Facing East from Indian Country, Daniel K Richter
Facing East from Indian Country, Daniel K Richter
1 Rating(s)
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

Facing East from Indian Country
A Native History of Early America

Author: Daniel K Richter

Narrator: Bob Souer

Unabridged: 9 hr 27 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 12/04/2018


Synopsis

In the beginning, North America was Indian country. But only in the beginning. After the opening act of the great national drama, Native Americans yielded to the westward rush of European settlers.

Or so the story usually goes. Yet, for three centuries after Columbus, Native people controlled most of eastern North America and profoundly shaped its destiny. In Facing East from Indian Country, Daniel K. Richter keeps Native people center-stage throughout the story of the origins of the United States.

Viewed from Indian country, the sixteenth century was an era in which Native people discovered Europeans and struggled to make sense of a new world. Well into the seventeenth century, the most profound challenges to Indian life came less from the arrival of a relative handful of European colonists than from the biological, economic, and environmental forces the newcomers unleashed. Drawing upon their own traditions, Indian communities reinvented themselves and carved out a place in a world dominated by transatlantic European empires. In 1776, however, when some of Britain's colonists rebelled against that imperial world, they overturned the system that had made Euro-American and Native coexistence possible. Eastern North America only ceased to be an Indian country because the revolutionaries denied the continent's first peoples a place in the nation they were creating.

In rediscovering early America as Indian country, Richter employs the historian's craft to challenge cherished assumptions about times and places we thought we knew well, revealing Native American experiences at the core of the nation's birth and identity.

About Daniel K Richter

Dan Richter teaches early American History at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he also directs the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. His first book, The Ordeal of the Longhouse, won the 1993 Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Organization of American Historians, and the 1993 Ray Allen Billington Prize, Organization of American Historians, and was selected a 1994 Choice Outstanding Academic Book. His Facing East from Indian Country won the 2001-02 Louis Gottschalk Prize in Eighteenth-Century History and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.


Reviews

Goodreads review by David on November 17, 2019

The importance of this seminal study seems to grow with each passing year, leading me to suspect that it will one day become a classic of American history. Daniel Richter’s originality and insight shine from the book’s very title, which argues that we can best understand early American history by ce......more

Goodreads review by Jason on September 04, 2011

Another book that no U.S history teacher should be without. This book debunks so many myths and popular notions about the Native Americans that I came away feeling my mind had been purged of generations of stereotypes propogated both by Native Americans themselves and the popular media; and I have a......more

Goodreads review by Sean on June 08, 2020

Excellent book. I have a few problems with the stylistic choices, but otherwise this achieves the goal of a different and refreshingly nuanced historical perspective.......more

Goodreads review by Cameron on April 27, 2025

9.27 hours on Audible. Tragic history of the fall of Native Americans in the early colonial era and in the new republic which excluded and waged war against them.......more

Goodreads review by Alissa on September 20, 2016

Even though this book was a little hard to get into sometimes because of all the political and military details, I really loved how it gave me a different perspective of the English coming to America from the Native American point of view. In all of our history classes growing up, at least in all of......more