Problem: The North American fur trade was the industry and activities related to the acquisition, trade, exchange, and sale of animal furs in North America. Aboriginal peoples in Canada and Native Americans in the United States of different regions traded among themselves in the Pre-Columbian Era, but Europeans participated in the trade beginning from the time of their arrival in the New World and extended its reach to Europe. The French started trading in the 16th century, the English established trading posts on Hudson Bay in present-day Canada in the 17th century, and the Dutch had trade by the same time in New Netherland. The 19th-century North American fur trade, when the industry was at its peak of economic importance, involved the development of elaborate trade networks.

At the beginning of the 18th century, more organized violence than in previous decades occurred between the Native Americans involved in the deerskin trade and white settlers, most famously the Yamasee War. This uprising of Indians against fur traders almost wiped out the European colonists in the southeast. The British promoted competition between tribes, and sold guns to both Creeks and Cherokees. This competition sprang out of the slave demand in the southeast - tribes would raid each other and sell prisoners into the slave trade of the colonizers. France tried to outlaw these raids because their allies, the Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Yazoos, bore the brunt of the slave trade. Guns and other modern weapons were essential trading items for the Native Americans to protect themselves from slave raids; motivation which drove the intensity of the deerksin trade. The need for Indian slaves decreased as African slaves began to be imported in larger quantities, and the focus returned to deerskins. The drive for Indian slaves also was diminished after the Yamasee War to avoid future uprisings. The Yamasees had collected extensive debt in the first decade of the 1700s due to buying manufactured goods on credit from traders, and then not being able to produce enough deerskins to pay the debt later in the year. Indians who were not able to pay their debt were often enslaved. The practice of enslavement extended to the wives and children of the Yamasees in debt as well. This process frustrated the Yamasees and other tribes, who lodged complaints against the deceitful credit-loaning scheme traders had enforced, along with methods of cheating or trade. The Yamasees were a coastal tribe in the area that is now known as South Carolina, and most of the white-tailed deer herds had moved inland for the better environment. The Yamasees rose up against the English in South Carolina, and soon other tribes joined them, creating combatants from almost every nation in the South. The British were able to defeat the Indian coalition with help from the Cherokees, cementing a pre-existing trade partnership. After the uprisings, the Native Americans returned to making alliances with the European powers, using political savvy to get the best deals by playing the three nations off each other. The Creeks were particularly good at manipulation - they had begun trading with South Carolina in the last years of the 17th century and became a trusted deerskin provider. The Creeks were already a wealthy tribe due to their control over the most valuable hunting lands, especially when compared to the impoverished Cherokees. Due to allying with the British during the Yamasee War, the Cherokees lacked Indian trading partners and could not break with Britain to negotiate with France or Spain.

What were the most common furs traded?

Answer with quotes: deerskin

Problem: Chinua Achebe (, born Albert Chinualumogu Achebe; (16 November 1930 - 21 March 2013) was a Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic. His first novel Things Fall Apart (1958), often considered his best, is the most widely read book in modern African literature. He won the Man Booker International Prize in 2007. Raised by his parents in the Igbo town of Ogidi in southeastern Nigeria, Achebe excelled at school and won a scholarship to study medicine, but changed his studies to English literature at University College (now the University of Ibadan).

Once he returned to Nigeria, Achebe was promoted at the NBS to the position of Director of External Broadcasting. One of his first duties was to help create the Voice of Nigeria network. The station broadcast its first transmission on New Year's Day 1962, and worked to maintain an objective perspective during the turbulent era immediately following independence. This objectivity was put to the test when Nigerian Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa declared a state of emergency in the Western Region, responding to a series of conflicts between officials of varying parties. Achebe became saddened by the evidence of corruption and silencing of political opposition. In 1962 he attended an executive conference of African writers in English at the Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda. He met with important literary figures from around the continent and the world, including Ghanaian poet Kofi Awoonor, Nigerian playwright and poet Wole Soyinka, and US poet-author Langston Hughes. Among the topics of discussion was an attempt to determine whether the term African literature ought to include work from the diaspora, or solely that writing composed by people living within the continent itself. Achebe indicated that it was not "a very significant question", and that scholars would do well to wait until a body of work were large enough to judge. Writing about the conference in several journals, Achebe hailed it as a milestone for the literature of Africa, and highlighted the importance of community among isolated voices on the continent and beyond. While at Makerere, Achebe was asked to read a novel written by a student (James Ngugi, later known as Ngugi wa Thiong'o) called Weep Not, Child. Impressed, he sent it to Alan Hill at Heinemann, which published it two years later to coincide with its paperback line of books from African writers. Hill indicated this was to remedy a situation where British publishers "regarded West Africa only as a place where you sold books." Achebe was chosen to be General Editor of the African Writers Series, which became a significant force in bringing postcolonial literature from Africa to the rest of the world, and he continued in that role until 1972. As these works became more widely available, reviews and essays about African literature - especially from Europe - began to flourish. Bristling against the commentary flooding his home country, Achebe published an essay entitled "Where Angels Fear to Tread" in the December 1962 issue of Nigeria Magazine. In it, he distinguished between the hostile critic (entirely negative), the amazed critic (entirely positive), and the conscious critic (who seeks a balance). He lashed out at those who critiqued African writers from the outside, saying: "no man can understand another whose language he does not speak (and 'language' here does not mean simply words, but a man's entire world view)." In September 1964 he attended the Commonwealth Literature conference at the University of Leeds, presenting his essay "The Novelist as Teacher".

What is the writers series?

Answer with quotes:
Writing about the conference in several journals, Achebe hailed it as a milestone for the literature of Africa,