The settling of the Northwest Territory by dauntless pioneers who overcame incredible hardships to build a community based on ideals The Pioneers is a history of the settlement of the Northwest Territory in the years after the American Revolution. In The Pioneers, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David McCullough “rediscovers an important and dramatic chapter in the American story — the settling of the Northwest Territory by dauntless pioneers who overcame incredible hardships to build a community based on ideals that would come to define the US,” said a review in goodreads.com. McCullough’s other acclaimed books include The Johnstown Flood, The Great Bridge, Brave Companions, 1776, The Greater Journey, and The Wright Brothers. “Like those 19th-century historians, The Pioneers presents American history as a grand civics lesson, in which the accomplishments of our principled forebears serve as inspirations. Rather than wrestle with the moral complexities of western settlement, McCullough simplifies that civics lesson into a tale of inexorable triumph,” critic Andrew C. Isenberg said in a review for The Washington Post.