Description
Book SynopsisLenape Country is a sweeping narrative history of Lenape Indian encounters with European settlers in the Delaware Valley in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
Trade Review"A commonly held idea is that Quaker settlers led by William Penn established Delaware Valley society's emphases on freedom, tolerance, and peaceful conflict. In
Lenape Country, however, Jean R. Soderlund demonstrates that these Delaware Valley hallmarks originated with the Lenape Indians and were the bases of Lenape economic and political dominance through successive waves of European colonization in the region. . . .
Lenape Country is meticulously researched and cautiously analyzed, qualities that strengthen Soderlund's assertions for the primacy of Lenape influence in the formation of Delaware Valley identity. It is a much needed study of this pivotal time in American history and a valuable contribution to Native American and colonial-era scholarship." *
American Studies *
"Succinct and imaginatively conceived,
Lenape Country is one of the best narrative histories I have read to date on the European-Indian interaction along the Delaware River." * Gunlög Fur, author of
A Nation of Women: Gender and Colonial Encounters Among the Delaware Indians *
Table of ContentsNote on the Text
Introduction
Chapter 1. A Free People, Subject to No One
Chapter 2. Controlling the Land through Massacre and War, 1626-38
Chapter 3. Managing a Tenuous Peace, 1638-54
Chapter 4. Allies against the Dutch, 1654-64
Chapter 5. Allies against the English, 1664-73
Chapter 6. Protecting Sovereignty amid Wars, 1673-80
Chapter 7. Negotiating Penn's Colony, 1681-1715
Chapter 8. Strategies of Survival and Revenge
Conclusion
Note on Methodology
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
