 1500s with the Spanish explorers and it continues with French explores and the fur trade. Next is Great Britain and their explores and the interaction of cultures on the frontier. He finishes with the great Lewis and Clark trip that was taken in 1806. Devoto explains economic and political impact of these explores, he then delves into the life

To my mind, Course of Empire is the best book written by Bernard Devoto (1897-1955). With it, he won a National Book Award to add to his Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes. DeVoto’s integration of American exploration with the political quarrels of Europe is exceptionally good, and his understanding of western geography is overwhelming even to the well traveled. Most important, this is the work of a novelist manqué who should have been a historian all along. The book is everywhere readable and sometim...

A narrative history of the exploration of North America from Cortez to Lewis and Clark. DeVoto writes about many explorers you and I have never heard of. The Spanish wanted gold. Later the French and British established an extensive fur trade along their routes to find a Northwest Passage. Published in 1952, this is still a grand narrative. These adventures have been described many times in the intervening 67 years, but I was persuaded that I'd find DeVoto's writing and his telling of the epic j...

This is the keystone book of DeVoto's trilogy of American growth and expansion. I've read the two follow-ups, "Across the Wide Missouri" and "The Year of Decision," and own this one, as the best of the three. Yes, "Across the Wide Missouri" won the Pulitzer, but it built on the recognition this book had achieved.This book also has more information about early non English/British/American exploration than in your high school textbook. More of what's in the other two volumes is accessible elsewher...

"'We ever held it certain that going toward the sunset we would find what we desired.' In four centuries, no one ever said it more fully." (quoting Cabeza de Vaca, 19)"Are there geographical units here to which political units must correspond? It was asked so quietly that down to today many have never realized that it was asked at all." (228)"The American teleology is geographical." (404)"[O]n the far shore were not only the Canto merchants who brought the sea otter but Prester John and the Gran...

Found the earlier part of the book fascinating, but the details re Lewis and Clark's expedition are probably more readable in Stephen Ambrose's "Undaunted Courage". That said, DeVoto's sense of imperial strategy -as seen in a time before rail and air transit and focused almost exclusively on the fur trade - is more than illuminating in the context of the development of an American empire. (Still unsure as to DeVoto's tendency to wax lyrical from time to time)

This is one of the most fascinating books about American History that I have ever read, and filled a huge gap in my knowledge and understanding of the years preceding 1830. I will read it again at least once, as there is so much to absorb and reflect upon. This book is enriching other books I am reading too. Highly recommend!

Finally finished this behemoth of a book. While some parts were engaging, for the most part it was a drag to get through. There are so many names and places that I felt lost. Would have been nice to have a big map sitting next to me for most of the text.

Scholarly, well written. Explains how Britain and subsequently the US bested the French and took control of their colonial properties including the Louisiana Purchase, thus opening the west for further exploration. I would have loved to be alive then and seen the country in its wild state.

Bernard D. has done it again and written a fine book with lots of research time behind it.The details of how the empire was created; how did the U.S. form itself? The book provides all the details of the western expansion of this youthful nation. And who helped this country grow along the way? What economies helped it get its footing? Enjoyed the author's writing of America's expansion from 1500(captains and ships) to the 1800s and the movement of farms west of the Mississippi.

This history of the development of the United States covers the period from early exploration to the Louisiana Purchase, with heavy emphasis on relations with Native American tribes. In a sense, it is "Guns, Germs and Steel" told from an American perspective. DeVoto, a noted historian, does a good job of describing relationships among the tribes of North America and the impact of trade for guns and iron tools that would change the balance of power among American Indians. It describes the arrival...

The "Great Game" contested by Great Britain, Russia, and to a lesser extent other powers for control of Central Asia is a familiar part of history. This book presents the thesis that North America between 1492 and roughly 1815 was the site of a similar "great game" involving Spain, France, Great Britain, and, at the end, the United States. The major elements were the same: foreign powers occupying the periphery of the continent and seeking to control trade with the interior; indigenous tribes in...

DeVoto is good, but here he loses his narrative power like Napoleon in Russia. Two and a half centuries is just too wide a path to travel for any one story, and the individual stories seem disjointed, as though they belonged in a narrower book. Had he concentrated on the navigation and settlement of the Gulf of Mexico, for instance, the details of hugely erroneous course planning and of human endurance would have come to flower. Instead he moves here from bud to bud.