The Indian sale of Manhattan is one of the world's most cherished legends. Few people know that the Indians who made the fabled sale were Munsees whose ancestral homeland lay between the lower Hudson and upper Delaware river valleys. The story of the Munsee people has long lain unnoticed in broader histories of the Delaware Nation.

Now, "The Munsee Indians" deftly interweaves a mass of archaeological, anthropologi-cal, and archival source material to resurrect the lost history of this forgotten people, from their earliest contacts with Europeans to their final expulsion just before the American Revolution. Anthropologist Robert S. Grumet rescues from obscurity Mattano, Tackapousha, Mamanuchqua, and other Munsee sachems whose influence on Dutch and British settlers helped shape the course of early American history in the mid-Atlantic heartland. He looks past the legendary sale of Manhattan to show for the first time how Munsee leaders forestalled land-hungry colonists by selling small tracts whose vaguely worded and bounded titles kept courts busy--and settlers out--for more than 150 years.

Ravaged by disease, war, and alcohol, the Munsees finally emigrated to reservations in Wisconsin, Oklahoma, and Ontario, where most of their descendants still live today. Coinciding with the four hundredth anniversary of Hudson's voyage to the river that bears his name, this book shows how Indians and settlers struggled, in land deals and other transactions, to reconcile cultural ideals with political realities. The result is the most authoritative treatment of the Munsee experience--one that restores this people to their place in history.

"This book is published with the generous assistance of Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund."

In this sweeping collection of essays, one of America's leading colonial historians reinterprets the struggle between Native peoples and Europeans in terms of how each understood the material basis of power. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in eastern North America, Natives and newcomers alike understood the close relationship between political power and control of trade and land, but they did so in very different ways. For Native Americans, trade was a collective act. The alliances that made a people powerful became visible through material exchanges that forged connections among kin groups, villages, and the spirit world. The land itself was often conceived as a participant in these transactions through the blessings it bestowed on those who gave in return. For colonizers, by contrast, power tended to grow from the individual accumulation of goods and landed property more than from collective exchange-from domination more than from alliance. For many decades, an uneasy balance between the two systems of power prevailed. Tracing the messy process by which global empires and their colonial populations could finally abandon compromise and impose their definitions on the continent, Daniel K. Richter casts penetrating light on the nature of European colonization, the character of Native resistance, and the formative roles that each played in the origins of the United States.

In this sweeping collection of essays, one of America's leading colonial historians reinterprets the struggle between Native peoples and Europeans in terms of how each understood the material basis of power. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in eastern North America, Natives and newcomers alike understood the close relationship between political power and control of trade and land, but they did so in very different ways. For Native Americans, trade was a collective act. The alliances that made a people powerful became visible through material exchanges that forged connections among kin groups, villages, and the spirit world. The land itself was often conceived as a participant in these transactions through the blessings it bestowed on those who gave in return. For colonizers, by contrast, power tended to grow from the individual accumulation of goods and landed property more than from collective exchange-from domination more than from alliance. For many decades, an uneasy balance between the two systems of power prevailed. Tracing the messy process by which global empires and their colonial populations could finally abandon compromise and impose their definitions on the continent, Daniel K. Richter casts penetrating light on the nature of European colonization, the character of Native resistance, and the formative roles that each played in the origins of the United States.

In the beginning, North America was Indian country. But only in the beginning. After the opening act of the great national drama, Native Americans yielded to the westward rush of European settlers. Or so the story usually goes. Yet, for three centuries after Columbus, Native people controlled most of eastern North America and profoundly shaped its destiny. In Facing East from Indian Country, Daniel K. Richter keeps Native people center-stage throughout the story of the origins of the United States. Viewed from Indian country, the sixteenth century was an era in which Native people discovered Europeans and struggled to make sense of a new world. Well into the seventeenth century, the most profound challenges to Indian life came less from the arrival of a relative handful of European colonists than from the biological, economic, and environmental forces the newcomers unleashed. Drawing upon their own traditions, Indian communities reinvented themselves and carved out a place in a world dominated by transatlantic European empires. In 1776, however, when some of Britain's colonists rebelled against that imperial world, they overturned the system that had made Euro-American and Native coexistence possible. Eastern North America only ceased to be an Indian country because the revolutionaries denied the continent's first peoples a place in the nation they were creating. In rediscovering early America as Indian country, Richter employs the historian's craft to challenge cherished assumptions about times and places we thought we knew well, revealing Native American experiences at the core of the nation's birth and identity.

