Indians and English
Subtitle: Facing Off in Early America
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: April 13, 2000
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 320
ISBN-13: 9780801482823
Subjects: American history: c 1500 to c 1800; Colonization & independence; Social history; Native American; History - General History; History: American; USA; Public opinion; United States - State & Local - General; History; Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775; First contact with Europeans; Indians of North America
First sentence: Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America looks at the meeting between American Indians and English people in the first decades of contact and colonization, and especially at their attempts to understand and place each other's ways within their own familiar schemes of how human society is supposed to function.
Description: "In this vividly written book, prize-winning author Karen Ordahl Kupperman refocuses our understanding of encounters between English venturers and Algonquians all along the East Coast of North America in the early years of contact and settlement. All parties in these dramas were uncertain--hopeful and fearful--about the opportunity and challenge presented by new realities. Indians and English both believed they could control the developing relationship. Each group was curious about the other, and interpreted through their own standards and traditions. At the same time both came from societies in the process of unsettling change and hoped to derive important lessons by studying a profoundly different culture. These meetings and early relationships are recorded in a wide variety of sources. Native people maintained oral traditions about the encounters, and these were written down by English recorders at the time of contact and since; many are maintained to this day. English venturers, desperate to make readers at home understand how difficult and potentially rewarding their enterprise was, wrote constantly of their own experiences and observations and transmitted native lore. Kupperman analyzes all these sources in order to understand the true nature of these early years, when English venturers were so fearful and dependent on native aid and the shape of the future was uncertain" -- Publisher's description.