New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America

Although many Americans consider the establishment of the colonies as the birth of this 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 toward 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; Indians drank tea. And, a unique American identity emerged.

"Calloway employs lucid prose and captivating examples to remind us that neither Indians nor Colonists were a monolithic group... The result is a more nuanced apprectiation for the complexity of cultural relationships in Colonial America." -- Christian Science Monitor

Kirkus Reviews

A highly readable if not highly original history of the early interaction between Europeans and Native Americans.

Recent history generally casts the European conquest of North America as a thoughtless or 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. While Calloway (History and Native American Studies/Dartmouth Coll.; The American Revolution in Indian Country, 1995, not reviewed) 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 the 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 here is well known, this is a fine primer on the cross-cultural influence of the Europeans and Indians in early American life.

Colin G. Calloway is professor of history and Native American studies at Dartmouth College. His previous books include The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities, nominated for a 1995 Pulitzer Prize; The Western Abenakis of Vermont, 1600-1800: War, Migration, and the Survival of an Indian People; and Crown and Calumet: British-Indian Relations, 1783-1815.