Early American Indian Documents


Book Description




Gathering Together


Book Description

Weaving Indian and Euro-American histories together in this groundbreaking book, Sami Lakomäki places the Shawnee people, and Native peoples in general, firmly at the center of American history. The book covers nearly three centuries, from the years leading up to the Shawnees’ first European contacts to the post–Civil War era, and demonstrates vividly how the interactions between Natives and newcomers transformed the political realities and ideas of both groups. Examining Shawnee society and politics in new depth, and introducing not only charismatic warriors like Blue Jacket and Tecumseh but also other leaders and thinkers, Lakomäki explores the Shawnee people’s debates and strategies for coping with colonial invasion. The author refutes the deep-seated notion that only European colonists created new nations in America, showing that the Shawnees, too, were engaged in nation building. With a sharpened focus on the creativity and power of Native political thought, Lakomäki provides an array of insights into Indian as well as American history.




Native Southerners


Book Description

Long before the indigenous people of southeastern North America first encountered Europeans and Africans, they established communities with clear social and political hierarchies and rich cultural traditions. Award-winning historian Gregory D. Smithers brings this world to life in Native Southerners, a sweeping narrative of American Indian history in the Southeast from the time before European colonialism to the Trail of Tears and beyond. In the Native South, as in much of North America, storytelling is key to an understanding of origins and tradition—and the stories of the indigenous people of the Southeast are central to Native Southerners. Spanning territory reaching from modern-day Louisiana and Arkansas to the Atlantic coast, and from present-day Tennessee and Kentucky through Florida, this book gives voice to the lived history of such well-known polities as the Cherokees, Creeks, Seminoles, Chickasaws, and Choctaws, as well as smaller Native communities like the Nottoway, Occaneechi, Haliwa-Saponi, Catawba, Biloxi-Chitimacha, Natchez, Caddo, and many others. From the oral and cultural traditions of these Native peoples, as well as the written archives of European colonists and their Native counterparts, Smithers constructs a vibrant history of the societies, cultures, and peoples that made and remade the Native South in the centuries before the American Civil War. What emerges is a complex picture of how Native Southerners understood themselves and their world—a portrayal linking community and politics, warfare and kinship, migration, adaptation, and ecological stewardship—and how this worldview shaped and was shaped by their experience both before and after the arrival of Europeans. As nuanced in detail as it is sweeping in scope, the narrative Smithers constructs is a testament to the storytelling and the living history that have informed the identities of Native Southerners to our day.







Transatlantic Encounters


Book Description

Publisher description




Dutch and Indigenous Communities in Seventeenth-Century Northeastern North America


Book Description

This volume of essays by historians and archaeologists offers an introduction to the significant impact of Dutch traders and settlers on the early history of Northeastern North America, as well as their extensive and intensive relationships with its Indigenous peoples. Often associated with the Hudson River Valley, New Netherland actually extended westward into present day New Jersey and Delaware and eastward to Cape Cod. Further, New Netherland was not merely a clutch of Dutch trading posts: settlers accompanied the Dutch traders, and Dutch colonists founded towns and villages along Long Island Sound, the mid-Atlantic coast, and up the Connecticut, Hudson, and Delaware River valleys. Unfortunately, few nonspecialists are aware of this history, especially in what was once eastern and western New Netherland (southern New England and the Delaware River Valley, respectively), and the essays collected here help strengthen the case that the Dutch deserve a more prominent position in future history books, museum exhibits, and school curricula than they have previously enjoyed. The archaeological content includes descriptions of both recent excavations and earlier, unpublished archaeological investigations that provide new and exciting insights into Dutch involvement in regional histories, particularly within Long Island Sound and inland New England. Although there were some incidences of cultural conflict, the archaeological and documentary findings clearly show the mutually tolerant, interdependent nature of Dutch-Indigenous relationships through time. One of the essays, by a Mohawk community member, provides a thought-provoking Indigenous perspective on Dutch–Native American relationships that complements and supplements the considerations of his fellow writers. The new archaeological and ethnohistoric information in this book sheds light on the motives, strategies, and sociopolitical maneuvers of seventeenth-century Native leadership, and how Indigenous agency helped shape postcontact histories in the American Northeast.




