| View Larger Image | The Indians' New World: Catawbas and their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal | Paperbackby James H. Merrell (Author)
| 10 New starting at: | $18.71 |
| | 28 Used starting at: | $2.71 |
| | Price: | $19.38 | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | W.W. Norton & Co. | | Page Count: | 400 Pages | | Publication Date: | January 17, 1991 | | Sales Rank: | 734,959th |
|
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 5.0 based on 1 review)
|
Informative and captivating by Thomas Veil (CA, USA)  5 Stars
February 26, 2005
James Merrell's The Indians' New World, winner of the 1990 Bancroft Prize, is one of those rare books that can satisfy both the interest of historians and the general public. It is written with detail and clarity, telling a story that is fascinating and tragic.
Merrell looks in depth at the Catawba tribe in colonial and post-independence South Carolina. His work sits broadly within the new stream of books about Native Americans - emphasizing both the injuries they suffered and their numerous adaptations to changed conditions after the arrival of the Europeans. His account does a fine job of both recognizing the choices made by the Catawbas and emphasizing the magnitude of the many calamities they suffered.
The reader gets a very clear sense of just how violent the world of the Catawbas was - one major challenge they faced was raids by the Iroquois. Merrell deals subtly with their decision to ally with the colonists - showing both the benefits and costs of this choice. A poignant final chapter and epilogue charts what befell them after independence - the Catawbas retained their reservation until 1840, making them something of an exception.
When thinking about the Native American experience, most Americans think primarily of the tribes of the west. Merrell's book does much to show us the experiences of Indians in the east of the country. As a meticulously researched, well written account, it has a lot to recommend it. Both experts and newcomers to Native American history will deeply enjoy this book.
| |
SIMILAR PRODUCTS |
| The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Studies in North American Indian History)
by Richard White (Author)
This book seeks to step outside the simple stories of Indian/white relations--stories of conquest and assimilation and stories of cultural persistence. It is, instead, about a search for accommodation and common meaning. It tells how Europeans and Indians met, regarding each other as alien, as virtually nonhuman, and how between 1650 and 1815 they constructed a common, mutually comprehensible world in the region around the Great Lakes that the French called the "Pays d'en haut". Here the older...
| 
| American Slavery, American Freedom
by Edmund S. Morgan (Author)
"If it is possible to understand the American paradox, the marriage of slavery and freedom, Virginia is surely the place to begin," writes Edmund S. Morgan in American Slavery, American Freedom, a study of the tragic contradiction at the core of America. Morgan finds the key to this central paradox in the people and politics of the state that was both the birthplace of the revolution and the largest slaveholding state in the country. With a new introduction. Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize...
| 
| Catawba Indian Nation: Treasures in History
by Thomas J. Blumer (Author), E. Fred Sanders (Afterword), Robert P. Smith (Afterword)
I am one of the lingering members of an almost extinguished race. Our graves will soon be our only habitations...I pursued the deer for my subsistence, the deer are disappearing, and I must starve. God ordained me for the forest, and my ambition is the shade, but the strength of my arm decays, and my feet fail in the chase. In my youth I bled in battle, that you might be independent, let not my heart in my old age, bleed, for the want of your commiseration. Peter Harris, a plea...
| 
| Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America
by Ira Berlin (Author)
Many Thousands Gone traces the evolution of black society from the first arrivals in the early seventeenth century through the American Revolution. Laboring as field hands on tobacco and rice plantations, as skilled artisans in port cities, or as soldiers along the frontier, generation after generation of black slaves struggled to create a world of their own in circumstances not of their own making. In a panoramic view that stretches from the North to the Chesapeake Bay and Carolina low...
| 
| The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Institute of Early American History & Culture)
by Daniel K. Richter (Author)
Richter examines a wide range of primary documents to survey the responses of the peoples of the Iroquois League—the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas, and Tuscaroras—to the challenges of the European colonialization of North America. He demonstrates that by the early eighteenth century a series of creative adaptations in politics and diplomacy allowed the peoples of the Longhouse to preserve their cultural autonomy in a land now dominated by foreign powers.
|
|
|
