THE PIONEERS

David McCullough tells the story of America's westward expansion into the Northwest Territory — now Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and the Upper Midwest — through five men who led the settlement of Marietta on the Ohio River: Revolutionary War veterans Rufus Putnam and Manasseh Cutler, Cutler's son Ephraim, a carpenter-turned-architect, and a physician who became a pioneering American scientist.

Drawing on diaries and letters, McCullough traces how these settlers built a functioning society from wilderness while grappling with the era's defining moral questions, including the Northwest Ordinance's ban on slavery in the new territory.