Indians of Colonial America

The encounter of natives and colonists in New England is a rich source of folklore and scholarship. The story, which usually ends with the defeat of Metacom (King Philip) in 1676, tells of how the natives were overwhelmed by the colonists. That picture, though rich and deeply tragic, is misleading. Disease, economic and ecological intrusion, and political and military pressures did alter native life. Some groups were largely destroyed or driven out by the English. But many others persisted in the region, as villages or as networks of families and individuals on the margins of colonial society. Their history offers a new and enlightening view of eighteenth-century New England. Behind the Frontier tells the story of the Indians in Massachusetts as English settlements moved past them between 1675 and 1775, from King Philip's War to the Battle of Bunker Hill. Daniel R. Mandell explores how local needs and regional conditions shaped an Indian ethnic group that transcended race, tribe, village, and clan, with a culture that incorporated new ways while maintaining a core of "Indian" customs. He examines the development of Native American communities in eastern Massachusetts, many of which survive today, and observes emerging patterns of adaptation and resistance that were played out in different settings as the American nation grew westward in the nineteenth century.

Drawing on the latest anthropological studies of colonial encounters, Frederic Gleach offers a more balanced and complete accounting of the early years of the Jamestown colony than has been seen before. When English colonists established their first permanent settlement at Jamestown in 1607, they confronted a powerful and growing native chiefdom consisting of over thirty tribes under one paramount chief, Powhatan. For the next half-century, a portion of the Middle Atlantic coastal plain became a charged and often violent meeting ground between two very different worlds.

Gleach argues that the history of Jamestown is essentially the story of how two cultures with conflicting world-views attempted to civilize and incorporate each other. He examines historical events from both native and colonial perspectives, resulting in original and fuller interpretations of seventeenth-century Virginia history.

In the relations between colonial European traders and the Indians of the southern backcountry, trade was a powerful manipulative tool used by both sides in their attempts to control each other. This anthropological and sociological study examines how European traders sought out native women as cultural instructors, translators, and sexual companions. The network of native women, fur traders, and colonial diplomats functioned as an invisible social, political, and economic web throughout the backcountry. Although this web was an integral part of the colonial struggle for the region, it is often overlooked or ignored in conventional histories.

The relationship between American Indians and European colonialists has come under increasing scrutiny as the myth of America as virgin land has been shattered. Steele continues this reassessment and argues that recent research in ethnohistory, sociology of contact and military history invites a complete overhaul of North American military history.

This book brings together the best-known works of the 19th-century Indian writer William Apess, including the first extended autobiography by a Native American. The text is drawn from ON OUR OWN GROUND, which was named a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book. This new edition of Apess's classic texts is designed for classroom use.

For more than a century and a half, from 1607 to 1763, Britain and France struggled to master the eastern half of North America. They fought five blood-soaked wars and continuously provoked various Indian tribes to raise arms against each other's subjects for the mastery of the land. The last French and Indian War, from 1754 to 1760, would dwarf all previous conflicts in the number of troops, expense, geographical expanse, and total casualties. Placing the French and Indian War in a broad historical context, this study examines the struggle for North America during the two preceding centuries and includes not only the conflict between France and Britain, but also the parts played by various Indian tribes and the other European powers.

This important new collection brings together ten of Alden Vaughan's essays about race relations in the British colonies. Focusing on the variable role of cultural and racial perceptions on colonial policies for Indians and African Americans, the essays include explorations of the origins of slavery and racism in Virginia, the causes of the Puritans' war against the Pequots, and the contest between natives and colonists to win the other's allegiance by persuasion or captivity. Less controversial but equally important to understanding the racial dynamics of early America are essays on early English paradigmatic views of Native Americans, the changing Anglo-American perceptions of Indian color and character, and frontier violence in pre-Revolutionary Pennsylvania. Published here for the first time are an extensive expose of slaveholder ideology in seventeenth-century Barbados, the second half of an essay on Puritan judicial policies for Indians, a general introduction, and headnotes to each essay. All previously published pieces have been revised to reflect recent scholarship or to address recent debates. Challenging standard interpretations while probing previously-ignored aspects of early American race relations, this convenient and provocative collection by one our most incisive commentators will be required reading for all scholars and students of early American history.