A comprehensive volume that interrogates European imperialism from the perspective of indigenous experiences. The contributors to Facing Empire reimagine the Age of Revolution from the perspective of indigenous peoples. Rather than treating indigenous peoples as distant and passive players in the political struggles of the time, this book argues that they helped create and exploit the volatility that marked an era while playing a central role in the profound acceleration in encounters and contacts between peoples around the world. Focusing in particular on indigenous peoples' experiences of the British Empire, this volume takes a unique comparative approach in thinking about how indigenous peoples shaped, influenced, redirected, ignored, and sometimes even forced the course of modern imperialism. The essays demonstrate how indigenous-shaped local exchanges, cultural relations, and warfare provoked discussion and policymaking in London as much as it did in Charleston, Cape Town, or Sydney. Facing Empire charts a fresh way forward for historians of empire, indigenous studies, and the Age of Revolution and shows why scholars can no longer continue to exclude indigenous peoples from histories of the modern world. These past conflicts over land and water, labor and resources, and hearts and minds have left a living legacy of contested relations that continue to resonate in contemporary politics and societies today. Covering the Indian and Pacific Oceans, Australia, and West and South Africa, as well as North America, this book looks at the often misrepresented and underrepresented complexity of the indigenous experience on a global scale. Contributors: Tony Ballantyne, Justin Brooks, Colin G. Calloway, Kate Fullagar, Bill Gammage, Robert Kenny, Shino Konishi, Elspeth Martini, Michael A. McDonnell, Jennifer Newell, Joshua L. Reid, Daniel K. Richter, Rebecca Shumway, Sujit Sivasundaram, Nicole Ulrich

America began, we are often told, with the Founding Fathers, the men who waged a revolution and created a unique place called the United States. We may acknowledge the early Jamestown and Puritan colonists and mourn the dispossession of Native Americans, but we rarely grapple with the complexity of the nation's pre-revolutionary past. In this pathbreaking revision, Daniel Richter shows that the United States has a much deeper history than is apparent-that far from beginning with a clean slate, it is a nation with multiple pasts that stretch back as far as the Middle Ages, pasts whose legacies continue to shape the present. Exploring a vast range of original sources, Before the Revolution spans more than seven centuries and ranges across North America, Europe, and Africa. Richter recovers the lives of a stunning array of peoples-Indians, Spaniards, French, Dutch, Africans, English-as they struggled with one another and with their own people for control of land and resources. Their struggles occurred in a global context and built upon the remains of what came before. Gradually and unpredictably, distinctive patterns of North American culture took shape on a continent where no one yet imagined there would be nations called the United States, Canada, or Mexico. By seeing these trajectories on their own dynamic terms, rather than merely as a prelude to independence, Richter's epic vision reveals the deepest origins of American history.

The Indian sale of Manhattan is one of the world's most cherished legends. Few people know that the Indians who made the fabled sale were Munsees whose ancestral homeland lay between the lower Hudson and upper Delaware river valleys. The story of the Munsee people has long lain unnoticed in broader histories of the Delaware Nation. Now, The Munsee Indians deftly interweaves a mass of archaeological, anthropologi-cal, and archival source material to resurrect the lost history of this forgotten people, from their earliest contacts with Europeans to their final expulsion just before the American Revolution. Anthropologist Robert S. Grumet rescues from obscurity Mattano, Tackapousha, Mamanuchqua, and other Munsee sachems whose influence on Dutch and British settlers helped shape the course of early American history in the mid-Atlantic heartland. He looks past the legendary sale of Manhattan to show for the first time how Munsee leaders forestalled land-hungry colonists by selling small tracts whose vaguely worded and bounded titles kept courts busy-and settlers out-for more than 150 years. Ravaged by disease, war, and alcohol, the Munsees finally emigrated to reservations in Wisconsin, Oklahoma, and Ontario, where most of their descendants still live today. Coinciding with the four hundredth anniversary of Hudson's voyage to the river that bears his name, this book shows how Indians and settlers struggled, in land deals and other transactions, to reconcile cultural ideals with political realities. The result is the most authoritative treatment of the Munsee experience-one that restores this people to their place in history. This book is published with the generous assistance of Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.

After political defeats and the loss of half his capital in a ranching venture in North Dakota, Theodore Roosevelt began writing his ambitious history of the conquest of the American West in 1888. He projected a sweeping drama, well documented and filled with Americans fighting Indian confederacies north and south while dealing with the machinations of the British, French, and Spanish and their sympathizers. Roosevelt wanted to show how backwoodsmen such as Daniel Boone and Simon Kenton, followed by hardy pioneer settlers, gave the United States eventual claim to land west of the Alleghanies. Heroism and treachery among both the whites and the Indians can be seen in his rapidly shifting story of a people on the move. By force and by treaty the new nation was established in the East, and when the explorers and settlers pushed against the Mississippi, everything west of the river was considered part of that nation. Roosevelt's second volume further illustrates his contention that no regular army could have prevailed in the border fighting, only toughened individual frontiersmen. Here Boone is seen again, as well as George Rogers Clark, the conqueror of the Illinois country. Roosevelt shows how the American Revolution helped the newly independent peoples take over the West.

Richter examines a wide range of primary documents to survey the responses of the peoples of the Iroquois League--the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas, and Tuscaroras--to 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.

For centuries the Western view of the Iroquois was clouded by the myth that they were the supermen of the frontier--"the Romans of this Western World," as De Witt Clinton called them in 1811. Only in recent years have scholars come to realize the extent to which Europeans had exaggerated the power of the Iroquois.

First published in 1987, Beyond the Covenant Chain was one of the first studies to acknowledge fully that the Iroquois never had an empire. It remains the best study of diplomatic and military relations among Native American groups in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North America.

Published in paperback for the first time, it features a new introduction by Richter and Merrell. Contributors include Douglas W. Boyce, Mary A. Druke-Becker, Richard L. Haan, Francis Jennings, Michael N. McConnell, Theda Perdue, and Neal Salisbury.