Building on his published work in early American and Western literature, Edward Watts's latest book considers the representation of eighteenth-century French settlers in antebellum US writing, using a postcolonial perspective. It investigates how depictions of the early colonial West were used to support competing political and cultural visions of the new republic. Most central to Watts's argument are early nineteenth-century discussions of race, ethnicity, gender, religion and imperialism.

Watts contends that portrayals of the colonial French were used either to promote a monolithic Anglo-American ideal or to suggest a more democratic, racially tolerant and less materialistic alternative. He demonstrates that Romantic historians, including Bancroft, denigrated or erased the eighteenth-century French, whose descendants still lived in the Ohio valley, in order to sustain the myth of a virgin land, tamed by yeoman farmers – a myth used to justify Anglo imperialism in the West. French settler customs, such as sharing the land's resources, egalitarian intermarriage with Indians, Catholicism and neglecting to pursue profit aggressively, were used by Nativist writers to illustrate the unsuitability of the habitants as citizens of the new democracy.

On the other hand, dissident voices wrote approvingly of the French, positing that the values of the habitants and coureurs de bois were truer to the democratic values and civic nationalism of founders like Jefferson and Franklin. Although Longfellow and Margaret Fuller feature, these voices mostly belong to local Western historians and writers, who favoured a more marginal role for the United States and opposed aggressive Yankee materialism. Writers like James Hall and Juliette Kinzie criticized the ethnic exclusivity of Jacksonian America and rejected the prejudices of those, including Lyman Beecher, who portrayed frontier society as uncivilized because it was insufficiently patriarchal and Protestant. By restoring these Western advocates of diversity and tolerance in antebellum US culture and exploring the colonial inheritance underlying their beliefs, Watts makes a major contribution to contemporary scholarship.

One problem, however, is the study's reliance on binary distinctions (dissident vs. Anglo, Nativist vs. ethnically inclusive, etc.). Not only do these flatten the complexity of some of the material (such as Parkman's and Irving's ambivalence towards the French and Métis), but they are also so morally loaded that they make it difficult for Watts to distinguish himself from the dissidents he clearly admires. Watts's agenda in highlighting alternative lifeways within US tradition is laudable, but lacks some critical awareness; although Watts extols the moral attractiveness of subsistence farming and communitarianism, his book belongs to a profession probably more shaped by values he ascribes to the Anglos, for instance individualism, hard graft and even domination (insofar as an academic book ideally redefines a field). A more complex sense of its own intellectual inheritance would make Watts's argument less vulnerable to echoing the binary oppositions found in the polemical writing presented. Another regrettable omission is the visual arts in what is otherwise a fascinating and authoritative study.