There's been a lot of really interesting work in this area and I just want to
highlight a couple of examples from the textbook. So one section that I'm really
happy with is the early portion of volume one where we talk about American
history to 1500 and you know historians are increasingly willing to look at non
textual sources, so things like archaeology and oral history and maps
and those kinds of sources can help tell a story that's much richer than
what we had before, and you can certainly see that on display here. So one of the
things that we bring up is the diversity of roles that Native people had. So they
weren't just hunters or gathers they're also farmers and fishermen or fisher-people I should probably say, and even city dwellers so there are Native
American cities before Columbus. Also you asked about race and slavery so a really
big intervention in the scholarship in the last 15 years I'd say, is the
revelation that native people were some of the first slaves taken by Europeans
in the Americas and throughout the colonial period from about you know from
1492 up till 1850s there were three to five million native people taken as
slaves in the Americas. So this is really a slave trade of you know hemispheric
proportions that connected Native people in really you know dangerous and deadly
ways to the global economy. So that is you know slavery initially did not
settle just on African people but on a wider spectrum of people. It wasn't
really until the early 1700s, after rivalries with Indian nations
created colonial wars that planters increasingly turned to African Americans
as slaves. But even then that happened mostly on the eastern seaboard and the
indian slave trade continued throughout much of the continent
until the late 19th century. So that for example really changes the way that we
think about race and slavery in North America. On a related note you know one
of the things that we want to bring out is how the violence of colonialism
impacts Native communities. And another piece of data that's clear from work on
the indian slave trade is that it's not just diseases that really impacted
native people and proved so devastating to their numbers it's those diseases
were compounded by violence from warfare and from slavery that really
significantly contributed to mortality. So that's like a missing piece of the
puzzle that makes the picture of the devastation of early Native communities
much different than the way it used to be. At the same time, you know, again,
Native people found ways to survive and an example that we bring out of that is
the Plains Indians in the 18th century. So these are people who actually adopted
European technologies like the horse and Firearms to develop a really viable
economy in bison hunting that lasted until the mid 1900s. So we see in
these volumes how native people are really impacted negatively by
globalization and colonialism but at the same time you know they creatively
respond to it, they survive.
Well, I think it changes their view of early American history in three ways. So
the first way is you know who are early Americans? And for a long time this
question really focused on British settlers on the East coast but the new
view of early American history is really continental. So it includes native people
it includes diverse colonizers you know that's French, Spanish, even Russian
colonists, and that continental view gives us a much more diverse and complex
picture of what America really is and what its origins are. And on a related
note you know where is early America? Again, like we used to look at these
places like Massachusetts and Virginia, which we obviously still do, but we also
look at places like colonial San Antonio right or the California mission system.
And finally you know I think that the story of early America itself changes
because it's no longer a group of Anglos who arrive on the east coast and face
West to try to conquer a continent. What we see instead is that they're competing
nations and empires that try to implement their own visions for the
future and you know that isn't necessarily always a straightforward
path to freedom, right. So this is a much more kind of dynamic story of
give-and-take and of the ways that people have tried to secure autonomy and
prosperity, sometimes in the face of great challenges.