Making a radical departure form traditional approaches to colonial American history, this book looks back at Indian-white relations from the perspective of the Indians themselves. In doing so, Salisbury reaches some startling new conclusions about a period of crucial—yet often overlooked—contact between two irreconcilably different cultures.

Drawing on a vast array of primary and secondary sources, Roger L. Nichols traces the changing relationships between Native peoples and whites in the United States and Canada from colonial times to the present. Dividing this history into five stages, beginning with Native supremacy over European settlers and concluding with Native peoples’ political, economic, and cultural resurgence, Nichols carefully compares and contrasts the effects of each stage on Native populations in the United States and Canada. This second edition includes new chapters on major transformations from 1945 to the present, focusing on social issues such as transracial adoption of Native children, the uses of national and international media to gain public awareness, and demands for increasing respect for tribal religious practices, burial sites, and historic and funerary remains.

Many know the name Uncas only from James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, but the historical Uncas flourished as an important leader of the Mohegan people in seventeenth-century Connecticut. In Uncas: First of the Mohegans, Michael Leroy Oberg integrates the life story of an important Native American sachem into the broader story of European settlement in America. The arrival of the English in Connecticut in the 1630s upset the established balance among the region's native groups and brought rapid economic and social change. Oberg argues that Uncas's methodical and sustained strategies for adapting to these changes made him the most influential Native American leader in colonial New England. Emerging from the damage wrought by epidemic disease and English violence, Uncas transformed the Mohegans from a small community along the banks of the Thames River in Connecticut into a regional power in southern New England. Uncas learned quickly how to negotiate between cultures in the conflicts that developed as natives and newcomers, Indians and English, maneuvered for access to and control of frontier resources. With English assistance, Uncas survived numerous assaults and plots hatched by his native rivals. Unique among Indian leaders in early America, Uncas maintained his power over large numbers of tributary and other native communities in the region, lived a long life, and died a peaceful death (without converting to Christianity) in his people's traditional homeland. Oberg finds that although the colonists considered Uncas "a friend to the English," he was first and foremost an assertive guardian of Mohegan interests.

The essays, which were originally published in The New England Quarterly: A Historical Review of New England Life and Letters, consider a wide range of areas in Native American-white relations: from Abenaki territory in northern Maine to Pequot lands in southern Connecticut; from profitable commerce to devastating warfare; from religious persuasion to labor exploitation; from cultural mixing to non-violent resistance; from literary representation to political argumentation. A comprehensive and insightful introduction by the editor places the richly diverse topics and perspectives within the broader context of New England ethnohistory. Most of the authors have added postscripts to their original essays commenting on recent scholarship and interpretations.

"The Embattled Northeast breaks with established wisdom concerning the dynamics of Indian-white relations. It shows that Euramericans' technological superiority did not undermine the Abenaki's self-confidence, but that trade pushed the tribes toward reaching an alliance among themselves as the first step in dealing with colonials. The study also tells how the Abenaki adapted to the post-contact world in order to secure their lives in religious terms, combining their own religious beliefs with compatible French Jesuit teachings"--Jacket.

Now that academic consensus has turned away from the dichotomy between the literate culture of the Puritans and the oral culture of Native Americans, Cohen (English, U. of Texas-Austin) looks at the methodological, disciplinary, legal, political, and aesthetic implications for studying communication during the early period of English colonies in North America. He looks at native audience, good noise from New England, forests of gestures, and multimedia combat and the Pequot War.

Nashaway became Lancaster, Wachusett became Princeton, and all of Nipmuck County became the county of Worcester. Town by town, New England grew—Watertown, Sudbury, Turkey Hills, Fitchburg, Westminster, Walpole—and with each new community the myth of America flourished. In People of the Wachusett the history of the New England town becomes the cultural history of America's first frontier. Integral to this history are the firsthand narratives of town founders and citizens, English, French, and Native American, whose accounts of trading and warring, relocating and putting down roots proved essential to the building of these communities. Town plans, local records, broadside ballads, vernacular house forms and furniture, festivals—all come into play in this innovative book, giving a rich picture of early Americans creating towns and crafting historical memory. Beginning with the Wachusett, in northern Worcester County, Massachusetts, David Jaffee traces the founding of towns through inland New England and Nova Scotia, from the mid-seventeenth century through the Revolutionary Era. His history of New England's settlement is one in which the replication of towns across the landscape is inextricable from the creation of a regional and national culture, with stories about colonization giving shape and meaning to New England life.

A fully revised and updated new edition of the classic history of western America The newly revised second edition of this concise, engaging, and unorthodox history of America’s West has been updated to incorporate new research, including recent scholarship on Native American lives and cultures. An ideal text for course work, it presents the West as both frontier and region, examining the clashing of different cultures and ethnic groups that occurred in the western territories from the first Columbian contacts between Native Americans and Europeans up to the end of the twentieth century.

A sweeping and overdue retelling of U.S. history that recognizes that Native Americans are essential to understanding the evolution of modern America The most enduring feature of U.S. history is the presence of Native Americans, yet most histories focus on Europeans and their descendants. This long practice of ignoring Indigenous history is changing, however, with a new generation of scholars insists that any full American history address the struggle, survival, and resurgence of American Indian nations. Indigenous history is essential to understanding the evolution of modern America. Ned Blackhawk interweaves five centuries of Native and non‑Native histories, from Spanish colonial exploration to the rise of Native American self-determination in the late twentieth century. In this transformative synthesis he shows that * European colonization in the 1600s was never a predetermined success; * Native nations helped shape England's crisis of empire; * the first shots of the American Revolution were prompted by Indian affairs in the interior; * California Indians targeted by federally funded militias were among the first casualties of the Civil War; * the Union victory forever recalibrated Native communities across the West; * twentieth-century reservation activists refashioned American law and policy. Blackhawk's retelling of U.S. history acknowledges the enduring power, agency, and survival of Indigenous peoples, yielding a truer account of the United States and revealing anew the varied meanings of America.

Pre-eighteenth century America was a uniquely pragmatic, utopian society—a new world in which the expectations of a new beginning brought by explorers, traders, and settlers often conflicted violently the Native Americans they encountered. In Era of Persuasion: American Thought and Culture 1521–1680, E. Brooks Holifield identifies the act of persuasion as the common ground on which these disparate groups stood. As he clearly documents and persuasively interprets an America that some readers may not recognize, Holifield includes compelling insights into the social expressions of Native Americans and Africans as well as Europeans. His view extends from the pueblos of New Mexico and the missions of France to the plantations of Virginia and the towns of New England. Era of Persuasion portrays an early American society populated by passionate visionaries with urgently persuasive purposes who lived by applied philosophy and inspired action, and will be appreciated by the curious reader and avid historian alike.