The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire: The Covenant Chain Confederation of Indian Tribes with English Colonies Review

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(More customer reviews)Francis Jennings, long associated with the Newbury Library American Indian collections has brought his vast knowledge to bear on the subject of the Iriquois as the fearsome 5 or 6 nations who independently cowed both their fellow tribes and the English and French colonists. He proves it wasn't so with so many documents of which we have never heard in our schoolbook history texts that I wonder how such material escaped notice previously. In the process he slays some American Sacred Cows such as Francis Parkman. One learns that the Indian frontier was no such thing and didn't exist but was a commonly inhabited piece of terrain, peopled by various tribes and the European invaders who traded with them. Relations were, for the most part, reasonably amicable, which accounts for the fact that during later wars the Eastern Indians frequently exhibited what we call civilized treatment of enemies and prisoners. (Of course there were the exceptions, usually well justified.) But in the beginning, the Dutch, Swedes, English and French, all found it necessary to deal with the various tribes quite diplomatically in order to survive, and use them in their wars of empire with one another. Furs in return for trade goods were king. The undoubted reality is such a vast contrast with the accepted picture of our frontier that this book, as well as Jennings others in this series, should be required reading to repair the damage done in our schools by claptrap such as Parkman and other revered historians who followed his lead, writing off the Indians as barabarians and the frontier as a clearly delineated line across which whites stepped only if they were willing to take their lives into their hands. Instead we find two cultures living amicably in common communities up until the first half of the 1700's when the balance was upset by driving out the Indians such as the Delewares and Shawnees so that they located in the Ohio country and became relatively independent. The Iriquois had a large hand in this and it was their undoing. Read the book. It is a complicated subject but well worth digesting. I recommend reading it in small doses and having an atlas nearby.

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The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Studies in North American Indian History) Review

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(More customer reviews)Anyone who has attended an academic history conference in the last five or so years already realizes the impact that this densely-written, but provocatively argued book by an historian of the American west has had on the study of American history. For both good and ill, White's central thesis -- that Indians and Europeans in the Great Lakes region created together and sustained an elaborate system of cultural and political contact that endured for centuries based not on mutual understandings, but mutual MISunderstandings, often deliberate ones -- has come to set the tone for the most recent studies of cultural encounter and creolization in the New World. Indeed, White's "middle ground" bids fair to assume the blanket hegemony exercised over the American historical imagination a decade or more back by the idea of "republicanism." And, not without cause: White's book is in many respects a stupendous achievement -- exhaustively researched, laser-subtle analyses, and ambitious in scope. What weakens the book is White's tendency to often assert the existence of a so-called cultural "middle ground" between Indians and others in advance of the evidence he presents. The "middle ground" is too often presented as a given, one that can act as the explanation, rather than as the hypothetical that it actually is, the actual subject that should be under investigation. This said, the influence of this book will be felt for years to come.

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This book seeks to step outside the simple stories of Indian/white relations--stories of conquest and assimilation and stories of cultural persistence. It is, instead, about a search for accommodation and common meaning. It tells how Europeans and Indians met, regarding each other as alien, as virtually nonhuman, and how between 1650 and 1815 they constructed a common, mutually comprehensible world in the region around the Great Lakes that the French called the "Pays d'en haut". Here the older worlds of the Algonquins and various Europeans overlapped, and their mixture created new systems of meaning and of exchange. Finally, the book tells of the breakdown of accommodation and common meanings and the recreation of the Indians as alien and exotic. The process of accommodation described in this book takes place in a middle ground, a place in between cultures and peoples, and in between empires and non-state villages. On the middle ground people try to persuade others who are different than themselvesby appealing to what they perceive to be the values and practices of those others. From the creative misunderstandings that result, there arise shared meanings and new practices.

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Natives and Newcomers: The Cultural Origins of North America Review

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(More customer reviews)This book deals with northeast North America, east of the Appalachians, in the period 1492-1783, i.e. from the first Columbus' voyage to the end of the Independence War. The main argument of the book is that cultural frontiers in early North america were "two-way"- interactive and dynamic. Thus, both sides influenced each other. The author attempted also to "write history from the other side of the frontier." (p.10) He is sympathetic to the Indian's point of view and tries to shed some light and understanding upon it.
He rejects the perception about the European moral superiority over the Indians and argues that the French and the English governments periodically fostered scalping of European and Indian enemies by offering bounties or other economic incentives. (p.269)
The only drawback of the book is the Axtell is repating himself, because this book is a compilation of papers and chapters from previous books, so he doesn't have a lot of new information in this book.

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In the past thirty years historians have come to realize that the shape and temper of early America was determined as much by its Indian natives as it was by its European colonizers. No one has done more to discover and recount this story than James Axtell, one of America's premier ethnohistorians. Natives and Newcomers is a collection of fifteen of his best and most influential essays, available for the first time in one volume. In accessible and often witty prose, Axtell describes the major encounters between Indians and Europeans--first contacts, communications, epidemics, trade and gift-giving, social and sexual mingling, work, cultural and religious conversions, military clashes--and probes their short- and long-term consequences for both cultures. The result is a book that shows how encounters between Indians and Europeans ultimately led to the birth of a distinctly American identity. Natives and Newcomers is an essential text for undergraduate and graduate courses in Colonial American history and Native American history.

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A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733-1816 (Studies in North American Indian History) Review

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(More customer reviews)Claudio Saunt has provided a scholarly exploration into the causes of the dramatic changes that took place within the Creek Confederacy during the latter portion of the 18th Century. Using primary sources, Saunt shows that it was the influence of the mestizos (children produced by marriages of Creek women with British and American traders) that introduced revolutionary concepts such as leadership through force and government by coercion, private property, reliance on plantation economy rather than hunting-trade for subsistence. No other mestizo accelerated the transformation than the brilliant leader Alexander McGillivray. Even though Saunt's work is scholarly, it is an easy read. It is certainly a must read for those who are interested in Creek History or an understanding of the Southeast during the latter half of the 18th Century and early 19th.

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Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835 (Indians of the Southeast) Review

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(More customer reviews)Perdue's work looks at gender roles in Cherokee society during the dramatic cultural upheaval of the 18th Century. It is a fascinating work which adds flesh to the historical skeletons that have centered on the Cherokee and European men's actions. One cannot truly understand the history and culture of a matrilineal people without a work of this type. This book is required reading for all scholars oof the Cherokee.

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Theda Perdue examines the roles and responsibilities of Cherokee women during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a time of intense cultural change. While building on the research of earlier historians, she develops a uniquely complex view of the effects of contact on Native gender relations, arguing that Cherokee conceptions of gender persisted long after contact. Maintaining traditional gender roles actually allowed Cherokee women and men to adapt to new circumstances and adopt new industries and practices.

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The Slave Ship: A Human History Review

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(More customer reviews)The slave ship gives a fascinating forte in the archives of slavery and the making of modern history. It was a vehicle, transporting captives whose labor was necessary for America's economic survival; it was a factory, where African men, women, and children were transformed into "cargo"; and it was an instrument of war, complete with fearsome weapons with the capability to destroy any who might challenge its gruesome mission. In Marcus Rediker's book it explores these historical uses of the slave ship by drawing on an astonishing array of archival material, revealing the voices of slaves, common sailors, pirates, captains, and traders in all their complex humanity. Rediker's talent as a writer and a historian is to bring this kind of disparate information into one solid, available and enthralling narrative.

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