New Worlds of Violence: Cultures and Conquests in the Early American Southeast
From the early 1500s to the mid-1700s, the American Southeast was the scene of continuoustumult as European powers vied for dominance in the region while waging  war on Native American communities. Yet even before Hernando de Soto  landed his expeditionaryforce on the Gulf shores of Florida, Native Americans had created their  own “cultures of violence”: sets of ideas about when it was appropriate  to use violence and what sorts of violence were appropriate to a given  situation.InNew Worlds of Violence, Matthew Jennings offers a persuasive  new framework for understanding the European–Native American contact  period and the conflicts among indigenous peoples that preceded it. This  pioneering approach posits that every group present in the Southeast  had its own ideas about the use of violence and that these ideas changed  over time as they collided with one another. The book starts with the  Mississippian era and continues through the successive Spanish and  English invasions of the Native South. Jennings argues that the English  conquered the Southeast because they were able to force everyone else to  adapt to their culture of violence, which, of course, changed over time  as well. By 1740, a peculiarly Anglo-American culture of violence was  in place that would profoundly influence the expansion of England’s  colonies and the eventual southern United States. While Native and  African violence were present in this world, they moved in circles  defined by the English.New Worlds of Violenceconcludes by pointing out that  long-lasting violence bears long-lasting consequences. An important  contribution to the growing body of work on the early Southeast, this  book will significantly broaden readers’ understanding of America’s  violent past.Matthew Jennings is an assistant professor of history at Macon State  College in Macon, Georgia. He is the author of “Violence in a Shattered  World” inMapping the Shatter Zone: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, edited by Robbie Ethridge and Sheri Shuck-Hall. His work has also appeared inThe Uniting States, The South Carolina Encyclopedia, A Multicultural History of the United States,andThe Encyclopedia of Native American History.