Our savage neighbors : how Indian war transformed early America

Resource Information

The work Our savage neighbors : how Indian war transformed early America represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Liverpool. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Our savage neighbors : how Indian war transformed early America

Title remainder

how Indian war transformed early America

Statement of responsibility

Peter Silver

Creator

• Silver, Peter Rhoads

Subject

• Indians of North America -- First contact with Europeans
• Indians of North America -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775
• Frontier and pioneer life -- United States
• United States -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775
• United States -- Race relations
• Indians of North America -- Wars

Language

eng

Summary

"Relying on original archival research, historian Peter Silver uncovers a fearful and vibrant early America in which Lutherans and Presbyterians, Quakers, Catholics and Covenanters, Irish, German, French, and Welsh all sought to lay claim to a daunting countryside. Such groups had only rarely intermingled in Europe; and with religious revivals, war scares, and unease over immigration, the divisions between them only grew - until, with the arrival of the Seven Years' War, thousands of country people were forced to flee from Indian attack." "Playing politics with terror, rural settlers accused Quakers, politicians, and urban elites of turning their backs on the countryside and on their fellow "white people" (a term that until then had been used only by Indian tribes). Agitators carted scalped corpses into city squares and cried out for action. Writers, pamphleteers, politicians, religious leaders - all seized upon the horrors of Indian war, recycling its gruesome images to stoke the Europeans' collective alarm." "Silver reveals in vivid and often chilling detail how easily a rhetoric of fear can incite entire populations to violence. He shows how it was only through the shared experience of fearing and hating Indians that these Europeans, once irreconcilable, were finally united. Ironically, only in the face of a common enemy did they discover an ideal that would come to define the best in American life: ethnic and religious tolerance."--BOOK JACKET

Cataloging source

DLC

Illustrations

• illustrations
• maps

Index

index present

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography