The Indians’ New World

The Indians’ New World PDF

Author: James H. Merrell

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2012-12-01

Total Pages: 424

ISBN-13: 0807838691

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This eloquent, pathbreaking account follows the Catawbas from their first contact with Europeans in the sixteenth century until they carved out a place in the American republic three centuries later. It is a story of Native agency, creativity, resilience, and endurance. Upon its original publication in 1989, James Merrell's definitive history of Catawbas and their neighbors in the southern piedmont helped signal a new direction in the study of Native Americans, serving as a model for their reintegration into American history. In an introduction written for this twentieth anniversary edition, Merrell recalls the book's origins and considers its place in the field of early American history in general and Native American history in particular, both at the time it was first published and two decades later.

The Indians' New World

The Indians' New World PDF

Author: James H Merrell

Publisher:

Published: 2009-06

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780807871362

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This book is an eloquent account of the native peoples of the Carolina piedmont who became known as the Catawba Nation. James Merrell brings the Catawbas more fully into American history by tracing how they underwent that most fundamental of American experiences: adapting to a new world. Arguing that European colonists and African slaves created a society that was as alien--as new--to Indians as American itself was to the newcomers, Merrell follows the Catawbas from their first contact with Europeans in the sixteenth century until their accommodation to a changing America was largely complete some three centuries later. Heretofore, scholarship has mostly ignored that adaptation of native Americans to the new American cultural and physical milieu and has instead dwelt on warfare, expropriation, suppression, and annihilation. Attempts to incorporate native peoples into the mainstream of American history have usually taken the form of lists of Indian "contributions" to American culture or, conversely, a solemn paean to Indian respect for nature. This chronicle of the Catawbas takes note of all of the above. But its center is the Catwabas' encounter with the colonists and their entourage: unfamiliar diseases, crown diplomats, trade goods, and Christian missionaries. Each of those required creative responses, which transformed Catawba life rather than destroyed it. Natives constructed new societies in the aftermath of epidemics, assimilated both traders and their enticing goods into established cultural forms, came to terms with settlers, and fended off missionaries. Through it all, the Catawbas endured--as soldiers in the Revolution, as landlords and landladies on their reservation, as potters and farmers--retaining their Indian identity, remaining in their piedmont home, and becoming a part of the American mosaic. Absorbing archeology, anthropology, and folklore into his vast historical research, Merrell provides what will be the definitive history of the Catawbas. The book also signals a new direction for the study of native Americans and will serve as a model for their reintegration into American history.

Indian Givers

Indian Givers PDF

Author: Jack Weatherford

Publisher: Crown

Published: 2010-08-03

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 030771716X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

An utterly compelling story of how the cultural, social, and political practices of Native Americans transformed the way life is lived throughout the world, with a new introduction by the author “As entertaining as it is thoughtful . . . Few contemporary writers have Weatherford’s talent for making the deep sweep of history seem vital and immediate.”—The Washington Post After 500 years, the world’s huge debt to the wisdom of the Native Americans has finally been explored in all its vivid drama by anthropologist Jack Weatherford. He traces the crucial contributions made by the Native Americans to our federal system of government, our democratic institutions, modern medicine, agriculture, architecture, and ecology, and in this astonishing, ground-breaking book takes a giant step toward recovering a true American history.

American Indians and World War II

American Indians and World War II PDF

Author:

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 1999-09-01

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780806131849

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Details the impact of World War II on American Indian life, arguing that the war had a more profound and lasting effect on the course of Indian affairs in the twentieth century than any other single event or period, and assessing its consequences for American Indians and whites.

The Indian World of George Washington

The Indian World of George Washington PDF

Author: Colin Gordon Calloway

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 648

ISBN-13: 0190652160

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

"An authoritative, sweeping, and fresh new biography of the nation's first president, Colin G. Calloway's book reveals fully the dimensions and depths of George Washington's relations with the First Americans."--Provided by publisher.

Firsting and Lasting

Firsting and Lasting PDF

Author: Jean M. Obrien

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2010-05-10

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 1452915253

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Across nineteenth-century New England, antiquarians and community leaders wrote hundreds of local histories about the founding and growth of their cities and towns. Ranging from pamphlets to multivolume treatments, these narratives shared a preoccupation with establishing the region as the cradle of an Anglo-Saxon nation and the center of a modern American culture. They also insisted, often in mournful tones, that New England’s original inhabitants, the Indians, had become extinct, even though many Indians still lived in the very towns being chronicled. InFirsting and Lasting, Jean M. O’Brien argues that local histories became a primary means by which European Americans asserted their own modernity while denying it to Indian peoples. Erasing and then memorializing Indian peoples also served a more pragmatic colonial goal: refuting Indian claims to land and rights. Drawing on more than six hundred local histories from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island written between 1820 and 1880, as well as censuses, monuments, and accounts of historical pageants and commemorations, O’Brien explores how these narratives inculcated the myth of Indian extinction, a myth that has stubbornly remained in the American consciousness. In order to convince themselves that the Indians had vanished despite their continued presence, O’Brien finds that local historians and their readers embraced notions of racial purity rooted in the century’s scientific racism and saw living Indians as “mixed” and therefore no longer truly Indian. Adaptation to modern life on the part of Indian peoples was used as further evidence of their demise. Indians did not—and have not—accepted this effacement, and O’Brien details how Indians have resisted their erasure through narratives of their own. These debates and the rich and surprising history uncovered in O’Brien’s work continue to have a profound influence on discourses about race and indigenous rights.

Before the Indians

Before the Indians PDF

Author: Björn Kurtén

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9780231065832

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

We do not know for sure when the first men appeared in America. What we do know is that vigorous people called Paleoindians flourished here at the end of the Ice Age, in the last millennia before the great transition of 10,000 years ago when the great ice sheets that had covered the northern part of the continent were finally vanishing. The Paleoindians are regarded as the ancestors of today's Indians.

An Infinity of Nations

An Infinity of Nations PDF

Author: Michael Witgen

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2011-11-29

Total Pages: 458

ISBN-13: 0812205170

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

An Infinity of Nations explores the formation and development of a Native New World in North America. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, indigenous peoples controlled the vast majority of the continent while European colonies of the Atlantic World were largely confined to the eastern seaboard. To be sure, Native North America experienced far-reaching and radical change following contact with the peoples, things, and ideas that flowed inland following the creation of European colonies on North American soil. Most of the continent's indigenous peoples, however, were not conquered, assimilated, or even socially incorporated into the settlements and political regimes of this Atlantic New World. Instead, Native peoples forged a New World of their own. This history, the evolution of a distinctly Native New World, is a foundational story that remains largely untold in histories of early America. Through imaginative use of both Native language and European documents, historian Michael Witgen recreates the world of the indigenous peoples who ruled the western interior of North America. The Anishinaabe and Dakota peoples of the Great Lakes and Northern Great Plains dominated the politics and political economy of these interconnected regions, which were pivotal to the fur trade and the emergent world economy. Moving between cycles of alliance and competition, and between peace and violence, the Anishinaabeg and Dakota carved out a place for Native peoples in modern North America, ensuring not only that they would survive as independent and distinct Native peoples but also that they would be a part of the new community of nations who made the New World.

Facing East from Indian Country

Facing East from Indian Country PDF

Author: Daniel K. Richter

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-06-01

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0674042727

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

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.

The Earth Is Weeping

The Earth Is Weeping PDF

Author: Peter Cozzens

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2016-10-25

Total Pages: 601

ISBN-13: 0307958051

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Bringing together Custer, Sherman, Grant, and other fascinating military and political figures, as well as great native leaders such as Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and Geronimo, this “sweeping work of narrative history” (San Francisco Chronicle) is the fullest account to date of how the West was won—and lost. After the Civil War the Indian Wars would last more than three decades, permanently altering the physical and political landscape of America. Peter Cozzens gives us both sides in comprehensive and singularly intimate detail. He illuminates the intertribal strife over whether to fight or make peace; explores the dreary, squalid lives of frontier soldiers and the imperatives of the Indian warrior culture; and describes the ethical quandaries faced by generals who often sympathized with their native enemies. In dramatically relating bloody and tragic events as varied as Wounded Knee, the Nez Perce War, the Sierra Madre campaign, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, we encounter a pageant of fascinating characters, including Custer, Sherman, Grant, and a host of officers, soldiers, and Indian agents, as well as great native leaders such as Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Geronimo, and Red Cloud and the warriors they led. The Earth Is Weeping is a sweeping, definitive history of the battles and negotiations that destroyed the Indian way of life even as they paved the way for the emergence of the United States we know today.