The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization - Paperback

by Daniel K. Richter (Author)

Richter examines a wide range of primary documents to survey the responses of the peoples of the Iroquois League -- the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas, and Tuscaroras -- to the challenges of the European colonialization of North America. He demonstrates that by the early eighteenth century a series of creative adaptations in politics and diplomacy allowed the peoples of the Longhouse to preserve their cultural autonomy in a land now dominated by foreign powers.

Back Jacket

My primary audience is neither the scholarly specialists on the Five Nations nor the Iroquois themselves, although I trust each will find something worthwhile here. Instead, I hope to reach historians, students, and interested readers who still too often exclude native peoples from the narrative mainstream of North American development. This is a story of European colonization viewed from the Indian side of the frontier.

Author Biography

Daniel K. Richter is the Richard S. Dunn Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is author of Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America, and is coeditor of Beyond the Covenant Chain: The Iroquois and Their Neighbors in Indian North America, 1600-1800.