Peter C. Mancall is Distinguished Professor; the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities;  and Professor of History, Anthropology, and Economics at the University of Southern California; and the Linda and Harlan Martens Director of the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute.

Professor Mancall  is the author of seven books including The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England (Yale, 2019); Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic (Penn, 2018); and Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson – A Tale of Mutiny and Murder in the Arctic (Basic Books, 2009).  His next book, to be published on June 1, 2026, is Contested Continent: The  Struggle for North America, c. 1000-1680, which will be volume one of the Oxford History of the United States.

He is an elected fellow of the Society of American Historians and the Royal Historical Society and an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society and the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. He was the Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University in the 2019-2020 academic year;  delivered the Mellon Distinguished Lectures in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012; and was the Ritchie Distinguished Fellow at The Huntington Library in 2023-2024.

He lives in Los Angeles with his spouse, Professor Lisa Bitel.

Peter Mancall, Author of Contested Continent

Tuesday, October 20, 2026

7:00 PM

Concord Museum
53 Cambridge Tpke

Free for Members | $10 Non-Members

In his new book, Contested Continent, historian Peter Mancall offers a sweeping history of North America from 1000 to 1680, chronicling crucial developments to the eventual founding of the United States.