Search results for ""author william a. starna""

This history of the Mahicans begins with the appearance of Europeans on the Hudson River in 1609 and ends with the removal of these Native people to Wisconsin in the 1830s. Marshaling the methods of history, ethnology, and archaeology, William A. Starna describes as comprehensively as the sources allow the Mahicans while in their Hudson and Housatonic Valley homeland; after their consolidation at the praying town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts; and following their move to Oneida country in central New York at the end of the Revolution and their migration west. The emphasis throughout this book is on describing and placing into historical context Mahican relations with surrounding Native groups: the Munsees of the lower Hudson, eastern Iroquoians, and the St. Lawrence and New England Algonquians. Starna also examines the Mahicans’ interactions with Dutch, English, and French interlopers. The first and most transformative of these encounters was with the Dutch and the trade in furs, which ushered in culture change and the loss of Mahican lands. The Dutch presence, along with the new economy, worked to unsettle political alliances in the region that, while leading to new alignments, often engendered rivalries and war. The result is an outstanding examination of the historical record that will become the definitive work on the Mahican people from the colonial period to the Removal Era.

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Gideon’s People is the story of an American Indian community in the Housatonic Valley of northwestern Connecticut. It is based on some three decades of nearly uninterrupted German-language diaries and allied records kept by the Moravian missionaries who had joined the Indians at a place called Pachgatgoch, later Schaghticoke. It is supplemented by colonial records and regional political, social, and religious histories and ethnographies. As such, it represents the only comprehensive, thoroughly contextualized description of a Native people in southern New England and adjacent eastern New York for the mid-eighteenth century.The Moravians’ diaries report on the day-to-day activities in the community, including house-building, the production of material goods, hunting, fishing, and farming. We are told of marriages, births, deaths, disease, and the calamity of alcohol abuse. The unavoidable interactions with surrounding Indians and close-by colonial farmers and townspeople are offered in detail, along with the sometimes contentious relations with local and colonial authorities. And there is the omnipresence of the missionaries’ religious message to the Indians, frequently accepted and then tested by the inevitable temptations and, more than once, spurned. But we also learn of the struggles of the Moravians to feed and clothe themselves at a distance from their congregation in Bethlehem and their endeavors, often marked by conflict and deep personal pain, to lead their Native flock to the Lamb.

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William N. Fenton’s contributions to the understanding of the cultures and histories of the Iroquois are formidable. Fenton grounded his studies in decades of fieldwork among the Senecas, an encyclopedic knowledge of pertinent historical accounts, a keen appreciation for interpretive theory and practice in ethnohistory and anthropology, and an enduring, generous character. William Fenton: Selected Writings brings together for the first time Fenton’s most influential writings on the Iroquois and anthropology, written across nearly six decades. This volume includes Fenton’s classic studies of such key issues as Iroquois folklore, factionalism, and the repatriation of material culture; discussions of theory and practice and the methodology of “upstreaming”; obituaries of colleagues and reviews of other studies of the Iroquois; and summaries of the early Conferences on Iroquois Research. This collection reveals much about the world of the Iroquois, past and present, as well as the career and accomplishments of Fenton himself.

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This new edition and original translation of a tract by Dutch settler and lawyer van der Donck makes more widely accessible a document crucial for understanding the history of Dutch colonization in North America. . . . This document is an important primary source for students and researchers in colonial Dutch history, the settlement of New York and North America more generally, and the understanding of Indian cultures in the Northeast. —J. Mercantini, Choice This edition of A Description of New Netherland provides the first complete and accurate English-language translation of an essential first-hand account of the lives and world of Dutch colonists and northeastern Native communities in the seventeenth century. Adriaen van der Donck, a graduate of Leiden University in the 1640s, became the law enforcement officer for the Dutch patroonship of Rensselaerswijck, located along the upper Hudson River. His position enabled him to interact extensively with Dutch colonists and the local Algonquians and Iroquoians. An astute observer, detailed recorder, and accessible writer, Van der Donck was ideally situated to write about his experiences and the natural and cultural worlds around him. Van der Donck’s Beschryvinge van Nieuw-Nederlant was first published in 1655 and then expanded in 1656. An inaccurate and abbreviated English translation appeared in 1841 and was reprinted in 1968. This new volume features an accurate, polished translation by Diederik Willem Goedhuys and includes all the material from the original 1655 and 1656 editions. The result is an indispensable first-hand account with enduring value to historians, ethnohistorians, and anthropologists.

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