Francis Jennings

The Invasion of America

"Fills a void in historical studies on American Indians. . . . A richly documented narrative that will surprise many readers with its revelations of the colonial period." —Dee Brown, author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

Traditionally, historians have thought of American society as a transplantation of European culture to a new continent—a "virgin land." In this important and disturbing book, Francis Jennings examines the real history of the relationships between Europeans and Indians in what is ordinarily called the colonial period of United States history. From the Indian viewpoint, it was the period of the invasion of America.

In Mr. Jennings' view, the American land during the period of discovery and settlement was more like a widow than a virgin. "Europeans did not find wilderness here," he writes, "rather, however involuntarity, they made one. . . . The so-called settlement of America was a resettlement, a reoccupation of a land made waste by the diseases and demoralization introduced by newcomers."

Basing his interpretations on an enormous amount of hitherto unused ethnographical and anthropological literature, Mr. Jennings summarizes what is now known about the Atlantic Coast Indians encountered by Europeans. He then concetrates on a single region, New England, as an illustrative case study. The result is a radically revisionist interpretation of Puritan history (both as the Puritans wrote and lived it) in relation to the aboriginal population.