Synopses & Reviews
Review
andldquo;Robert M. Owens locates the explosion of Indian-hating on the part of U.S. officials and Anglo-American settlers, and their anxiety over a possible general war with Native peoples in trans-Appalachian North America, in an all-consuming psychology of fear. In this provocative and powerful telling, American expansion was less about civilization, destiny, or dominance than about an overwhelming obsession with security.andrdquo;andmdash;Andrew Cayton, coauthor (with Fred Anderson) of The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500andndash;1800
Review
With compelling prose, Robert M. Owens surveys pan-Indian movements, Indian alliances with European empires, slave rebellions, and the responses such coalitions generated among British colonists and American citizens in the Revolutionary and early national eras. One empireandrsquo;s alliance with Indians, one tribal nationandrsquo;s coalition with another, and one renegade Europeanandrsquo;s collusion with slaves became in Anglo-American chambers a conspiratorial act of war. Red Dreams, White Nightmares illuminates the unsettling nature of early American frontiers. By the time of the War of 1812, fear became a defining feature of the early American relationship with independent Indian peoples, and the fear lasted for decades.andrdquo;andmdash;Gregory Evans Dowd, author of War under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, and the British Empire
Synopsis
From the end of Pontiacandrsquo;s War in 1763 through the War of 1812, fearandmdash;even paranoiaandmdash;drove Anglo-American Indian policies. In Red Dreams, White Nightmares, Robert M. Owens views conflicts between whites and Natives in this eraandmdash;invariably treated as discrete, regional affairsandmdash;as the inextricably related struggles they were.
About the Author
Robert M. Owens is Associate Professor of History at Wichita State University. He specializes in colonial U.S. history and the Early Republic. He is the author of Mr. Jeffersonandrsquo;s Hammer: William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy (OU Press, 2007). His articles have appeared in the Journal of the Early Republic and the Journal of Illinois History.