Research Catalog

The middle ground : Indians, empires, and republics in the Great Lakes region, 1650-1815 / Richard White.

Title
The middle ground : Indians, empires, and republics in the Great Lakes region, 1650-1815 / Richard White.
Author
White, Richard, 1947-
Publication
Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1991.

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Details

Description
xvi, 544 pages : illustrations; 24 cm
Summary
This book seeks to step outside the simple stories of Indian/white relations--stories of conquest and assimilation and stories of cultural persistence. It is, instead, about a search for accommodation and common meaning. It tells how Europeans and Indians met, regarding each other as alien, as virtually nonhuman, and how between 1650 and 1815 they constructed a common, mutually comprehensible world in the region around the Great Lakes that the French called the "Pays d'en haut". Here the older worlds of the Algonquins and various Europeans overlapped, and their mixture created new systems of meaning and of exchange. Finally, the book tells of the breakdown of accommodation and common meanings and the recreation of the Indians as alien and exotic. The process of accommodation described in this book takes place in a middle ground, a place in between cultures and peoples, and in between empires and non-state villages. On the middle ground people try to persuade others who are different than themselves by appealing to what they perceive to be the values and practices of those others. From the creative misunderstandings that result, there arise shared meanings and new practices.
Series Statement
Cambridge studies in North American Indian history
Uniform Title
Cambridge studies in North American Indian history.
Subjects
Genre/Form
History
Bibliography (note)
  • Includes bibliographical references and index.
Processing Action (note)
  • committed to retain
Awards (note)
  • Albert J. Beveridge Award, 1992
  • American Historical Association Albert B. Corey Prize in Canadian-American Relations, 1992.
  • Association of American Publishers PROSE Award, 1991.
  • Society of American Historians Francis Parkman Prize, 1992.
Contents
List of abbreviations -- Introduction -- Refugees : a world made of fragments -- The middle ground -- The fur trade -- The alliance -- Republicans and rebels -- The clash of empires -- Pontiac and the restoration of the middle ground -- The British alliance -- The contest of villagers -- Confederacies -- The politics of benevolence -- Epilogue.
ISBN
  • 052137104X
  • 9780521371049
  • 0521424607
  • 9780521424608
LCCN
90002679
OCLC
  • 22344887
  • SCSB-10138248
Owning Institutions
Harvard Library