Natives and Newcomers: The Cultural Origins of North America / Edition 1

by James Axtell

Overview

In the past thirty years historians have come to realize that the shape and temper of early America was determined as much by its Indian natives as it was by its European colonizers. No one has done more to discover and recount this story than James Axtell, one of America's premier ethnohistorians. Natives and Newcomers is a collection of fifteen of his best and most influential essays, available for the first time in one volume. In accessible and often witty prose, Axtell describes the major encounters between Indians and Europeans—first contacts, communications, epidemics, trade and gift-giving, social and sexual mingling, work, cultural and religious conversions, military clashes—and probes their short- and long-term consequences for both cultures. The result is a book that shows how encounters between Indians and Europeans ultimately led to the birth of a distinctly American identity. Natives and Newcomers is an essential text for undergraduate and graduate courses in Colonial American history and Native American history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195137712
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	08/31/2000
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	9.22(w) x 6.22(h) x 0.78(d)

About the Author

College of William and Mary

Table of Contents

Illustrations listPrefaceProloguePart I. ContactsIntroduction1. Imagining the Other: First Encounters2. Babel of Tongues: Communciating with the IndiansPart II. ConsumptionIntroduction3. At the Water's Edge: Trading in the Sixteenth Century4. The First Consumer Revolution: The Seventeenth Century5. Making Do: Trade in the Eighteenth-Century SoutheastPart III. ConversionsIntroduction6. The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures7. Dr. Wheelock's Little Red School8. The White IndiansPart IV. ClashesIntroduction9. The Spanish Incursion10. The Rise and Fall of the Powhatan Empire11. The Moral Dilemmas of ScalpingPart V. ConsequencesIntroduction12. The Columbian Mosaic13. Native Reactions to the Invasion of America14. The Indian impact on English Colonial CultureNotesIndex