Indigenous London


Book Description

Cover -- Half-title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Maps -- 1. The Unhidden City: Imagining Indigenous Londons -- Interlude One: A Devil's Looking Glass, circa 1676 -- 2. Dawnland Telescopes: Making Colonial Knowledge in Algonquian London 1580-1630 -- Interlude Two: A Debtor's Petition 1676 -- 3. Alive from America: Indigenous Diplomacies and Urban Disorder 1710-1765 -- Interlude Three: Atlantes 1761 -- 4. "Such Confusion As I Never Dreamt": Indigenous Reasonings in an Unreasonable City 1766-1785 -- Interlude Four: A Lost Museum 1793




The Oneida Indian Journey


Book Description

For the first time, the traumatic removal of the Oneida Indians from New York to Wisconsin is examined in a groundbreaking collection of essays, The Oneida Indian Journey from New York to Wisconsin, 1784-1860. To shed light on this vital period of Oneida history, editors Laurence Hauptman and L. Gordon McLester, III, present a unique collaboration between an American Indian nation and the academic community. Two professional historians, a geographer, anthropologist, archivist and attorney join in with eighteen voices from the Oneida community--local historians, folklorists, genealogists, linguists, and tribal elders--discuss tribal dispossession and community; Oneida community perspectives of Oneida history; and the means of studying Oneida history. Contributors include: Debra Anderson, Eileen Antone, Jim Antone, Abrahms Archiquette, Oscar Archiquette, Jack Campisi, Richard Chrisjohn, Amelia Cornelius, Judy Cornelius, Katie Cornelius, Melissa Cornelius, Jonas Elm, James Folts, Reginald Horsman, Elizabeth Huff, Francis Jennings, Arlinda Locklear, Jo Margaret Mano, Loretta Metoxen, Liz Obomsawin, Jessie Peters, Sarah Summers, and Rachel Swamp




American Foreign Relations Since 1600


Book Description

A thorough update of the standard bibliography of American foreign relations literature from colonial times to the present day. America has formed alliances, exchanged diplomats, traded goods and services, and fought wars with nations on every continent but Antarctica. And people have written books, articles, reports, and papers by the thousands on these subjects. In American Foreign Relations since 1600, the 2002 president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, Robert Beisner, has worked with members of SHAFR to compile the most exhaustive survey of writing on American foreign relations ever published. Covering 400 years of American history, his team of editors--all top experts in the field--have referenced and annotated nearly 20,000 published and nonpublished works. It's all here, from the Mayflower Compact to the My Lai massacre, from the War of 1812 to the war on terrorism, from the pre-Revolutionary era to the post-Cold War world. - Nearly 20,000 fully annotated bibliographical entries on topics such as the Mexican Revolution, pan-Americanism, wartime diplomacy, the German threat, and more - A preface clearly outlining the updated features of the book - Three analytical indexes to guide users to entry information, contributors, and significant individuals - Biographical studies on individuals such as John Barrett, William Jennings Bryan, and Theodore Roosevelt




Separate Paths


Book Description

Separate Paths: Lenapes and Colonists in West New Jersey is the first cross-cultural study of European colonization in the region south of the Falls of the Delaware River (now Trenton). Lenape men and women welcomed their allies, the Swedes and Finns, to escape more rigid English regimes on the west bank of the Delaware, offering land to establish farms, share resources, and trade. In the 1670s, Quaker men and women challenged this model with strategies to acquire all Lenape territory for their own use and to sell as real estate to new immigrants. Though the Lenapes remained sovereign and “old settlers” retained their Swedish Lutheran religion and ethnic autonomy, the West Jersey proprietors had considerable success in excluding Lenapes from their land. The Friends believed God favored their endeavor with epidemics of smallpox and other European diseases that destroyed Lenape families and communities. Affluent Quakers also introduced enslavement of imported Africans and Natives—and the violence that sustained it—to a colony they had promoted with the liberal West New Jersey Concessions of 1676-77. Thus, they defied their prior experience of religious persecution and their principles of peaceful resolution of conflict, equality of everyone before God, and the golden rule to treat others as you wish to be treated. Despite mutual commitment to peace by Lenapes, old settlers, and Friends, Quaker colonization had similar results to military conquests of Natives by English in Virginia and New England, and Dutch in the Hudson Valley and northern New Jersey. Still, in alliance with old settlers, Lenape communities survived in areas outside the focus of English colonization, in the Pine Barrens, upper reaches of streams, and Atlantic shore.