New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (The American Moment) - Softcover

Calloway employs lucid prose and captivating examples to remind us that neither Indians nor Colonists were a monolithic group... The result is a more nuanced appreciation for the complexity of cultural relationships in Colonial America... He surveys this complex story with imagination and insight and provides an essential starting point for all those interested in the interaction of Europeans and Indians in early American life.

Paints a panoramic picture of multilayered interactions between Europeans and American Natives throughout North America... Through a telling use of quotation and example Calloway demonstrates that history comprises the cumulative experience of countless people.

Calloway wants to restore Indian peoples to a national experience from which they have, excapt as combantants against whites, been largely erased. But more than that, he want to show how European settlers as they entered Indian country, became Americans.

New Worlds for All fills an important niche in the historiography of early America. The book presents the best available brief synthesis of current historical scholarship on relations between Indians and Europeans, and it covers all of North America instead of just the British colonies.

The book expertly synthesizes a generation of scholarship that, guided by the ethnohistorical imperative to render crosscultural encounters from the perspectives of all participants, has moved Amerindians from the periphery to the center of colonial history.

I cannot think of another work that sets out to accomplish what Colin Calloway has achieved. New Worlds for All stands poised to become the most successful synthesis of North American ethnohistory from contact to the early national period.

The European colonization of North America entailed not the discovery of a 'New World' but the creation of multiple 'new worlds.' Colin Calloway is to be congratulated for synthesizing an enormous body of scholarship and offering this accessible explanation of the emergence of a multicultural America.

Colin Calloway's grand synthesis of the experience of Indians and other Americans before 1800 is exceptional in its breadth of vision. Taking as his canvas the entire North American continent—examining everything from war and disease to trade and sex, from clothes and houses to foods and cures—he nonetheless never loses sight of the individual, human story, the vivid encounter or striking incident that brings the past to life.

Colin Calloway charts a sensible middle way between the gross generalizations and the random trivia that have long dominated discussions of the influences that Native Americans and Europeans exerted on one another. Wearing its vast research lightly, New Worlds for All provides an excellent introduction to recent scholarship on cultural interaction in early America.

Although many Americans consider the establishment of the colonies as the birth of this country, in fact Early America already existed long before the arrival of the Europeans. From coast to coast, Native Americans had created enduring cultures, and the subsequent European invasion remade much of the existing land and culture. In New Worlds for All, Colin Calloway explores the unique and vibrant new cultures that Indians and Europeans forged together in early America. The journey toward this hybrid society kept Europeans' and Indians' lives tightly entwined: living, working, worshiping, traveling, and trading together—as well as fearing, avoiding, despising, and killing one another. In the West, settlers lived in Indian towns, eating Indian food. In Mohawk Valley, New York, Europeans tattooed their faces; Indians drank tea. And, a unique American identity emerged.