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Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America

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Manufacturer: W. W. Norton
List Price: $29.95
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"No recent work of history...has presented such a distinctive—and beautifully resonant—authorial voice."—John Demos, Yale University

The colonial communities of eighteenth-century America were perhaps the most racially, ethnically, and religiously mixed societies on earth. Lutherans and Presbyterians, Quakers, Catholics, and Covenentors, the Irish, the German, the French, the Welsh—groups that rarely intermingled in Europe—were thrown together when they confronted the American countryside. Rather than embracing the inescapable and ever-increasing diversity, the European settler communities had their very existence threatened by the tensions and fears among their own groups. Only through "Indian-hating"—in both military and rhetorical forms—could the splintered colonists find a common ground.

In potent, graceful prose that sensitively unearths the social complexity and tangled history of colonial relations, Peter Silver gives us an astonishingly vivid picture of eighteenth-century America. He straddles cultural history, political history, social history, and ethnohistory to offer groundbreaking insights into the seminal forces that continue to shape the United States today. 13 illustrations; 2 maps.


DESCRIPTION:

Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.2
EAN: 9780393062489
ISBN: 0393062481
Label: W. W. Norton
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 352
Publication Date: 2007-11-26
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Studio: W. W. Norton


SIMILAR ITEMS:

• Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution
• What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford History of the United States)
• American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier
• Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier
• The Slave Ship: A Human History


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Summary: A Completely Believable Theory of How the White Race was Invented in America
Comment: To the extent that all our history is but a conduit back to our collective national memory, this sophisticated book chips away at the "Rosetta Stone" coiled in the nation's bosom: It uncovers one of the key sources of our obsession with the issue of race, and racism.

But race, in this context has to do, not so much with black and white issues, as with red and white issues. Unlike the familiar tracts on how whiteness evolved, (Such as Winthrop D. Jordan's "White over Black," or Theodore W. Allen's "The Invention of the White Race") that tend to carry the heavy odor of a socialist axe to grind (which is to say most of them), this one has no ideological axe to wield. And the very fact that it took so long to uncover this rather innocent but imminently common sense and believable thesis is itself no small measure of how deep our national denial on the issue of race really is.

What this brilliant author and researcher tells us is that the white race has not been in existence for time immemorial (as the committed racists tell themselves - even claiming Greek and Roman history as part of a common "white heritage," and pedigree), but was invented in the aftermath of the "Seven Year War," by demagogues, and scam-artists, pamphleteers, and other peddlers of the print medium, whose tactics even today would make Madison Avenue "Ad Men" blush.

As the story is told here, during, and in the aftermath of the war between England and France, the disparate tribes on opposing sides of that war, for their own respective existential imperatives, found for the first time, ways to coalesce as groups in order to fight each other in that war. The Indian tribes, who literally had been fighting each other for centuries, came together for the first time to address the emerging and rapidly expanding existential threat of encroaching (rather than invading) hoards of "European Settlers," who the Indians (not Europeans) first gave the name "White men."

On the opposing side, were the European tribes: a disparate collection of Europe's ethnic underbelly. Most were thrown onto the North American shores to sink or swim as a last resort to their lowly European existence. As people, these European tribes were as unalike and as disconnected from each other as any group ever dumped onto the shores of a foreign land. For the most part they disliked and distrusted each other immensely, and did so for all the obvious reasons: They had fought each other on the European continent over customs, traditions, religions, politics, resources, etc. But in Europe they were at least protected from each other by national borders. In the new world even this final barrier was torn way. They were all thrown into the same American mixing bowl, left to their own devices, to sink or swim.

It was in fact these "pockets" of differentiated, unmixable and profoundly isolated ethnic European tribes that were strewn and strung vulnerable across the pre-American frontier. Each tribe it seems had in fact made a conscious effort to get as far away from other European tribes as was humanly possible. This cultural dis-affinity and isolation among the white tribes, which even today remains an enduring fixture of the American cultural and geographic landscape, during the time of Seven Year War, became a decidedly serious military liability.

Both the French and their Indian allies were keenly aware of, and sought to exploit this vulnerability. The Indians used terrorist tactics (such as scalping their victims and leaving them in conspicuous places) to brilliant effect. By "picking off" the settlers one hamlet and fort at a time, the Indian raids raised to the breaking point the ante on fear and terror among the isolated settlers. The disparate white tribes now had no choice but to try to come together to fight a common and very effective and determined enemy. However, this proved easier said than done. The then "powers that be, the landed gentry, secure on their estates, away from the outer perimeter of the frontier, could care less about those poor desperate bastards left isolated and vulnerable "out there" of the nation's periphery.

So, what to do?

The tribes had no choice but to come together, under the shrewd media blitz and demagoguery of the peddlers of a new war propaganda and a new racial ideology of "saving the white men from the terror of the red men;" and in doing so, they made a virtue out of necessity. This book tells how they did this. That is to say, it tells how the demagogues of that day, repackaged the fear and horrors of the frontier wars to create an artificial unity among the European tribes that overtime would endure and would evolve into, not just a unifying racial ideology and worldview, but also into a democratic revolution that dignified ordinary people and gave expression to the fledgling new republic's deepest yearnings. A truly worthy contribution to American history and to historical scholarship.

Five stars.

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