We have long been divided over how exceptional the United States is, and that debate has often revolved around the frontier. In Heart of American Darkness, acclaimed historian Robert G. Parkinson presents a startling narrative of the ever-shifting encounters between white colonists and Native Americans. He reveals that the colonization of the interior was not a rational process or heroic deed-nor the act by which American democracy was forged. Rather, it was as bewildering, violent, and haphazard as European colonization of Africa. Bringing a Conradian lens to the central episodes of the early American frontier from the 1730s through the Revolutionary War, Parkinson follows the intertwined histories of two prominent families, one colonial and the other Native, who helped determine the fate of the empires battling for control of the Ohio River Valley. And in reclaiming the true nature and costs of imperialism, he offers nothing less than a new story of the making of the United States.