Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500-1643

by Neal Salisbury

Book Overview

Making a radical departure form traditional approaches to colonial American history, this book looks back at Indian-white relations from the perspective of the Indians themselves. In doing so, Salisbury reaches some startling new conclusions about a period of crucial-yet often overlooked-contact between two irreconcilably different cultures.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195030257
• ISBN13: 9780195030259
• Release Date: May 1982
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.8" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

outstanding work of history

this views the movement of english to new england with both breadth and depth. truly excellent.

Early New England encounters

Salisbury's book is very well written analysis of Indian - European encounters in early New England. Especially Indian actions are researched in admirable details. For anyone, who wants to know utmost of Indian policy in this region in the 16th and early 17th century, this is the essential reading. But I think, that book has one important weak point. Salisbury omits Puritan mind. He offers only socio-economic analysis of reasons for Puritan migration. But he neglects, that their actions toward Indians in the early faze of colonization were highly influenced by their world view - i. e. by their religion. From this point of view, good addition to this book is for example Peter Carroll's Puritanism and Wilderness (1969).

stimulating account of early European-Native contacts

A well-written chronicle of contacts and interactions between Europeans (concentrating of course on the English Puritans) and the Indians of New England. Somewhat revisionist, and thankfully so. These contacts didn't have to yield the result they did; the disappearance of the Native American wasn't a foregone conclusion from the moment Miles Standish alighted on Plymouth Rock - the Puritans wanted to get rid of the Indians, and with disease and war, this was accomplished.