The Mask and the Man

Franklin's influence on the course of the revolutionary movement is seen in a new light by a distinguished historian of early America.

Benjamin Franklin was a man of genius and enormous ego, smart enough not to flaunt his superiority but to let others proclaim it. To understand him and his role in great events, one must realize the omnipresence of this ego, and the extent to which he mirrored the feelings of other colonial Pennsylvanians. With this in mind, Francis Jennings sets forth some new ideas about Franklin as the "first American." In so doing, he provides a new view of the beginnings of the American Revolution in Franklin's struggle against William Penn. By striving against Penn's feudal lordship (and therefore against King George) Franklin became master of the Pennsylvania assembly. It was in this role that he suggested a meeting of the Continental Congress which, as Jennings notes, flies in the face of historical opinion which suggests that Boston patriots had to drag Pennsylvanians into the revolution.

Franklin's autobiography omits discussion of his heroic struggle against Penn and, in so doing, robs history of his true role in the making of the new country. It is through an accurate accounting of what Franklin did, not what he said he did in his autobiography (which Jennings likens to a campaign speech), that we understand the author's use of the term "first American."

Francis Jennings is the author of numerous path-breaking books, including the award-winning The Invasion of America (Norton). He is director emeritus of the Newberry Library's Center for the History of the American Indian. He lives in Chicago.

Empire of Fortune is vintage Jennings. He writes with as much flair and involvement as his predecessors, while challenging their assumptions and research at every turn. No one has done more to demystify the early American wilderness or worked harder to dynamite the anglocentric folktales of colonial history. Peter H. Wood, Duke University"

In the standard presentation of the American Revolution, a ragtag assortment of revolutionaries, inspired by the ideals of liberty and justice, rise to throw off the yoke of the British empire and bring democracy to the New World. It makes a pretty story. Now, in place of this fairytale standing in for history, Francis Jennings presents a realistic alternative: a privileged elite, dreaming of empire, clone their own empire from the British. Jennings shows that colonies were extensions from Britain intended from the first to conquer American Indians. Though subordinate to the British crown, in the opposite direction they ruled over beaten native peoples. Adding to this dual nature, some colonists bought Africans as slaves and rigidly ruled over them within their colonies. To justify conquests and oppression, they invented the concept of racial gradation in a system of social castes. We live with it still. In this full scale reconception, the experience of tribal Indians and enslaved Blacks is brought into the whole picture. The colonists were enraged by efforts of crown and Parliament to forbid settlement in tribal territories. Especially Virginians rose under great speculator George Washington to seize the western lands in defiance of the crown's orders. We witness the founders' invasion and attempted conquest of Canada and the "conquest" of Pennsylvania as Quakers and German pietists were deprived of citizenship rights and despoiled of property through armed force and legal trickery. British sympathies were so strong that George III had to hire Hessians as soldiers because he could not trust his own people. And Britain also had movements for reform that won freedom of the press and refusal to legislate slavery while the Revolutionaries tarred and feathered their opponents and strengthened the slavery institution. Revolutionary rhetoric about liberty and virtue is revealed as war propaganda. Illegal "committees" and "conventions" functioned like soviets of the later Russian revolution. The U.S. Constitution was the fulfillment of the Revolution rather than its "Thermidor." The work is meticulously documented and detailed. By including the whole population in its history, Jennings provides an eloquent explanation for a host of anomalies, ambiguities, and iniquities that have followed in the Revolution's wake.

In the standard presentation of the American Revolution, a ragtag assortment of revolutionaries, inspired by the ideals of liberty and justice, rise to throw off the yoke of the British empire and bring democracy to the New World. It makes a pretty story. Now, in place of this fairytale standing in for history, Francis Jennings presents a realistic alternative: a privileged elite, dreaming of empire, clone their own empire from the British. Jennings shows that colonies were extensions from Britain intended from the first to conquer American Indians. Though subordinate to the British crown, in the opposite direction they ruled over beaten native peoples. Adding to this dual nature, some colonists bought Africans as slaves and rigidly ruled over them within their colonies. To justify conquests and oppression, they invented the concept of racial gradation in a system of social castes. We live with it still. In this full scale reconception, the experience of tribal Indians and enslaved Blacks is brought into the whole picture. The colonists were enraged by efforts of crown and Parliament to forbid settlement in tribal territories. Especially Virginians rose under great speculator George Washington to seize the western lands in defiance of the crown's orders. We witness the founders' invasion and attempted conquest of Canada and the "conquest" of Pennsylvania as Quakers and German pietists were deprived of citizenship rights and despoiled of property through armed force and legal trickery. British sympathies were so strong that George III had to hire Hessians as soldiers because he could not trust his own people. And Britain also had movements for reform that won freedom of the press and refusal to legislate slavery while the Revolutionaries tarred and feathered their opponents and strengthened the slavery institution. Revolutionary rhetoric about liberty and virtue is revealed as war propaganda. Illegal "committees" and "conventions" functioned like soviets of the later Russian revolution. The U.S. Constitution was the fulfillment of the Revolution rather than its "Thermidor." The work is meticulously documented and detailed. By including the whole population in its history, Jennings provides an eloquent explanation for a host of anomalies, ambiguities, and iniquities that have followed in the Revolution's wake.

Anthropologist and preservationist Robert S. Grumet has created this up-to-date, well-written overview of historic contact with Native Americans on the colonial frontier from a vast array of documentary, archaeological, and ethnographic data never assembled before. This is a definitive history of early Indian-white relations in an area extending from Virginia to Maine and from the Atlantic coast to the upper Ohio River. It will be read by specialists and Indian-studies buffs alike. Historic Contact divides native northeastern America into three subregions where the histories of thirty-four "Indian Countries" are described and mapped in detail, including all National Historic Landmarks. In the North Atlantic Region are the Eastern and Western Abenaki, Pocumtuck-Squakheag, Nipmuck, Pennacook-Pawtucket, Massachusett, Wampanoag, Narragansett, Mohegan-Pequot, Montauk, Lower Connecticut Valley, and Mahican Indian Countries; in the Middle Atlantic Region, the Munsee, Delaware, Nanticoke, Piscataway-Potomac, Powhatan, Nottoway-Meherrin, Upper Potomac-Shenandoah, Virginian Piedmont, Southern Appalachian Highlands, and Lower Susquehanna Indian Countries; and in the Trans-Appalachian Region, the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, Niagara-Erie, Upper Susquehanna, and Upper Ohio Indian Countries. Readers interested in Indian history and colonial America will value this basic reference, which originated as a National Historic Landmarks Survey Theme Study. Federal agencies, state and local preservation offices, and Indian communities will use it as an excellent planning tool in making evaluations and protection decisions.

The Covenant Chain Confederation of Indian Tribes with English Colonies

Winner of the Distinguished Book Award of the Society of Colonial Wars

"A learned and lively new history of the Iroquois to 1744 . . . [that] stands by itself as a very important book. . . . [It] surely must now be the definitely history of the Iroquois in their era of triumph and the first stages of decline." —Ronald Sanders, author of Lost Tribes and Promised Lands

"[The] joint effort [of historians and anthropologists] to reconstruct the Indian past has produced not only a new definition of "frontier" but a major reinterpretation of early American history. The scholar who has done most to advance and popularize the "Indianization" of American history is Francis Jennings. . . . [He] has demonstrated once again that the American frontier was not a clear line between 'savagism' and 'civilization' but rather a wide zone of intercultural conflict, penetration, and cooperation." —James Axtell, author of The European and the Indian

Anthropologist and preservationist Robert S. Grumet has created this up-to-date, well-written overview of historic contact with Native Americans on the colonial frontier from a vast array of documentary, archaeological, and ethnographic data never assembled before. This is a definitive history of early Indian-white relations in an area extending from Virginia to Maine and from the Atlantic coast to the upper Ohio River. It will be read by specialists and Indian-studies buffs alike.Historic Contact divides native northeastern America into three subregions where the histories of thirty-four Indian Countries are described and mapped in detail, including all National Historic Landmarks. In the North Atlantic Region are the Eastern and Western Abenaki, Pocumtuck-Squakheag, Nipmuck, Pennacook-Pawtucket, Massachusett, Wampanoag, Narragansett, Mohegan-Pequot, Montauk, Lower Connecticut Valley, and Mahican Indian Countries; in the Middle Atlantic Region, the Munsee, Delaware, Nanticoke, Piscataway-Potomac, Powhatan, Nottoway-Meherrin, Upper Potomac-Shenandoah, Virginian Piedmont, Southern Appalachian Highlands, and lower Susquehanna Indian Countries; and in the Trans-Appalachian Region, the Mohawl, Oneida, Cayuga, Seneca, Niagara-Erie, Upper Susquehanna, and Upper Ohio Indian Countries. Readers interested in Indian history and colonial America will value this basic reference, which originated as a National Historic landmarks Survey Theme Study. Federal agencies, state and local preservation officers, and Indian communities will use it as an excellent planning tool in making evaluations protection decisions.

This title revisits the history of American colonization. In this iconoclastic book, Francis Jennings recasts the story of American colonization as a territorial invasion. The traditional history of early America paints the colonies as a transplantation of European culture to a new continent - a 'virgin land' in which Native Americans were assigned the role of foil whose main contribution was to stimulate the energy and ingenuity of European dispossessors. Jennings rejects this ideology and examines the relationships between Europeans and Indians from a far more critical point of view. Shorn of old mythology and rationalizations, Puritan actions are seen in the cold light of material interest and naked expansion.

Jennings describes the experience of the first pioneers of the North American continent, who migrated from Siberia across what is now Beringia nomadic people who traveled over the continents and islands of the Americas, establishing networks of trails and trade and adapting the land to human purposes. He tells of the rise of imperial city states in Mexico and Peru, and of the extension of cultures from Mexico into North America; he describes the multitude of cultures and societies created by the Native Americans, from simple kin-structured bands to immense and complex cities. Jennings shows that Europeans did not "discover" America; they invaded it and conquered its population. We grew up on history written from the point of view of the victor. Here now is the rest of the story, by the acknowledged dean of American Indian history. It is strong, eye-opening, and timely."

"Fills a void in historical studies on American Indians. . . . A richly documented narrative that will surprise many readers with its revelations of the colonial period." —Dee Brown, author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

Traditionally, historians have thought of American society as a transplantation of European culture to a new continent—a "virgin land." In this important and disturbing book, Francis Jennings examines the real history of the relationships between Europeans and Indians in what is ordinarily called the colonial period of United States history. From the Indian viewpoint, it was the period of the invasion of America.

In Mr. Jennings' view, the American land during the period of discovery and settlement was more like a widow than a virgin. "Europeans did not find wilderness here," he writes, "rather, however involuntarity, they made one. . . . The so-called settlement of America was a resettlement, a reoccupation of a land made waste by the diseases and demoralization introduced by newcomers."

Basing his interpretations on an enormous amount of hitherto unused ethnographical and anthropological literature, Mr. Jennings summarizes what is now known about the Atlantic Coast Indians encountered by Europeans. He then concetrates on a single region, New England, as an illustrative case study. The result is a radically revisionist interpretation of Puritan history (both as the Puritans wrote and lived it) in relation to the aboriginal population.