Description
Book SynopsisA study of Iroquois and European communities and coexistence in eastern North America before the American Revolution. It describes everyday encounters between Europeans and Indians along the frontiers of the Iroquois Confederacy in the St Lawrence, Mohawk, Susquehanna, and Ohio valleys.
Trade Review"Preston has created an original and stimulating narrative by engaging with frontier peoples on their own lands and on their own terms."—Christopher Bilodeau,
Ethnohistory"Well-written, thoroughly researched . . . . [Preston's] major contribution is the wonderful descriptions of Indian economic, cultural, and social relations with diverse whites in the Mohawk Valley."—L. M. Hauptman,
Choice"Students of Iroquois culture and backcountry history will be surprised and challenged by this book, which shows in a new way that conflict was never inevitable in the backcountry. Even on the eve of the Revolution, there was still the possibility of Indian-European amity in the Iroquoian borderlands."—Daniel Ingram,
Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography"Preston is an ambitious and stimulating writer, and his book is worthy of use in the graduate or advanced undergraduate classroom."—Gregory Evans Dowd,
American Historical Review"This book is a substantive and welcome addition to the scholarship on eighteenth-century Native-settler relations. . . . Preston's engaging writing style makes the book viable for assignment in upper-level undergraduate courses and graduate seminars, and all scholars in the field will need to grapple with the implications of his significant findings regarding the importance of local, "everyday," face-to-face interactions across cultural boundaries in early America."—Jon Parmenter,
William and Mary Quarterly“The Texture of Contact deserves to be recognized for what it is, a major contribution to the ever growing body of academic studies about Indian-white interactions, both peaceful and bloody, in colonial North America. Preston’s presentation represents a sophisticated analysis that moves significantly beyond currently fashionable explanations about Indian-white interactions—and the reasons why harmony finally gave way to a bloody history of violence and the dispossession of Native Americans from their homelands.”—James Kirby Martin, Pennsylvania History
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Under the Tree of Peace
1. The Tree of Peace Planted: Iroquois and French-Canadian Communities in the St. Lawrence Valley
2. Iroquois Communities in the Eighteenth-Century Mohawk Valley: Schoharie, Tiononderoge, and Canajoharie
3. Dispossessing the Indians: Proprietors, Squatters, and Natives in the Susquehanna Valley
4. "The Storm Which Had Been So Long Gathering": Pennsylvanians and Indians at War
5. "Our Neighbourhood with the Settlers": Iroquois and German Communities in the Seven Years' War
6. Imperial Crisis in the Ohio Valley: Indian, Colonial American, and British Military Communities
Epilogue: The Tree of Peace Uprooted
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
