Historical Review of New Worlds For All by Colin G. Calloway - Book Report/Review Example

Historical review Running head: HISTORICAL REVIEW Historical Review of New Worlds For All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America by Colin G. Calloway Write your name here Write the name of the institution here Colin G Calloway is Professor of History and Professor of Native American Studies; he received his PhD in 1978 at the University of Leeds in Great Britain. He has been associated with the Native American studies program since 1990 when he first came to Dartmouth as a visiting professor. Professor Calloway has written many books and articles on Native American History including: The scratch of a pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America; One vast Winter Count: The Native American West Before Lewis and Clark; New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of early America and others. Most books today will fill out the landscape or shine light into the dark interstices of existing paradigms. A few take the reader on a journey guided by a new map. A very few provide a reader a new atlas informed by new perspectives and new information. Calloway's New Worlds for All synthesizes the recent work of ethno-historians and historians of the colonial period into a coherent and convincing, new historical and cultural atlas of the first three hundred years of contact between Europeans and the indigenous peoples of North America. Hundred and fifty years ago, Franz Boas observed that when two cultures meet neither culture remains unchanged. The central point of Calloway's book demonstrates convincingly that historians should have attended to Boas all along, for the record of cultural borrowing, adapting, adopting, rejecting, modifying and creating, that recent historians have identified adds a wonderful richness to our understanding of American culture. The historic tradition that favored tracking the triumph of European and then American culture over Indian cultures mapped at best only part of the terrain. Calloway corrects that imbalance offering a more complex and sophisticated analysis, without feeling compelled to attack older historians. Nearly a century ago, Bernard De Voto made a passionate plea to change the story line of American history that dismisses Native Americans as little more than a hindrance to the course of progress. "American history" he wrote " has been written as if history were a function solely of white culture-in spite of the fact that till well into the nineteenth century the Indians were one of the principal determinants of historical events. De Voto charged that " American historians have made shockingly little effort to misunderstand the life, the societies, the cultures, the thinking, and the feeling of the Indians, and disastrously little effort to understand how all of these affected white man and their societies". Calloway's scholarship over the past several decades has answered De Voto's call for change by wining a rich vein of precious ore, representing the work of scores of Indian historians, anthropologists, linguists, archeologists, agronomists, and other scholars, he has constructed a primer on the myriad ways in which European colonizers were Indianized and Indians were Europeanized over two centuries continuous contact in North America. By canvassing the entire North American continent-necessarily incorporating French-Indian, Dutch-Indian and Spanish-Indian as well as Anglo-Indian contacts-Calloway has struck a useful blow in a campaign to treat the colonial period as something more than a preview of the emerging of the nation state. Calloway employs lucid prose and captivating examples to remind us that neither Indians nor Colonists were a monolithic group. Although many Americans consider the establishment of the colonies as the birth of the American country, in fact early America already existed long before the arrival of the Europeans. From coast to coast, Native Americans had created enduring cultures, and the subsequent European invasion remade much of the existing land and culture. In New worlds for All, Colin Calloway explores the unique and vibrant new cultures that Indians and Europeans forged together in early America. The journey towards this hybrid society kept Europeans' and Indians' lives tightly entwined: living, working worshiping, traveling, and trading together-as well as fearing, avoiding, despising, and killing one another. In the west, settlers lived in Indian towns, eating Indian food. In Mohawk Valley, New York, Europeans tattooed their faces; and Indians drank tea. And a unique American identity emerged. Calloway's grand synthesis of the experience of Indians and other Americans before1800 is exceptional, everything from war and disease, to trade and sex, from clothes and houses to foods and cures is being examined without loosing sight of the individual, human story. Recent history generally casts the European conquest of North America as a thoughtless and malicious genocide of the indigenous population. And while this is in some ways correct, the stress on American Indians' victimization at the hands of the invaders results in ignoring the Indians' contribution to the resulting American culture. Calloway acknowledges that the European effect on Indian life was larger, and more devastating, than the other way around, he contends that Indian culture contributed in many significant ways to what would eventually become a distinctly American way of life. The author supports his thesis with many oft-cited facts about early colonial times. Few readers will be surprised when Calloway reports that Europeans settled in deserted Indian towns, looked to Indians to show them how to cultivate