The shame and the sorrow : Dutch-Amerindian encounters in New Netherland

Author(s)

• Merwick, Donna

Bibliographic Information

The shame and the sorrow : Dutch-Amerindian encounters in New Netherland

Donna Merwick

（Early American studies）

University of Pennsylvania Press, c2006

• : pbk.

Note

Includes bibliographical references and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

The Dutch, through the directors of the West India Company, purchased Manhattan Island in 1625. They had come to the New World as traders, not expecting to assume responsibility as the sovereign possessor of a conquered New Netherland. They did not intend to make war on the native peoples around Manhattan Island, but they did; they did not intend to help destroy native cultures, but they did; they intended to be overseas the tolerant, pluralistic, and antimilitaristic people they thought themselves to be-and in so many respects were-at home, but they were not. For the Dutch intruders, establishing a settled presence away from the homeland meant the destabilization of the adventurers' values and self-regard. They found that the initially peaceful encounters with the indigenous people soon took on the alarming overtones of an insurgency as the influx of the Dutch led to a complete upheaval and eventual disintegration of the social and political worlds of the natives. How are the Dutch to be judged? Donna Merwick, in The Shame and the Sorrow, asks this question. She points to a betrayal both of their own values and of the native peoples. She also directs us to the self-delusion of hegemonic control. Her work belongs alongside the best of today's postcolonial studies in the description of cross-cultural violence and subtle questioning of the nature of writing its history.

Table of Contents

Soundings PART I. ALONGSHORE 1. Alongshore: Stories to Tell of the Virginias 2. "The Island" PART II. SHARED BEACHES 3. The Quarterdeck and Trading Station 4. Natives and Strangers PART III. STAYING ALONGSHORE 5. Sovereign People 6. Masters of Their Lands 7. Inland Drownings PART IV. OMENS OF A TRAGEDY COMING ON 8. Bells of War 9. "Only This and Nothing More" 10. The Connecticut Valley: The Strangers' Ways of Violence PART V. DEADLY ENCOUNTER 11. The Indian War Seen 12. The Indian War Given Words 13. The War's Haunting PART VI. CROSS-COLONIZATION 14. Watchful Waiting 15. Alongshore Compromised 16. Considerations on a Just War PART VII. FINAL LOGGED ENTRIES 17. Cultural Entanglement 18. No Closure Weighing Up Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments

by "Nielsen BookData"

• NCID: BB12742907
• ISBN:
  • 9780812222722
• Country Code: us
• Title Language Code: eng
• Text Language Code: eng
• Place of Publication: Philadelphia
• Pages/Volumes: viii, 332 p.
• Size: 24 cm
• Classification:
  • DC23 : 974.702
• Subject Headings:
  • LCSH : Indians of North America -- New York (State) -- History
  • LCSH : Indians of North America -- Wars -- New York (State)
  • LCSH : New York (State) -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775
  • LCSH : New Netherland -- History
• Parent Bibliography ID:
  • BA28317991