James H. Merrell, '75
Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier. Paperback: 463 pages; W.W. Norton & Company, January 2000; ISBN: 0-3933-1976-8.
James Merrell is the Lucy Maynard Salmon Professor of History at Vassar College.
Into the American Woods deals with the people Merrell calls "go-betweens" -- the Europeans and Indians who moved between cultures on the Pennsylvania frontier as negotiators, translators, and de facto diplomats. Since knowledge of an Indian language was required, go-betweens were often fur traders, people of mixed blood, missionaries, Indian converts to Christianity, or white people who had been held captive by Indians; still, despite being held in suspicion by both sides, their profession was a necessary one during the period of the "Long Peace" -- from Pennsylvania's founding to the start of the French and Indian War -- a time that was far less peaceful than its name implies.
Writing in The New Republic, Alan Taylor called Into the American Woods a story about "how an early regime of mutual adjustment and mixed culture gave way as the colonists grew in power and asserted a rigid racial divide that exterminated, confined, or exiled the last of the natives."
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