Old World, New World: Great Britain and America from the Beginning

Our close bond with Great Britain seems inevitable, given our shared language and heritage. But as distinguished historian Kathleen Burk shows in this groundbreaking history, recently published to acclaim in the United Kingdom, the close international relationship was forged only recently, preceded by several centuries of hostility and conflict that began soon after the first English colony was established on the newly discovered continent. Burk, a fourth-generation Californian and professor of history in London, draws on her unique knowledge of both countries to explore the totality of the relationship—the politics, economics, culture, and society—that both connected the two peoples and drove them apart. She tells the story from each side, beginning with the English exploration of the New World and taking us up to the present alliance in Iraq. At once sweeping in scope and intimate in detail, Old World, New World is a vivid, absorbing, and surprising story of one of the longest international love-hate relationships in modern history.