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A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World by Tony Horwitz

A Voyage Long and Strange finds Tony Horwitz setting out on a journey to fill in his lack of knowledge about the history of the new world between Christopher Columbus' voyage and the English settlement at Jamestown over a century later. He goes to Nova Scotia to see if he can find traces of the Vikings who must have arrived first, to the Dominican Republic in search of Columbus, follows the Spanish conquistadors in Florida and the American Southwest, and finally goes to Plymouth where the Puritans celebrated the first Thanksgiving. Along the way, he debunks common myths, examines the culture of violence against the Native Americans and against other settlers, and the follows the search for gold and fame. A Voyage Long and Strange has received mostly positive reviews with the Boston Globe saying, "All cultures employ this collective denial mechanism, ignoring crimes and failures both ancient and recent in the name of an upbeat patriotism. It makes you wonder what we will say about ourselves 100 years from now. And it makes you think that A Voyage Long and Strange - disturbing, honest, wonderfully written, and heroically researched - should be required reading in every high school in the land."