An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North America (Early American Studies)
Selected byChoicemagazine as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2012"Witgen implores readers to reimagine native peoples as agents of their own destiny well into the nineteenth century. As such,An Infinity of Nationsinvites scholars to reconsider crucial tenets of early American history."—Journal of American History"An important and original history,An Infinity of Nationsshould lead ethnohistorians to reinterrogate other North American regions for indigenous categories of social and political organization that may have been more important, and more fluid, than Europeans understood."—Ethnohistory"An Infinity of Nationsis a bold and altogether original examination of Indian-European relations, indigenous social formation, and European imperialism. Though centered on the western Great Lakes and northwestern interior in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the book travels far and wide geographically, chronologically, and thematically—to Iroquoia in the East, Hudson Bay in the North, the prairie-plains in the West, and Ohio Country in the South. Witgen also reaches deep into the past to place the events of the late 1600s in a long historical context of evolving indigenous North America, and he takes the story into the early nineteenth century, showing how, as it expanded westward, the United States collided with a long-evolving and fully formed indigenous world. A sophisticated study of a different kind of colonial world where kinship ties, mediation, small gestures, and right words signified and brought power."—Pekka Hämäläinen, author ofThe Comanche Empire