Facing East from Indian Country, A Native History of Early America (Heftet (myke permer))

Daniel K. Richter is Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History and the Richard S. Dunn Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of the award-winning Facing East from Indian Country (Harvard).

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 centre-stage throughout the story of the origins of the United States. Viewed from Indian country, the 16th century was an era in which Native people discovered Europeans and struggled to make sense of a new world. Well into the 17th 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.

From its title to its very last page, Facing East from Indian Country spins us around. But rather than dizzying, this turnabout is clarifying, freeing us from the blinders of a European perspective on the early American experience. Vast in scope yet intimate in its attention to particular people, places, and moments, Richter's book is a moving, thought-provoking work of scholarship. -- James H. Merrell, author of Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier Richter offers a brilliant retelling of the old stories of European colonies and empires through Native eyes. Facing East from Indian Country may be as close as any scholar has come to synthesizing an "Indian perspective" on early American history This is a book not to be missed. -- Philip J. Deloria, author of Playing Indian With keen insight, deep reading, and a sparkling wit, Richter makes new and compelling sense of American history, radically shifting our perspective on the past. Balancing vivid imagination and a respect for the unknown, Richter crafts a powerful and engaging story that is essential to understanding our place in time on this continent. -- Alan Taylor, author of William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic

Prologue: Early America as Indian Country 1. Imagining a Distant New World 2. Confronting a Material New World 3. Living with Europeans 4. Native Voices in a Colonial World 5. Native Peoples in an Imperial World 6. Separate Creations Epilogue: Eulogy from Indian Country A Technical Note Notes Acknowledgments Index