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A carregar... Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early Americapor Virginia DeJohn Anderson
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Adira ao LibraryThing para descobrir se irá gostar deste livro. Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro. Interesting book on how livestock were central to the encounter between English colonists and Indians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The English assumed that livestock cultivation would both allow the English settlers to control the new lands, transforming them into private property, and “civilize” Indians. But that’s not what happened for a very long time—instead, because of limited labor resources, the colonists regularly let their livestock run wild, which led to more conflict with Indians since the colonists wouldn’t stick to the land they said they wanted. Indians tried to integrate the new animals into their existing worldviews, but colonists often had the raw military power to insist both on their special status as property—even if wandering free in the woods—and on their subordinate status as nonhumans, contrary to many Indian understandings of the natural world. “As agents of empire, livestock occupied land in advance of English settlers, forcing native peoples who stood in their way either to fend the animals off as best they could or else to move on.” Anderson suggests that the intrusions of livestock can explain why Indian violence was primarily directed against settler property, not settler persons, including why they would sometimes mutilate animals instead of carrying them off to eat. Indians knew how much livestock mattered to the English, and the animals had “amply earned the Indians’ enmity in their own right” by destroying Indians’ cultivated crops and eating the plants that deer had previously consumed. ( ) sem críticas | adicionar uma crítica
When we think of the key figures of early American history, we think of explorers, or pilgrims, or Native Americans--not cattle, or goats, or swine. But as Virginia DeJohn Anderson reveals in this brilliantly original account of colonists in New England and the Chesapeake region, livestockplayed a vitally important role in the settling of the New World. Livestock, Anderson writes, were a central factor in the cultural clash between colonists and Indians as well as a driving force in the expansion west. By bringing livestock across the Atlantic, colonists believed that they provided the means to realize America's potential. It was thoughtthat if the Native Americans learned to keep livestock as well, they would be that much closer to assimilating the colonists' culture, especially their Christian faith. But colonists failed to anticipate the problems that would arise as Indians began encountering free-ranging livestock at almostevery turn, often trespassing in their cornfields. Moreover, when growing populations and an expansive style of husbandry required far more space than they had expected, colonists could see no alternative but to appropriate Indian land. This created tensions that reached the boiling point with KingPhilip's War and Bacon's Rebellion. And it established a pattern that would repeat time and again over the next two centuries. A stunning account that presents our history in a truly new light, Creatures of Empire restores a vital element of our past, illuminating one of the great forces of colonization and the expansion westward. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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