Beyond 1492: Encounters in Colonial North America

by James Axtell

In this provocative and timely collection of essays--five published for the first time--one of the most important ethnohistorians writing today, James Axtell, explores the key role of imagination both in our perception of strangers and in the writing of history. Coinciding with the 500th anniversary of Columbus's "discovery" of America, this collection covers a wide range of topics dealing with American history. Three essays view the invasion of North America from the perspective of the Indians, whose land it was. The very first meetings, he finds, were nearly always peaceful. Other essays describe native encounters with colonial traders--creating "the first consumer revolution"--and Jesuit missionaries in Canada and Mexico. Despite the tragedy of many of the encounters, Axtell also finds that there was much humor in Indian-European negotiations over peace, sex, and war. In the final section he conducts searching analyses of how college textbooks treat the initial century
of American history, how America's human face changed from all brown in 1492 to predominantly white and black by 1792, and how we handled moral questions during the Quincentenary. He concludes with an extensive review of the Quincentenary scholarship--books, films, TV, and museum exhibits--and suggestions for how we can assimilate what we have learned.

Genres: History

400 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[Christopher Sutch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Axtell is (or was; the book is almost 20 years old) an ethnohistorian and this collection of essays demonstrates both the strengths and incredible weaknesses of the subdiscipline as practised in the 1980s. There is no doubt that Axtell's work contributes something to the scholarly understanding of Native American, Spanish, and English cultures in the first few centuries of the "colonial encounters." However, Axtell, despite claiming to have absorbed the "lessons" of colonial discourse theorists, is still able to glibly assert that we should view European imperialism "neutrally," that the term "genocide" cannot realistically be applied to what Europeans did to the aboriginal peoples of this continent (despite the evidence literally before our very eyes: where ARE all those Native Americans? Oh, that's right, there's a few thousand slowly repopulating themselves, mostly on reservations), and his annoying continued use of the term "native" to describe aboriginal peoples (even Australian aborigines) several years after Trinh's work "Woman, Native, Other" should have showed him the problem with such language.

[Richard Subber · Rating 5 out of 5]

There’s a whole lot more to the story of Indian-European interaction in “the New World” than the alleged “first Thanksgiving” in the beleaguered Pilgrim colony on Cape Cod Bay.

Axtell offers learned intuition and credible research to describe the evolution of the First Americans’ perceptions of the hairy, smelly “Igrismannak” (“English men”) who invaded their land in the northern zone of North America. Of course, Europeans (the Spanish and the French) sent expeditions to North America in the 16th century, long before the English showed up.

We have much to learn about how the Indians resisted and embraced European cultures, faiths, technologies, and trade goods. (They thought the copper pots were marvelous). In part, Axtell explains, the Indians gradually gave up their independence for cloth and metal tools and guns.

Axtell bitingly criticizes the failures of 20th century American textbooks to portray our national history in full detail, as it actually happened. It’s not a pretty story.

Read more of my book reviews and poems here:
www.richardsubber.com

[Milo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extremely well written with balance between the radical two opposing views:
Those who worship Columbus and what he brought with him, and
Those who only see the damage done to the natives and ecology

[Amber · Rating 2 out of 5]

The information in the book is interesting, but reading the same concepts repeated over and over again made it a boring read. Read 1/3 of the book and you will have read the rest.

[Boni · Rating 3 out of 5]

Milo read me this book while I was sick with the flue