The brief preface establishes Calloway’s purpose, explains his approach, and identifies new material included in the book’s second edition. New Worlds for All “considers how conquest and colonialism changed colonizers and colonized people alike” (xiii). To highlight specific changes, Calloway organizes the book’s nine chapters by topic rather than chronology. He also incorporates relevant scholarship published since New Worlds for All first appeared in 1997.

The introductory chapter describes the “Indian imprint on American society” (3). It opens with anecdotes drawn from several meetings between tribal delegates and prominent U.S. officials during the American Revolution. In each instance, U.S. officials express friendship and solidarity by asserting that Indigenous Americans and citizens of the new United States comprise one people. Calloway explores the idea that prolonged contact between European settlers and Indigenous Americans had produced something new. Indigenous societies, of course, “had changed beyond recognition” (6). Even the “new” American society, however, which differed in so many ways from European societies, had developed its distinctiveness through myriad exchanges with Indigenous Americans.

Chapter 1 explains how European settlers transformed North America’s physical environment. Europeans drew maps and renamed places that were new to them but familiar to Indigenous Americans. Europeans introduced new animals and crops.