Synopses & Reviews
This book is an eloquent account of the native peoples of the Carolina piedmont who became known as the Catawba Nation. James Merrell brings the Catawbas more fully into American history by tracing how they underwent that most fundamental of American experiences: adapting to a new world. Arguing that European colonists and African slaves created a society that was as alienas newto Indians as American itself was to the newcomers, Merrell follows the Catawbas from their first contact with Europeans in the sixteenth century until their accommodation to a changing America was largely complete some three centuries later.
Heretofore, scholarship has mostly ignored that adaptation of native Americans to the new American cultural and physical milieu and has instead dwelt on warfare, expropriation, suppression, and annihilation. Attempts to incorporate native peoples into the mainstream of American history have usually taken the form of lists of Indian "contributions" to American culture or, conversely, a solemn paean to Indian respect for nature.
This chronicle of the Catawbas takes note of all of the above. But its center is the Catwabas' encounter with the colonists and their entourage: unfamiliar diseases, crown diplomats, trade goods, and Christian missionaries. Each of those required creative responses, which transformed Catawba life rather than destroyed it. Natives constructed new societies in the aftermath of epidemics, assimilated both traders and their enticing goods into established cultural forms, came to terms with settlers, and fended off missionaries. Through it all, the Catawbas enduredas soldiers in the Revolution, as landlords and landladies on their reservation, as potters and farmersretaining their Indian identity, remaining in their piedmont home, and becoming a part of the American mosaic.
Absorbing archeology, anthropology, and folklore into his vast historical research, Merrell provides what will be the definitive history of the Catawbas. The book also signals a new direction for the study of native Americans and will serve as a model for their reintegration into American history.
Review
A vivid reconstruction. . . . Outstanding.
American Historical Review
Review
Merrell offers a fresh perspective in this stimulating study of the Catawbas.
Choice
Review
Only a genuine scholar and fascinating writer could have paid tribute as James Merrell has done.
Francis Jennings, Director Emeritus, D'Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian, The Newberry Library
Synopsis
This eloquent, pathbreaking account follows the Catawbas from their first contact with Europeans in the 16th century until they carved out a place in the American republic three centuries later. It is a story of Native agency, creativity, resilience, and endurance. In a new introduction for this 20th anniversary edition, Merrell recalls the book's origins and considers its place in the field of early American history in general and Native American history in particular, both at the time it was first published and two decades later.
Synopsis
This eloquent, pathbreaking account follows the Catawbas from their first contact with Europeans in the sixteenth century until they carved out a place in the American republic three centuries later. It is a story of Native agency, creativity, resilience, and endurance.
Upon its original publication in 1989, James Merrell's definitive history of Catawbas and their neighbors in the southern piedmont helped signal a new direction in the study of Native Americans, serving as a model for their reintegration into American history. In an introduction written for this twentieth anniversary edition, Merrell recalls the book's origins and considers its place in the field of early American history in general and Native American history in particular, both at the time it was first published and two decades later.
About the Author
James H. Merrell is Lucy Maynard Salmon Professor of History at Vassar College. He is author and editor of numerous books, including his second Bancroft Prize-winner (and a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier.