Separate Peoples, One Land: The Minds of Cherokees, Blacks, and Whites on the Tennessee Frontier
Exploring the mental worlds of the major groups interacting in a borderland setting, Cynthia Cumfer offers a broad, multiracial intellectual and cultural history of the Tennessee frontier in the Revolutionary and early national periods, leading up to the era of rapid westward expansion and Cherokee removal. Attentive to the complexities of race, gender, class, and spirituality, Cumfer offers a rare glimpse into the cultural logic of Native American, African American, and Euro-American men and women as contact with one another powerfully transformed their ideas about themselves and the territory they came to share.

The Tennessee frontier shaped both Cherokee and white assumptions about diplomacy and nationhood. After contact, both groups moved away from local and personal notions about polity to embrace nationhood. Excluded from the nationalization process, slaves revived and modified African and American premises about patronage and community, while free blacks fashioned an African American doctrine of freedom that was both communal and individual. Paying particular attention to the influence of older European concepts of civilization, Cumfer shows how Tennesseans, along with other Americans and Europeans, modified European assumptions to contribute to a discourse about civilization, one both dynamic and destructive, which has profoundly shaped world history.
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Separate Peoples, One Land: The Minds of Cherokees, Blacks, and Whites on the Tennessee Frontier
Exploring the mental worlds of the major groups interacting in a borderland setting, Cynthia Cumfer offers a broad, multiracial intellectual and cultural history of the Tennessee frontier in the Revolutionary and early national periods, leading up to the era of rapid westward expansion and Cherokee removal. Attentive to the complexities of race, gender, class, and spirituality, Cumfer offers a rare glimpse into the cultural logic of Native American, African American, and Euro-American men and women as contact with one another powerfully transformed their ideas about themselves and the territory they came to share.

The Tennessee frontier shaped both Cherokee and white assumptions about diplomacy and nationhood. After contact, both groups moved away from local and personal notions about polity to embrace nationhood. Excluded from the nationalization process, slaves revived and modified African and American premises about patronage and community, while free blacks fashioned an African American doctrine of freedom that was both communal and individual. Paying particular attention to the influence of older European concepts of civilization, Cumfer shows how Tennesseans, along with other Americans and Europeans, modified European assumptions to contribute to a discourse about civilization, one both dynamic and destructive, which has profoundly shaped world history.
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Separate Peoples, One Land: The Minds of Cherokees, Blacks, and Whites on the Tennessee Frontier

Separate Peoples, One Land: The Minds of Cherokees, Blacks, and Whites on the Tennessee Frontier

by Cynthia Cumfer
Separate Peoples, One Land: The Minds of Cherokees, Blacks, and Whites on the Tennessee Frontier

Separate Peoples, One Land: The Minds of Cherokees, Blacks, and Whites on the Tennessee Frontier

by Cynthia Cumfer

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Overview

Exploring the mental worlds of the major groups interacting in a borderland setting, Cynthia Cumfer offers a broad, multiracial intellectual and cultural history of the Tennessee frontier in the Revolutionary and early national periods, leading up to the era of rapid westward expansion and Cherokee removal. Attentive to the complexities of race, gender, class, and spirituality, Cumfer offers a rare glimpse into the cultural logic of Native American, African American, and Euro-American men and women as contact with one another powerfully transformed their ideas about themselves and the territory they came to share.

The Tennessee frontier shaped both Cherokee and white assumptions about diplomacy and nationhood. After contact, both groups moved away from local and personal notions about polity to embrace nationhood. Excluded from the nationalization process, slaves revived and modified African and American premises about patronage and community, while free blacks fashioned an African American doctrine of freedom that was both communal and individual. Paying particular attention to the influence of older European concepts of civilization, Cumfer shows how Tennesseans, along with other Americans and Europeans, modified European assumptions to contribute to a discourse about civilization, one both dynamic and destructive, which has profoundly shaped world history.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781469606590
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date: 09/01/2012
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 336
File size: 3 MB

About the Author

Cynthia Cumfer is an attorney and independent scholar in Portland, Oregon.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

[A] valuable study.—The Journal of American History

A nuanced picture of frontier American political life . . . reveals a thriving political culture in which all levels of society participated.—Western Historical Quarterly

Successfully illustrates the disintegration of trust and possible amity between Native Americans and white settlers in the post-Revolutionary era within a more detail-oriented ground-level analysis than many before accomplished.—Southern Historian

A well-written book and offers insights on the developing values of the nation as a whole.—Choice

Attentive to the complexities of race, class, gender, and spirituality. . . . A broad, multiracial intellectual and cultural history of the Tennessee frontier in the Revolutionary and early national periods.—The Courier

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