Synopses & Reviews
Richter examines a wide range of primary documents to survey the responses of the peoples of the Iroquois Leaguethe Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas, and Tuscarorasto the challenges of the European colonialization of North America. He demonstrates that by the early eighteenth century a series of creative adaptations in politics and diplomacy allowed the peoples of the Longhouse to preserve their cultural autonomy in a land now dominated by foreign powers.
Review
An important book for scholars of Native history and colonial American history.
American Indian Quarterly
Review
An outstanding contribution to the study of Iroquois history and culture.
American Indian Culture and Research Journal
Review
This is a detailed, accurate, and convincing study of the Iroquois before 1720.
William and Mary Quarterly
Review
Richter has made a major contribution to the literature on the Iroquois.
Journal of American History
Synopsis
My primary audience is neither the scholarly specialists on the Five Nations nor the Iroquois themselves, although I trust each will find something worthwhile here. Instead, I hope to reach historians, students, and interested readers who still too often exclude native peoples from the narrative mainstream of North American development. This is a story of European colonization viewed from the Indian side of the frontier.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. 391-415) and index.
About the Author
Daniel K. Richter is the Richard S. Dunn Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is author of Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America, and is coeditor of Beyond the Covenant Chain: The Iroquois and Their Neighbors in Indian North America, 1600-1800.