The Middle Ground Audiobook By Richard White cover art

The Middle Ground

Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815

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The Middle Ground

By: Richard White
Narrated by: Bob Souer
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An acclaimed book and widely acknowledged classic, The Middle Ground steps outside the simple stories of Indian-white relations—stories of conquest and assimilation and stories of cultural persistence. It is, instead, about a search for accommodation and common meaning. It tells how Europeans and Indians met, regarding each other as alien, as other, as virtually nonhuman, and how between 1650 and 1815 they constructed a common mutually comprehensible world in the region around the Great Lakes that the French called pays d'en haut. Here the older worlds of the Algonquians and of various Europeans overlapped, and their mixture created new systems of meaning and of exchange. Finally, the book tells of the breakdown of accommodation and common meanings and the re-creation of the Indians as alien and exotic. First published in 1991, the twentieth anniversary edition includes a new preface by the author examining the impact and legacy of this study.

©1991, 2011 Cambridge University Press (P)2022 Tantor Americas Indigenous Peoples United States World
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Traces the evolution of Native American relations with French, British, and eventually Americans in the modern Ohio and upper Mississippi valleys. Most books on this subject focus primarily on the military aspects of the history, but The Middle Ground has a sociological perspective that feels foundational to understanding the whole story.

A foundational work on the period

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This is an early White, written to impress fellow academics rather than to provide a good experience for readers and listeners. The research is phenomenal and it’s all there in fine detail. There’s an overarching theme, expressed in the title, to which he seeks to bend every anecdote, but no narrative rhythm or drive. It’s a long series of digressions in search of something to digress from. Impressive and convincing but a slog.

Very academic

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This is a good book, but it is an academic monograph. Casual readers might be annoyed that it’s not so much a straightforward history book as it is an analysis of cultural interactions over a specific period.

By the end I felt that some of the points were belabored, but still it is an eye opening book about the complexities of European-Native American relations in the 17th-early 19th centuries. Naturally, far more complicated than we are taught in grade school.

A great book, not for beginners

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Most assuredly not your ‘Indian Starter Book’, but for those fairly well heeled ‘in the know’ concerning the tribes, I’m confident that you may just find a gem. It’s tough to come across untold stories / perspectives, therefore I was pleased.

Pleasantly surprised.

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