The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest

by Francis Jennings

Book Overview

Francis Jennings demonstrates that the story of the tribes east of the Alleghenies has been as filled with myths and is equally as dramatic and tragic as that of the better-known horse Indians of the Western Plains.He also examines the real history of the relationships between Europeans and Indians in what is ordinarily called the colonial period of United States history.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393008304
• ISBN13: 9780393008302
• Release Date: January 1976
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 369 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 4.8" x 7.3"

Customer Reviews

Fantastic Work

The beauty of this book...the author, though angry, uses the angry energy in a focused, forthright and definitive way. The result is an informative and detailed look at history that most may be surprised to read. Jennings analysis of the events is told in a story-like form, so that the reader is enlightened, then slowly taken in by the intrigue and intriging mischief of the day. Another title for this research could have been {the art of puritan warfare}. The author tells of the barbaric, imperialistic, and destructive engagements with the Irish as a prelude to the western invasion. This invasive group of people had plenty of practice. Word of advice, read slowly, don't miss anything...Fantastic Work...

Very thought provoking

Francis Jennings' first book, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism and the Cant of Conquest was path breaking when released in 1975, a book of "angry, forceful prose [that] still touches readers a quarter century after its publication," according to his 2001 obituary in the newsletter of the American Organization of Historians. In fact, Jennings himself was known for his "irrepressible" devotion to debunking the myths of Native American history of the colonial period, particularly the works of Francis Parkman. As his eulogizer Frederick Hoxie notes, Jennings early on insisted that "America began not with "discovery" but invasion," a belief which set "himself apart from those who viewed the fate of the continent's indigenous people as somehow inevitable or natural." The polemical The Invasion of America was the first in what Jennings called his "Covenant Chain Trilogy," with The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire (1984) and Empire of Fortune (1988) finishing the set. As Hoxie states, The Invasion of America (and most of Jennings' other writings) was a "frontal attack on the generations of scholars who, he argued, had internalized the racist language of the seventeenth century and overlooked the violence and brutality of European settlement." As another reviewer writes, "this is a strong, angry book," the prose of which is characterized by "the author's controlled outrage at what happened and at the misconceptions, distortions, and even lies he sees in the treatment of the period by other historians."

Jennings lays it out- you have to make yourself think.

Book offers analyses based on thorough interpretation of primary sources.It is a seed book portraying the event of European conquest on the North American continent. The magnitude of the underlying falsehoods that American history is based upon are what the reader walks away with after digesting this work.The list of sources contained in the work are worth the price of the book