In his engrossing new book, award-winning historian Alan Taylor masterfully explores the transition of the borderland of Iroquoia, an alliance of Native American groups called the Six Nations, into two bordered lands which became the state of New York in the American republic and the province of Upper Canada in the British Empire. The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution offers a panoramic view of events from multiple perspectives over a period of 50 years. Throughout the painful, and, for many, tragic process including war, diplomacy, broken treaties and promises, land speculation, greed and opportunism the Indians become divided among themselves and devalued as human beings by others. Taylor, recipient of both the Bancroft and Pulitzer prizes for Mr. Cooper’s Town, explains in extensive detail what lay behind Westward expansion and the settlement of the frontier.

At the heart of this narrative are Joseph Brant, a Mohawk Indian, and Samuel Kirkland, a clergyman’s son, whose 50-year link began in 1761 at a colonial boarding school. It was intended that the boys would become teachers and missionaries to the Indians. However, these one-time friends became bitingly hostile opponents: Brant siding with the British, Kirkland with the revolutionary colonists. Brant sought to help the Indians as he, at least for a while, moved nimbly and with great influence and power between the two cultures. Kirkland also tried to help the Indians, then left to join the rebelling colonists, returning to the Indians late in life. Both men profited handsomely from being able to bridge the cultures.

Taylor also gives us carefully drawn portraits of many other prominent personalities, including the Seneca chief Red Jacket, who was an extraordinary negotiator, and George Clinton, who dominated New York’s politics from 1777 to 1795 and was primarily responsible for the massive transfer of Iroquois lands into state possession for sale and settlement.

Taylor shows that the Indian leaders, with foresight, chose to manage settlement by leasing land rather than selling it. However, a so-called preemption right, by which state and colonial leaders declared imminent and inevitable their acquisition of Indian land, diminishing aboriginal title to a temporary possession, accomplished the objectives of dispossessing the Indians and creating the private property that led to the development of New York in the United States and British interests in Canada. Taylor is concerned about scholars who treat preemption as anything more than a partisan fiction asserted to dispossess native people. Of particular interest to him is the Washington administration’s serious concern about the strength of Indian forces which led to a decision to revise the nation’s frontier policy. The foundation of the new federal policy, passed by Congress and signed by President Washington in July 1790, invalidated any purchase of Indian land, whether by a state or an individual, unless conducted at a treaty council held under federal auspices. The power of The Divided Ground comes from both the accumulation of so much detail from all sides regarding specific events and by the roles played by individual leaders. This is a crucial part of American history that all of us should understand, and Taylor is an excellent teacher.

Roger Bishop is a Nashville bookseller and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

There can hardly be a more frustrating or thankless task than trying to impose a moral code on war, an institution which, by its very nature, feeds on its own excesses. Yet that is the job that A.C. Grayling, a professor of philosophy at the University of London’s Birkbeck College, undertakes here. Although he cites examples from armed conflicts throughout history, Grayling draws his chief conclusions from the bombings of cities in Europe and Japan during World War II. Grayling first makes it clear that he is not an apologist for Germany or Japan and that they were clearly aggressors who merited being defeated. His moral question is: what did the Allies owe to the innocent civilians of those two nations when it came to planning and carrying out their bombing raids? He is specifically concerned with area bombing, which he defines as the strategy of treating whole cities and the civilian populations as targets for attack by high explosive and incendiary bombs, and in the end by atom bombs. The two great Allied proponents of area bombing were Great Britain’s Sir Arthur Harris and America’s Gen. Curtis E. LeMay. Each, according to Grayling, had an inflated notion of the effectiveness of the technique in winning the war. Their unfortunate laboratories for testing their theories included not only the industrial centers of Berlin and Tokyo but also such targets of questionable military value as Augsburg, Frankfurt, Cologne, Dresden and Nagasaki. At the beginning of the war, both Germany and Britain went to some lengths to avoid the gratuitous bombing of civilians. But as the conflict heated up and one outrage incited another, the niceties fell away and the rationalizations for indiscriminate slaughter blossomed. (LeMay conceded that had the U.S. lost the war, he might have been indicted as a war criminal.) Beyond the great loss of innocent lives, Grayling points out that the bombings also amounted to culturecide the needless destruction of libraries, schools, churches, monuments and other irreplaceable objects of artistic and historic importance. (To America’s credit, he notes, Secretary of War Henry Stimson removed Kyoto, Japan’s cultural center, from the list of cities to be bombed.) In addition to contending that it was morally wrong, Grayling further argues that area bombing was not nearly as militarily effective as its champions insisted it was. He says it didn’t sap the Germans’ will to fight nor break the back of their industrial productivity. Just as it had in Britain, the attacks seemed only to stiffen national resolve and bring out the people’s resilience and ingenuity. According to official estimates, Allied bombing principally by the British killed 305,000 German civilians and injured another 780,000.

The lingering question is: who can punish the victor in war, no matter how flagrant his crime? Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.