We use cookies to enhance your experience on our website. By continuing to use our website, you are agreeing to our use of cookies. You can change your cookie settings at any time. Find out more
Instructor inspection copy request
Cover

Natives and Newcomers

The Cultural Origins of North America

James Axtell

Publication Date - 31 August 2000

ISBN: 9780195137712

432 pages
Paperback
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches

In Stock

Description

In the past thirty years historians have come to realize that the shape and temper of early America was determined as much by its Indian natives as it was by its European colonizers. No one has done more to discover and recount this story than James Axtell, one of America's premier ethnohistorians. Natives and Newcomers is a collection of fifteen of his best and most influential essays, available for the first time in one volume. In accessible and often witty prose, Axtell describes the major encounters between Indians and Europeans--first contacts, communications, epidemics, trade and gift-giving, social and sexual mingling, work, cultural and religious conversions, military clashes--and probes their short- and long-term consequences for both cultures. The result is a book that shows how encounters between Indians and Europeans ultimately led to the birth of a distinctly American identity. Natives and Newcomers is an essential text for undergraduate and graduate courses in Colonial American history and Native American history.

Table of Contents

    Illustrations list
    Preface
    Prologue
    Part I. Contacts
    Introduction
    1. Imagining the Other: First Encounters
    2. Babel of Tongues: Communciating with the Indians
    Part II. Consumption
    Introduction
    3. At the Water's Edge: Trading in the Sixteenth Century
    4. The First Consumer Revolution: The Seventeenth Century
    5. Making Do: Trade in the Eighteenth-Century Southeast
    Part III. Conversions
    Introduction
    6. The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures
    7. Dr. Wheelock's Little Red School
    8. The White Indians
    Part IV. Clashes
    Introduction
    9. The Spanish Incursion
    10. The Rise and Fall of the Powhatan Empire
    11. The Moral Dilemmas of Scalping
    Part V. Consequences
    Introduction
    12. The Columbian Mosaic
    13. Native Reactions to the Invasion of America
    14. The Indian impact on English Colonial Culture
    Notes
    Index

Related Titles