In the beginning, North America was Indian country. But only in the beginning. After the opening act of the great national drama, Native Americans yielded to the westward rush of European settlers. Or so the story usually goes. Yet, for three centuries after Columbus, Native people controlled most of eastern North America and profoundly shaped its destiny. In Facing East from Indian Country, Daniel K. Richter keeps Native people center-stage throughout the story of the origins of the United States. Viewed from Indian country, the sixteenth century was an era in which Native people discovered Europeans and struggled to make sense of a new world. Well into the seventeenth century, the most profound challenges to Indian life came less from the arrival of a relative handful of European colonists than from the biological, economic, and environmental forces the newcomers unleashed. Drawing upon their own traditions, Indian communities reinvented themselves and carved out a place in a world dominated by transatlantic European empires. In 1776, however, when some of Britain's colonists rebelled against that imperial world, they overturned the system that had made Euro-American and Native coexistence possible. Eastern North America only ceased to be an Indian country because the revolutionaries denied the continent's first peoples a place in the nation they were creating. In rediscovering early America as Indian country, Richter employs the historian's craft to challenge cherished assumptions about times and places we thought we knew well, revealing Native American experiences at the core of the nation's birth and identity.
Discusses the myth of European control over the Native Americans in the sixteenth century, and claims that Native Americans controlled the majority of eastern North America well after Columbus' arrival, having only to adjust to their ...
Telling each of these stories from the European and then the Native American perspective, Richter elucidates an alternative history of America from Columbus to just after the Revolution.
Richter examines a wide range of primary documents to survey the responses of the peoples of the Iroquois League--the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas, and Tuscaroras--to the challenges of the European colonialization of North ...
Exploring a vast range of original sources, Before the Revolution spans more than seven centuries and ranges across North America, Europe, and Africa.
syth and his brother, the ship ladened with their furs fell “into the hands of the enemy” at Mackinac, and they never recovered them.39 In the weeks preceding Lalime's death, Forsyth had been in negotiations with William Clark and ...
Henry Spelman, “Relation of Virginea,” in Edward Arber and A. G. Bradley, eds., Travels and Works of Captain John Smith, President of Virginia and Admiral ofNew England, 1580–1631, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1910), 1: cv, cxii.
How did Indians actually lose their land? Stuart Banner argues that neither simple coercion nor simple consent reflects the complicated legal history of land transfers.
Thomas W. Kavanagh, Comanche Political History: An Ethnohistorical Perspective, 1706–1875 (Lincoln, Neb., 1996), 478–79. 69. Métairie, “Procès-verbal,” 2: 181–85. 70. Bienville to Pontchartrain, Sept. 6,1704, MPAFD, 3: 22–23. 71.
In Canada , McDonald's uses 100 percent Canadian beef . In this country , we use 100 percent United States beef . ” New York Times , 10 Jan. 1989 , A22 . 3. Mark J. Plotkin , Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice : An Ethnobotanist Searches ...
After winning an eight year legal battle, here is the controversial book that powerfully sheds new light on the plight of Native Americans. Matthiessen's urgent accounts and absorbing journalistic details...