Ninigret (c. 1600–1676) was a sachem of the Niantic and Narragansett Indians of what is now Rhode Island from the mid-1630s through the mid-1670s. For Ninigret and his contemporaries, Indian Country and New England were multipolar political worlds shaped by ever-shifting intertribal rivalries. In the first biography of Ninigret, Julie A. Fisher and David J. Silverman assert that he was the most influential Indian leader of his era in southern New England. As such, he was a key to the balance of power in both Indian-colonial and intertribal relations.Ninigret was at the center of almost every major development involving southern New England Indians between the Pequot War of 1636–37 and King Philip's War of 1675–76. He led the Narragansetts' campaign to become the region's major power, including a decades-long war against the Mohegans led by Uncas, Ninigret's archrival. To offset growing English power, Ninigret formed long-distance alliances with the powerful Mohawks of the Iroquois League and the Pocumtucks of the Connecticut River Valley. Over the course of Ninigret's life, English officials repeatedly charged him with plotting to organize a coalition of tribes and even the Dutch to roll back English settlement. Ironically, though, he refused to take up arms against the English in King Philip’s War. Ninigret died at the end of the war, having guided his people through one of the most tumultuous chapters of the colonial era.

Indians, too, could play the land game for both personal and political benefit According to his kin, John Wompas was “no sachem,” although he claimed that status to achieve his economic and political ends. He drew on the legal and political practices of both Indians and the English—even visiting and securing the support of King Charles II—to legitimize the land sales that funded his extravagant spending. But he also used the knowledge acquired in his English education to defend the land and rights of his fellow Nipmucs. Jenny Hale Pulsipher’s biography offers a window on seventeenth-century New England and the Atlantic world from the unusual perspective of an American Indian who, even though he may not have been what he claimed, was certainly out of the ordinary. Drawing on documentary and anthropological sources as well as consultations with Native people, Pulsipher shows how Wompas turned the opportunities and hardships of economic, cultural, religious, and political forces in the emerging English empire to the benefit of himself and his kin.

Employing innovative research and unique interpretations, these essays provide a fresh perspective on Native American history by focusing on how Indians lived and helped shape each of the United States. Native America: A State-by-State Historical Encyclopedia comprises 50 chapters offering interpretations of Native American history through the lens of the states in which Indians lived or helped shape. This organizing structure and thematic focus allows readers access to information on specific Indians and the regions they lived in while also providing a collective overview of Native American relationships with the United States as a whole. These three volumes synthesize scholarship on the Native American past to provide both an academic and indigenous perspective on the subject, covering all states and the native peoples who lived in them or were instrumental to their development. Each state is featured in its own chapter, authored by a specialist on the region and its indigenous peoples. Each essay has these main sections: Chronology, Historical Overview, Notable Indians, Cultural Contributions, and Bibliography. The chapters are interspersed with photographs and illustrations that add visual clarity to the written content, put a human face on the individuals described, and depict the peoples and environment with which they interacted.

Hiding in Plain Sight: Women Warriors throughout Time and Space takes the many, long-standing dimensions of military history, including the various modalities of warfare across cultures and periods, and integrates them with the more recent and very substantial contributions of social history, women’s history, black history, feminist theory, LGBTQ community, and other perspectives. By providing an extensive annotated bibliography of the new findings, the work provides the reader with an exciting compilation of new knowledge placed within a longstanding military historical framework, one which provides a broader study and understanding of warfare into which to put the very recent, disparate findings culled from many disciplines. The book reaffirms that women have long been deeply embedded in the practice of warfare, not simply as victims or minor curiosities, but as important actors—tactically, strategically, in combat, and directing warfare from afar—just as their male counterparts. The concomitant amalgam also shows that certain types and patterns of warfare such as the defense of castles and fortresses, commanding a ship or a fleet, revolutionary warfare, and today’s drone and cyber-forms of warfare have been more conducive to female activity than other forms of warfare, even as women are also present in a wider variety of other broader temporal and geographical dimensions of the history of warfare. Hiding in Plain Sight is the only extensive annotated bibliography currently available which provides such a holistic overview of recent scholarship by grounding that scholarship in the existing military canon and history.

A powerful study of King Philip's War and its enduring effects on histories, memories, and places in Native New England from 1675 to the present

Was the relationship between English settlers and Native Americans in the New World destined to turn tragic? This book investigates how the newcomers interacted with Algonquian groups in the Chesapeake Bay area and New England, describing the role that original Americans occupied in England's empire during the critical first century of contact. Michael Leroy Oberg considers the history of Anglo-Indian relations in transatlantic context while viewing the frontier as a zone where neither party had the upper hand. He tells how the English pursued three sets of policies in America—securing profit for their sponsors, making lands safe from both European and native enemies, and "civilizing" the Indians—and explains why the British settlers found it impossible to achieve all of these goals. Oberg places the history of Anglo-Indian relations in the early Chesapeake and New England in a broad transatlantic context while drawing parallels with subsequent efforts by England as well as its imperial rivals—the French, Dutch, and Spanish—to plant colonies in America. Dominion and Civility promises to broaden our understanding of the exchange between Europeans and Indians and makes an important contribution to the emerging history of the English Atlantic world.

New England Indians created the multitribal Brothertown and Stockbridge communities during the eighteenth century with the intent of using Christianity and civilized reforms to cope with white expansion. In Red Brethren, David J. Silverman considers the stories of these communities and argues that Indians in early America were racial thinkers in their own right and that indigenous people rallied together as Indians not only in the context of violent resistance but also in campaigns to adjust peacefully to white dominion. All too often, the Indians discovered that their many concessions to white demands earned them no relief. In the era of the American Revolution, the pressure of white settlements forced the Brothertowns and Stockbridges from New England to Oneida country in upstate New York. During the early nineteenth century, whites forced these Indians from Oneida country, too, until they finally wound up in Wisconsin. Tired of moving, in the 1830s and 1840s, the Brothertowns and Stockbridges became some of the first Indians to accept U.S. citizenship, which they called "becoming white," in the hope that this status would enable them to remain as Indians in Wisconsin. Even then, whites would not leave them alone. Red Brethren traces the evolution of Indian ideas about race under this relentless pressure. In the early seventeenth century, indigenous people did not conceive of themselves as Indian. They sharpened their sense of Indian identity as they realized that Christianity would not bridge their many differences with whites, and as they fought to keep blacks out of their communities. The stories of Brothertown and Stockbridge shed light on the dynamism of Indians' own racial history and the place of Indians in the racial history of early America.

Ahead of the 400th anniversary of the first Thanksgiving, a new look at the Plymouth colony's founding events, told for the first time with Wampanoag people at the heart of the story. In March 1621, when Plymouth's survival was hanging in the balance, the Wampanoag sachem (or chief), Ousamequin (Massasoit), and Plymouth's governor, John Carver, declared their people's friendship for each other and a commitment to mutual defense. Later that autumn, the English gathered their first successful harvest and lifted the specter of starvation. Ousamequin and 90 of his men then visited Plymouth for the “First Thanksgiving.” The treaty remained operative until King Philip's War in 1675, when 50 years of uneasy peace between the two parties would come to an end. 400 years after that famous meal, historian David J. Silverman sheds profound new light on the events that led to the creation, and bloody dissolution, of this alliance. Focusing on the Wampanoag Indians, Silverman deepens the narrative to consider tensions that developed well before 1620 and lasted long after the devastating war-tracing the Wampanoags' ongoing struggle for self-determination up to this very day. This unsettling history reveals why some modern Native people hold a Day of Mourning on Thanksgiving, a holiday which celebrates a myth of colonialism and white proprietorship of the United States. This Land is Their Land shows that it is time to rethink how we, as a pluralistic nation, tell the history of Thanksgiving.