The Ordeal Of The Longhouse

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.

Beginning in 1701, the Iroquois, at their nadir after twenty years of warring, sought to rebuild the Confederacy. By design or circumstance, they carried out sophisticated diplomatic relations with their Indian and white neighbors, gradually recouping much of their political, military, and economic power. The Iroquois helped shape the frontier, influencing Westward expansion, the fur trade, and colonial warfare.

A fully revised and updated new edition of the classic history of western America The newly revised second edition of this concise, engaging, and unorthodox history of America’s West has been updated to incorporate new research, including recent scholarship on Native American lives and cultures. An ideal text for course work, it presents the West as both frontier and region, examining the clashing of different cultures and ethnic groups that occurred in the western territories from the first Columbian contacts between Native Americans and Europeans up to the end of the twentieth century.

Seventeenth-century North America was truly a new world for both the European and indigenous First Nations native cultures that interfaced upon that spectacular wilderness theater. For both the native people and the European, this stage forged new understandings from all things thought familiar to previous generations. Throughout this historical period were episodes that defined the era, episodes that captured the essence of the human spirit, and episodes that abase a work of fiction. One such episode that proved an epoch of the era was the 1656 French Jesuit mission embassy among the Haudenosaunee-Iroquois. This was the mission Ste. Marie established in the heart of Iroquoia, at a place known and revered by the Iroquois for its spiritual and political significance--Gannentaha. The Ste. Marie mission proved as a captivating geopolitical choke point of its era. Its story remains an intriguing historical human drama, a hallmark cultural interface event, an inspirational faith journey story, and an audacious act of perseverance and courage within a larger historical saga. The Ste. Marie de Gannentaha episode is an enduring story to be told and remembered beyond the generation of those who lived it.

Gateways to Empire: Quebec and New Amsterdam to 1664 by Daniel Weeks is the first comprehensive comparative study of the North American fur-trading colonies New France and New Netherland. Weeks traces the evolution of Quebec and New Amsterdam from hubs for trade with the Indians to gateways for European settlement.

The early modern period (c. 1500–1800) of world history is characterized by the establishment and aggressive expansion of European empires, and warfare between imperial powers and indigenous peoples was a central component of the quest for global dominance. From the Portuguese in Africa to the Russians and Ottomans in Central Asia, empire builders could not avoid military interactions with native populations, and many discovered that imperial expansion was impossible without the cooperation, and, in some cases, alliances with the natives they encountered in the new worlds they sought to rule. Empires and Indigenes is a sweeping examination of how intercultural interactions between Europeans and indigenous people influenced military choices and strategic action. Ranging from the Muscovites on the western steppe to the French and English in North America, it analyzes how diplomatic and military systems were designed to accommodate the demands and expectations of local peoples, who aided the imperial powers even as they often became subordinated to them. Contributors take on the analytical problem from a variety of levels, from the detailed case studies of the different ways indigenous peoples could be employed, to more comprehensive syntheses and theoretical examinations of diplomatic processes, ethnic soldier mobilization, and the interaction of culture and military technology. Warfare and Culture series Contributors: Virginia Aksan, David R. Jones, Marjoleine Kars, Wayne E. Lee, Mark Meuwese, Douglas M. Peers, Geoffrey Plank, Jenny Hale Pulsipher, and John K. Thornton

This magnificent, sweeping work traces the histories of the Native peoples of the American West from their arrival thousands of years ago to the early years of the nineteenth century. Emphasizing conflict and change, One Vast Winter Count offers a new look at the early history of the region by blending ethnohistory, colonial history, and frontier history. Drawing on a wide range of oral and archival sources from across the West, Colin G. Calloway offers an unparalleled glimpse at the lives of generations of Native peoples in a western land soon to be overrun.

The academic field of Peace Studies emerged during the Cold War to address the nature and sources of interstate and internal conflict and methods to prevent it and deal with its consequences.