indigenous crops, or that not just corn and tobacco but also potatoes and tomatoes were discovered in the New World and introduced to Europeans as exports from the colonies. Not as well known is the respect many Europeans felt for Indian medicine, or that so-called 'Indian style" warfare -guerrilla tactics that colonists were said to have adopted in their successful fight against the British army during the American revolution-was in fact only invented by Indians a hundred years before to counter the unfamiliar tactics of European interlopers. Although much of the information from the book is well known, this is a fine primer of the cross-cultural influence of the Europeans and Indians in early American life. Calloway noted the dismal coverage of Indians in American textbooks and declared, as Bernard De Voto did before him, that Indians were " One of the principal determinants of historical events". Calloway argues that ' things could not have been the way they were without the interaction of Indian and European peoples in America". Calloway sought to remove Indians from "some kind of exotic subcategory in American history" and "instead to integrate them as essential participants in the making of American history and the shaping of American societies". The book is organized into ten thematic chapters which examine both ideas and practice in such a diverse areas such as decease and medicine, warfare, theology, international relations, demography, ideology, practice of religion, trade and material culture, sex and family formation. Each area unfolds to show the interplay of culture, personality, and the land. A choice sentence that Calloway uses from the anthropologists Sidney W. Mintz and Richard price at the beginning of the book sums up his message: " new World it is, for those who became its peoples remade it, and in the process, they remade themselves." The sentence quoted refers to the merging and melding of Indian, African, and European cultural attributes. However, Calloway leaves Africans out of the New World equation. This can be justified by his purpose of showing the myriad ways in which Native Americans and Europeans mingle, merged and married. Calloway is silent on some topics that have enormous effects on how Indian societies changed trough living along porous boundaries with European settlers. Perhaps the most important is alcohol-a vital trade item not mentioned in his discussion of dietary changes in Indian societies or in his treatment of the fur trade. Political influences, running in one or both directions between Europeans and Native Americans, are another area Calloway ignores. Perhaps this may be explained by distaste for the arguments of Iroquois nationalists who make large claims about the influence of Iroquois confederation on American constitutional thinking. But whatever one's position on this on-going argument, there is little dispute that Indian political organizations and practice changed as a result of trade, war, and alliance with Europeans. New World for All concentrates on geopolitics rather than the actual business that provoked the violence. This is an interesting look at the early history of the European struggle for empire in North America, with particular emphasis on what it meant for the colony of North Carolina, and the Indian tribes they interacted with. The process of merging together, Calloway writes, lasted longer than the United States has existed as a nation. During that time, most of America was still " Indian country" and even in areas of European settlement. Indians and Europeans remained a part of each other's daily lives: living, working, worshiping, traveling, and trading together-as well as fearing, avoiding, despising, and killing one another. Ranging across the continent and over 300 years, new worlds for all describe encounters between Spanish conquistadors and Zuni warriors, Huron shamans and French Jesuits missionaries, English merchants and Montagnais traders. Calloway's discussion of conflict and cooperation includes the use of natural resources and shared knowledge about trail networks, herbal medicines, metal tools, and weapons. He depicts the European emulation of Indian military tactics, the varied responses of Indian societies of Christianity, attempts made on all sides to learn the languages and customs of the other, and the intermingling of peoples at the fringes of competing cultures-through captivity and adoption, attempts to escape one's own society and embrace another, or intermarriage. The New World, Calloway concludes, brought new identities for all, as Indian and European cultures combined to create a uniquely American identity. A significant virtue of the book is its tone. Calloway's voice is confident, but balanced. He resists overstatement, even dampening overstatements when he finds it in his sources. He resists taking gratuitous slaps at historians whose work seems now outdated, preferring rather to rescue elements of their work worth attending to now. The book rewards the vocational historian who will find flashes of insight and interpretative brilliance in every one of the ten chapters. It also rewards the professional historian who will find in it linkages and evaluations that bring coherence to new historian research. It is a fine work, suited to a general audience, but most appropriate for any audience interested in historical interpretation. In sum, this is a positive, moderately even modestly stated account that convinces through solid example and clear detail gleaned from respected historians working on the cusp of modern scholarship of the first three centuries of European-Indian contacts. Reference: 1. Calloway G. Colin; New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Read More