Best thing about this book is how funny it is. Farquhar wrote with a certain kind of early modernist author appeal that saw him and his subjects as not infallible but in conversations with each other across history. This inspired tone of wry comments peppered throughout the notes and parentheticals. Plenty of info on native Americans and settler life are left out in the desire for a compact and Amerocentric perspective, but he does seem aware of this significant pitfall in the history he had access to in the 1960s.