Over the past generation, historians, anthropologists and other scholars have transformed our understanding of the history of North America's native peoples between first contact with Europeans in 1492 and the era of Indian Removal in the 1840s. Once relegated to the sidelines of historical scholarship, studies of Native Americans and of their relations with Europeans are now basic components of any serious effort to understand the early American experience. This timely anthology brings together much of the best work available on early Native American history, offering comprehensive yet focused coverage on a wide array of topics from contact, exchange and diplomacy to religion, disease and warfare.

Author Biography

Peter C. Mancall is Professor of History and Anthropology at the University of Southern California and Director of the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute. He is the author of several books, including Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America and Hakluyt's Promise: An Elizabethan's Obsession for an English America. James H. Merrell, the Lucy Maynard Salmon Professor of History at Vassar College, is the author of the Bancroft Prize-winning books The Indians' New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors From European Contact through the Era of Removal and Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier.