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

by Neal Salisbury

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.

Genres: History, Native American, Academic, Nonfiction, The United States Of America, Native Americans, European History

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

Reviews

[Dan Gorman · Rating 4 out of 5]

While the book is dry and an early work of revisionist Native American history (there has been much more anthropological and archaeological work done since 1983), there is a lot of great information here. The British conquest of New England didn't stem from cultural superiority. It stemmed from choices by British settlers, fishers, and adventurers, who then had to navigate a dense web of tribal alliances and feuds. Native Americans emerge here as astute political actors, measuring British actions against reports of the French to the north. The successive waves of British immigration and exposure to new diseases doomed Native American resistance in the long term, but none of that would have happened, had these settlers not chosen to make the Atlantic crossing.

P.S. The chapter on Squanto, the Pokanoket, and the Pilgrims utterly destroys the myth of Thanksgiving.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a book I had from a class I took in college, but I read it pretty superficially then, and now that I'm more interested in the subject matter, I thought I'd revisit it. The interesting thing here is all the material about that ignored century from about 1500-1600, when all of these relationships between indians and english/french people started. At least in high school, everyone acts as if the relations between natives and europeans in what's now the united states started with Jamestown and Plymouth. But the two sides had been trading for decades before colonization.

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

Salisbury’s central argument revolves around a few contentions:

- the decimation of the Native American population was primarily due to disease, which in turn created sufficient vacuum for European military exploitation of the surviving native population;

-that the Puritan worldview was greatly influenced by a religious utopian view of the establishment of New England;

- and that the economic and social revolutions of Europe which found new ground in North America (something of a twin-headed virgin soil epidemic in themselves), and not simply the cultural differences between natives and Europeans, were a significant factor in the unraveling of events in New England, particularly in the realm of economic consequences for native autonomy.

These last two strike me as being of a piece. The economic revolution exported from Europe to New England was a major tenet of Puritan/Calvinist dogma and the particular religious utopianism defined the entirety of New England, and this particular strain of Protestantism was merely a component of the religious upheaval which had engulfed Europe.

Some reviewers complained at the time of publication that Salisbury painted the Puritans as "domineering and avaricious" (Alden Vaughan) and the the overall treatment demonstrated "a lack of empathy for English settlers” which results in a “somewhat lopsided” brand of ethnohistory (Glenn LaFantasie), or noted a distinct similarity to Francis Jennings’ The Invasion of America. However, Allen Trelease suggested Salisbury’s work is the antithesis component of a Hegelian dialectic at work in Native American-European contact ethnohistory, a necessary step on the way to true synthesis which “recognizes mixed motives and fallible behavior on both sides.” I am inclined to agree. Salisbury has apparently been at work on a follow-up volume, which will extend its scope to the conclusion of King Philip’s War, since publication of this work in 1982, which will bring his own work precisely into the same period as Jennings. Assuming the second book is published, it will be interesting to see how thirty years of dialectic has manifest itself.

[Renee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating and well-written history, told from a non-Eurocentric point of view.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for a class in college. The writing isn't great, but the subject matter is fascinating.