A Strange Likeness

Description

The relationship between American Indians and Europeans on America's frontiers is typically characterized as a series of cultural conflicts and misunderstandings based on a vast gulf of difference. Nancy Shoemaker turns this notion on its head, showing that Indians and Europeans shared commonbeliefs about their most fundamental realities--land as national territory, government, record-keeping, international alliances, gender, and the human body.Before they even met, Europeans and Indians shared perceptions of a landscape marked by mountains and rivers, a physical world in which the sun rose and set every day, and a human body with its own distinctive shape. They also shared in their ability to make sense of it all and to invent new,abstract ideas based on the tangible and visible experiences of daily life...

First Sentence

In 1650, several Indian guides led a party of Englishmen into the interior of Virginia so that they could establish trade relations with the Tuscaroras.

Description

When American Indians and Europeans met on the frontiers of eighteenth-century eastern North America, they had many shared ideas about human nature, political life, and social relations. But instead of finding fellowship in their common humanity, both Indians and Europeans emphasized their difference, increasingly so as the eighteenth century progressed. By the century's end, they had come to see themselves as people so different in their customs and natures that they appeared to be each other's opposite.

Subjects

Other Editions

• A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North AmericaOxford University Press, USA2004-02-25
• A Strange LikenessOxford University Press, USA2006-03-30
• A Strange LikenesseBookOxford University Press2007-01-01