The Memory Of All Ancient Customs

In The Memory of All Ancient Customs, Tom Arne Midtrød examines the complex patterns of diplomatic, political, and social communication among the American Indian peoples of the Hudson Valley-including the Mahicans, Wappingers, and Esopus Indians-from the early seventeenth century through the American Revolutionary era. By focusing on how members of different Native groups interacted with one another, this book places Indians rather than Europeans on center stage. Midtrød uncovers a vast and multifaceted Native American world that was largely hidden from the eyes of the Dutch and English colonists who gradually displaced the indigenous peoples of the Hudson Valley. In The Memory of All Ancient Customs he establishes the surprising extent to which numerically small and militarily weak Indian groups continued to understand the world around them in their own terms, and as often engaged- sometimes violently, sometimes cooperatively-with neighboring peoples to the east (New England Indians) and west (the Iroquois ) as with the Dutch and English colonizers. Even as they fell more and more under the domination of powerful outsiders-Iroquois as well as Dutch and English-the Hudson Valley Indians were resilient, maintaining or adapting features of their traditional diplomatic ties until the moment of their final dispossession during the American Revolutionary War.

In The Memory of All Ancient Customs, Tom Arne Midtrød examines the complex patterns of diplomatic, political, and social communication among the American Indian peoples of the Hudson Valley—including the Mahicans, Wappingers, and Esopus Indians—from the early seventeenth century through the American Revolutionary era. By focusing on how members of different Native groups interacted with one another, this book places Indians rather than Europeans on center stage.Midtrød uncovers a vast and multifaceted Native American world that was largely hidden from the eyes of the Dutch and English colonists who gradually displaced the indigenous peoples of the Hudson Valley. In The Memory of All Ancient Customs he establishes the surprising extent to which numerically small and militarily weak Indian groups continued to understand the world around them in their own terms, and as often engaged— sometimes violently, sometimes cooperatively—with neighboring peoples to the east (New England Indians) and west (the Iroquois ) as with the Dutch and English colonizers. Even as they fell more and more under the domination of powerful outsiders—Iroquois as well as Dutch and English—the Hudson Valley Indians were resilient, maintaining or adapting features of their traditional diplomatic ties until the moment of their final dispossession during the American Revolutionary War.

Pacifist Prophet recounts the untold history of peaceable Native Americans in the eighteenth century, as explored through the world of Papunhank (ca. 1705–75), a Munsee and Moravian prophet, preacher, reformer, and diplomat. Papunhank’s life was dominated by a search for a peaceful homeland in Pennsylvania and the Ohio country amid the upheavals of the era between the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution. His efforts paralleled other Indian quests for autonomy but with a crucial twist: he was a pacifist committed to using only nonviolent means. Such an approach countered the messages of other Native prophets and ran against the tide in an early American world increasingly wrecked with violence, racial hatred, and political turmoil. Nevertheless, Papunhank was not alone. He followed and contributed to a longer and wider indigenous peace tradition. Richard W. Pointer shows how Papunhank pushed beyond the pragmatic pacifism of other Indians and developed from indigenous and Christian influences a principled pacifism that became the driving force of his life and leadership. Hundreds of Native people embraced his call to be “a great Lover of Peace” in their quests for home. Against formidable odds, Papunhank’s prophetic message spoke boldly to Euro-American and Native centers of power and kept many Indians alive during a time when their very survival was constantly threatened. Papunhank’s story sheds critical new light on the responses of some Munsees, Delawares, Mahicans, Nanticokes, and Conoys for whom the “way of war” was no way at all.

This volume of essays by historians and archaeologists offers an introduction to the significant impact of Dutch traders and settlers on the early history of Northeastern North America, as well as their extensive and intensive relationships with its Indigenous peoples. Often associated with the Hudson River Valley, New Netherland actually extended westward into present day New Jersey and Delaware and eastward to Cape Cod. Further, New Netherland was not merely a clutch of Dutch trading posts: settlers accompanied the Dutch traders, and Dutch colonists founded towns and villages along Long Island Sound, the mid-Atlantic coast, and up the Connecticut, Hudson, and Delaware River valleys. Unfortunately, few nonspecialists are aware of this history, especially in what was once eastern and western New Netherland (southern New England and the Delaware River Valley, respectively), and the essays collected here help strengthen the case that the Dutch deserve a more prominent position in future history books, museum exhibits, and school curricula than they have previously enjoyed. The archaeological content includes descriptions of both recent excavations and earlier, unpublished archaeological investigations that provide new and exciting insights into Dutch involvement in regional histories, particularly within Long Island Sound and inland New England. Although there were some incidences of cultural conflict, the archaeological and documentary findings clearly show the mutually tolerant, interdependent nature of Dutch-Indigenous relationships through time. One of the essays, by a Mohawk community member, provides a thought-provoking Indigenous perspective on Dutch–Native American relationships that complements and supplements the considerations of his fellow writers. The new archaeological and ethnohistoric information in this book sheds light on the motives, strategies, and sociopolitical maneuvers of seventeenth-century Native leadership, and how Indigenous agency helped shape postcontact histories in the American Northeast.

This vintage book by F. J. Drake-Carnell explores the historical English ceremonies and traditions. From the Queen's opening of parliament to small town festivals and beyond, this volume contains everything one might to know about English customs, and it is not to be missed by the discerning Anglophile. Contents include: “The Houses of Parliament (1)”, “The Houses of Parliament (2)”, “Royal Ceremonies”, “The City of London”, “The City Livery Companies”, “Ceremony and the Law”, “Ecclesiastical Ceremonies, Doles, and Charities”, “Customs in the Country (1)”, “Customs in the Country (2)”, “Customs in the Country (3)”, Curious Tenures (1)”, etc. Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially commissioned new introduction.

In Modernity through Letter Writing Claudia B. Haake shows how the Cherokees and Senecas envisioned their political modernity in missives they sent to members of the federal government to negotiate their status. They not only used their letters, petitions, and memoranda to reject incorporation into the United States and to express their continuing adherence to their own laws and customs but also to mark areas where they were willing to compromise. As they found themselves increasingly unable to secure opportunities for face-to-face meetings with representatives of the federal government, Cherokees and Senecas relied more heavily on letter writing to conduct diplomatic relations with the U.S. government. The amount of time and energy they expended on the missives demonstrates that authors from both tribes considered letters, memoranda, and petitions to be a crucial political strategy. Instead of merely observing Western written conventions, the Cherokees and Senecas incorporated oral writing and consciously insisted on elements of their own culture they wanted to preserve, seeking to convey to the government a vision of their continued political separateness as well as of their own modernity.