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Andersen, Fred. The War That Made America: A Short History of the French and Indian War. New York: Viking, 2005. 293pp. $25.95
"It is the nature of great events to obscure the great events that came before them." This memorable phrasing begins nineteenth-century historian Francis Parkman's masterwork on the French and Indian War, Montcalm and Wolfe. One hundred twenty years later, Fred Anderson's The War That Made America clears away with lucid prose and effective narrative style the obscurity that has veiled the French and Indian War. Described as the "first world war" by Winston Churchill, it was the fourth in a series of six wars fought between England and France and their various allies between 1689 and 1815. It enflamed French Canada and British North America from the Carolinas to Nova Scotia, and it spread to Europe, the Caribbean, West Africa, India, and eventually to the Philippines. Despite this nearly worldwide conflagration and the approximately 800,000 total military casualties that occurred in all theaters, this conflict (also commonly known as the Seven Years' War) is no more familiar to most Americans than the Peloponnesian War, according to Anderson. His highly readable...