Ebook The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America, by James Axtell
Certainly, to improve your life quality, every book The European And The Indian: Essays In The Ethnohistory Of Colonial North America, By James Axtell will have their particular driving lesson. Nonetheless, having certain recognition will certainly make you really feel much more certain. When you really feel something take place to your life, sometimes, reading e-book The European And The Indian: Essays In The Ethnohistory Of Colonial North America, By James Axtell can help you to make calm. Is that your real pastime? Sometimes yes, however often will certainly be not exactly sure. Your option to check out The European And The Indian: Essays In The Ethnohistory Of Colonial North America, By James Axtell as one of your reading e-books, could be your correct publication to read now.
The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America, by James Axtell
Ebook The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America, by James Axtell
The European And The Indian: Essays In The Ethnohistory Of Colonial North America, By James Axtell How can you transform your mind to be much more open? There numerous sources that could aid you to boost your ideas. It can be from the various other encounters and story from some people. Schedule The European And The Indian: Essays In The Ethnohistory Of Colonial North America, By James Axtell is among the trusted resources to obtain. You could discover a lot of publications that we discuss below in this internet site. As well as now, we reveal you one of the very best, the The European And The Indian: Essays In The Ethnohistory Of Colonial North America, By James Axtell
For everyone, if you want to begin joining with others to review a book, this The European And The Indian: Essays In The Ethnohistory Of Colonial North America, By James Axtell is much suggested. As well as you should get guide The European And The Indian: Essays In The Ethnohistory Of Colonial North America, By James Axtell below, in the web link download that we offer. Why should be here? If you want other type of books, you will certainly always locate them and also The European And The Indian: Essays In The Ethnohistory Of Colonial North America, By James Axtell Economics, national politics, social, scientific researches, religious beliefs, Fictions, and more books are supplied. These readily available publications are in the soft documents.
Why should soft documents? As this The European And The Indian: Essays In The Ethnohistory Of Colonial North America, By James Axtell, lots of people likewise will should buy the book quicker. But, in some cases it's so far way to obtain guide The European And The Indian: Essays In The Ethnohistory Of Colonial North America, By James Axtell, even in various other country or city. So, to reduce you in locating guides The European And The Indian: Essays In The Ethnohistory Of Colonial North America, By James Axtell that will sustain you, we aid you by offering the lists. It's not only the listing. We will provide the advised book The European And The Indian: Essays In The Ethnohistory Of Colonial North America, By James Axtell link that can be downloaded directly. So, it will not require more times or perhaps days to posture it and other books.
Gather the book The European And The Indian: Essays In The Ethnohistory Of Colonial North America, By James Axtell begin with now. Yet the extra method is by accumulating the soft file of the book The European And The Indian: Essays In The Ethnohistory Of Colonial North America, By James Axtell Taking the soft data can be saved or stored in computer or in your laptop. So, it can be greater than a book The European And The Indian: Essays In The Ethnohistory Of Colonial North America, By James Axtell that you have. The most convenient way to disclose is that you could additionally conserve the soft data of The European And The Indian: Essays In The Ethnohistory Of Colonial North America, By James Axtell in your appropriate as well as readily available device. This condition will certainly suppose you frequently check out The European And The Indian: Essays In The Ethnohistory Of Colonial North America, By James Axtell in the extra times more than chatting or gossiping. It will not make you have bad habit, but it will certainly lead you to have far better behavior to review book The European And The Indian: Essays In The Ethnohistory Of Colonial North America, By James Axtell.
Studies the interaction between white settlers and native Americans during the colonial period.
- Sales Rank: #3535666 in Books
- Published on: 1981-08-13
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: .0" h x .0" w x .0" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 402 pages
Review
"A fine book."--Richard Ellis, Fort Lewis College
"This important volume, coving the period 1600-1763, is the first in a trilogy which promises to provide a new and more sophisticated understanding of colonial ethno-history and Indian missions than we have ever had....Lively, informative, and convincing, this book explains how the Indians managed to sustain their ethnicity even when they adopted Christianity. Axtell is clearly one of our best ethnohistorians; this is a superb book."--Journal of American Academy of Religion
"An intelligent, often innovative, and elegantly written work by a serious scholar who is quite intimate with the primary historical sources as well as the anthropological literature on the early Eastern Woodland peoples."--American Antiquity
"Penetrating and lucid."--Francis Jennings, The Newberry Library Center for the History of the American Indian
From the Back Cover
Drawing on a wide variety of source, Axtell explores the cultural adjustments that occurred when white Europeans met and attempted to 'civilize' the native Americans.
About the Author
James Axtell is at College of William and Mary.
Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
The very Heart & Meat of the Early American Experience
By Herbert L Calhoun
Here are a series of finely tuned expertly written essays that actually represent a casebook of ethno-history and ethno-historical methodology. It proves not only that this "common law" marriage between history and ethnography works, but also that in many respects, it seems almost indispensable to a full understanding of early American history itself. The essays focus on, and are largely held together by, the only thing that mattered on the early American frontiers: the social and cultural interactions and competition between white and red peoples. And here we mean mostly between French, English, (and to a much lesser extent, Spanish), and Eastern Native Americans.
As a political scientist who knew little about early American history, I am ashamed to admit that I did not know about the controversy involving who had actually introduced scalping to the American continent? I took the conventional understanding - that it had always been due to a Native American ritual brought up deep from the Indian past -- at face value. And as the first essay shows, in this one instance it turns out that the conventional wisdom holds up. However, what an interesting odyssey to discover the intertwined theories and historical trajectory leading up to the practice of scalping, that grew out of pre-Columbian religious practices - the origins of which got lost in translation. Scalping thus reemerged as a myth about how the white man had paid friendly Indians a bounty for the scalps of the more hostile ones. The myth of the white origins of scalping is so plausibly framed, that if I had heard it without reading this book, I would readily and surely have believed it.
To be converted, or be conquered, that is the question
The second essay is even more informative than the first and is the theoretical centerpiece of the book, as it focuses not on war, the normal staple of historians, but on the periods of peace, where learning, sharing, converting, and the whole host of other interactions more loosely referred to as enculturation is constantly taking place. And to bastardize a famous saying of Carl von Clausewitz we know that: War is just politics by other means. Here we literally see what that phrase means as we see what goes on in the underbrush preceding war between two conflicting cultures. Clearly the author got the architecture of the book right when he rested its premise on the fact that since cultures are normally normative affairs - - about the norms, ideas and ideals of survival -- then it follows that cultural competition is largely a contest for the hearts and minds of the other side. Such was very much the case on the American frontier. Thus this chapter is literally worth its weight in gold, as it gets down to the real meat of the cultural competition that made up the substrate of the interactions between early Europeans and Native Americans.
The purpose of the European invasion (It was not really a discovery) was clear from the outset. It was to take over the new land by any means necessary and use it to produce goods that could be traded back to Europe for a profit, period. Anything that got in the way of this purpose was either to be converted into European ways, or done away with completely. Thus, the options laid out for the Indians were: be converted or be conquered. There was no middle ground. Hardly out of the "Dark Ages" themselves and bringing with them their own flawed feudally-based social hierarchy, its institutions and principles; plus machines, guns and microbes, the Europeans considered themselves and everything they represented as superior to everything native, and thus they had no interest in two-way assimilation: It was the European way or the highway. And although the French did make a feeble attempt at two-way assimilation (some intermarried with Indians and joined their tribes as members, etc.), the English (with the exception of the so-called "white Indians," who were seen as traitors by the English) simply had no interest in any aspect of Indian culture and behavior. The English Settlers as a group, uniformly saw Indians as savages that needed to first be civilized and then Christianized.
As we now know all too well, these options got played out over the course of nearly four centuries with devastating results for all sides. During that period, vastly out-numbered, the European's first line of attack was religious conversion. The second was divide and conquer. On the second, rifts between the Indians were exploited strategically and put to good use, by pitting friendly against hostile Indians. Eventually the friendly Indians became dependent on "English goods" and thus were seduced into adopting English ways. But there were no rewards for their comradeship. The English still saw them in exclusively racist terms.
On the first line of attack, Missionaries were sent into Indian communities to try to civilized and then convert the Indians to Christianity, which arguably at the time was little more than the "spiritual arm" of European hegemony. And even though Indian religion was similar to but much richer and more general than (and thus arguably superior to) Christianity, the Europeans had no interest in seeing how Indian religion might have been able to enrich Christianity. They tried in uncompromising ways to impose "the yoke of Christ" on Indian behavior, in order to make it more predictable. At first the Indians were receptive, but soon turned sour on the transparent and heavy-handed ways and obviously mercenary intentions of European religion. But even so, unlike the Europeans, they did try to incorporate many aspects of European religion into their own. Some Indians tried for a time to "play-along" to "get along," and were surprised to discover that upon becoming a Christian, wearing English clothes, using English names and learning English did not change their status vis-à-vis the English one iota. English racism trumped civilization and dictated that they would remain savages no matter what they did and thus they were still entitled to nothing as far as the English Settlers were concerned. They were still segregated and denied citizenship. So most Indians said to hell with it.
The third essay in the book is of the tragic-comedy genre. It is the tale uncovered by the author's meticulous research of how a not so well-meaning English educator, one, Eleazar Wheelock, under the guise of helping educate Indians, actually stole their land and the funds to establish Dartmouth College, which to add insult to irony, still uses the Indian as its schools mascot?!
Altogether, this is an eye-opening book that will vastly enrich the reader's understanding of the early interactions between European and Native cultures during the nation's founding. Five Stars
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
excellent
By Historian
"No study of acculturation in colonial America would be complete," writes James Axtell in The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America, "without giving equal consideration to the question of how English culture was altered by its contacts with Native America." (272) Indeed, Axtell devotes the final chapter of his book to this view and concludes that colonial American culture experienced adaptive changes (a temporary, pragmatic adoption of Indian ways) and reactive changes ("spurred by the ubiquitous presence of the Indians as military foes and cultural foils.") (272-3) Reactive changes, Axtell argues, were most common to the settlement experience of the British, whose goal was to supplant the native population; he concludes that "where the natives were not regarded as superfluous obstacles, as in French Canada, adaptive changes were much more pervasive." One of the most obvious ways in which some English settlers adapted to their new land and neighbors was by literally "going native," a process Axtell calls "transculturation." (275) He points to the many instances of European whites adopting Indian customs and culture, particularly those closest to the frontier: longhunters, traders, missionaries, white captives and backcountry settlers. Axtell points to the fact that so many of the white captives in Indian hands refused to return to their own societies when given the opportunity as evidence of the profound impact native culture had on at least some British migrants to the New World.
Axtell concedes that these "white Indians" removed themselves from British culture and therefore mitigated the influence their newly adopted ways had on those colonists back in the settlements. It was, however, "necessary for the colonists to borrow some of the Indians' time-tested skills techniques and technology for coping with the frontier environment." (284) "Indian means," Axtell contends, "were not borrowed in cultural context," but were taken piecemeal from the native way of life, selectively, for the benefit of the newcomers and their survival, as well as for the goal of cultural mastery. English settlers adapted to their new land by taking or borrowing numerous Indian techniques of agriculture, language, war, hunting, and to some extent, adopting medicinal practices which relied on native (and heretofore unknown) plants and flora. It is well known that British newcomers to America borrowed numerous native words, many of which have been permanently added to our vocabulary (potato, canoe). Axtell points out however, that the colonists adopted elements of Indian speech "in distinct ways which minimized their normative impact on colonial culture." Words were added to colonial speech ways only when equivalent English words did not exist, and Indian tribal and geographic names were commonly anglicized in spelling and pronunciation (289)
Although Axtell writes that "acculturation is a two way street," the English clearly had no intention of making this relationship one of equality. As an example, he notes that while early settlers needed to master use of native materials for building shelter upon arrival on American shores, "the wigwam had no lasting effect on colonial culture." (291). Nevertheless, the neighboring Indians did have a lasting and pervasive effect on colonial society in more subtle ways. Axtell advances the suggestion that "the realities of Anglo-Indian relations was the reordering of colonial priorities," which included the conversion of natives to Christianity, increased overseas trade, and the expansion of the British Empire in the American provinces. (304-305) All of these goals emphasized for imperialists in London and America the need for pacification of the Indians, which Axtell holds was the overriding priority of the colonists in British America once they became firmly established on these shores by the late 17th century.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Great Book
By Tricia L VanVorce
The author is very knowledgeable on the subject and writes in a fluid manner that is easy to read and understand - would love to take one of his classes!
The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America, by James Axtell PDF
The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America, by James Axtell EPub
The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America, by James Axtell Doc
The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America, by James Axtell iBooks
The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America, by James Axtell rtf
The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America, by James Axtell Mobipocket
The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America, by James Axtell Kindle
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar