The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000-1927

by Jace Weaver

Overview

From the earliest moments of European contact, Native Americans have played a pivotal role in the Atlantic experience, yet they often have been relegated to the margins of the region's historical record. The Red Atlantic, Jace Weaver's sweeping and highly readable survey of history and literature, synthesizes scholarship to place indigenous people of the Americas at the center of our understanding of the Atlantic world. Weaver illuminates their willing and unwilling travels through the region, revealing how they changed the course of world history.

Indigenous Americans, Weaver shows, crossed the Atlantic as royal dignitaries, diplomats, slaves, laborers, soldiers, performers, and tourists. And they carried resources and knowledge that shaped world civilization—from chocolate, tobacco, and potatoes to terrace farming and suspension bridges. Weaver makes clear that indigenous travelers were cosmopolitan agents of international change whose engagement with other societies gave them the tools to advocate for their own sovereignty even as it was challenged by colonialism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469633381
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	02/01/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	9.20(w) x 6.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Jace Weaver is the Franklin Professor of Native American Studies at the University of Georgia and author of Notes from a Miner's Canary: Essays on the State of Native America, among other books.

Table of Contents

From the earliest moments of European contact, Native Americans have played a pivotal role in the Atlantic experience, yet they often have been relegated to the margins of the region's historical record. The Red Atlantic, Jace Weaver's sweeping and highly readable survey of history and literature, synthesizes scholarship to place indigenous people of the Americas at the center of our understanding of the Atlantic world. Weaver illuminates their willing and unwilling travels through the region, revealing how they changed the course of world history.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

The Red Atlantic is an original, learned, and comparative historical narrative of transatlantic cultures and nations. Jace Weaver considers the significance of the cultural exchange, political ideas, literature, technology, and material trade with Native American Indians, or the historical and cultural transatlantic significance of the Red Atlantic. He has written an extraordinary and comprehensive comparative history of Native American Indians in the Red Atlantic, and his discussions of the subject will surely inspire and influence future students, research, and writing on the subject.—Gerald Vizenor, University of California, Berkeley

Following in the wake of Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, this book re-visions the Atlantic as Native space. Indians inhabited an Atlantic world and participated in the multiple lanes of exchange that developed following Columbus's voyages. Native foods, technologies, and ideas traveled to Europe; Native people traveled to Europe (sometimes more than once) as captives and slaves, as soldiers and sailors, as diplomats, and occasionally as celebrities. And writers, both Native and non-Native, created a fictional literature of the Red Atlantic. An important and stimulating book.—Colin G. Calloway, Dartmouth College

Editorial Reviews

A helpful platform to discuss this engaging topic.—Library Journal



In this fascinating, well-written account that places Native people at the center of Atlantic world history, Weaver positions the Atlantic as a conduit not only for the physical movement of people and ideas, but also as a highway for connections between cultures. . . . Highly recommended.—Choice



Essential for scholars of American Indian studies and Atlantic studies, especially those working at the intersections of literature and history. It is also highly readable, even entertaining at times.—American Indian Quarterly



A valuable resource for students.—Transmotion



Engrossing.—Journal of American History



Highly readable and engaging . . . will prove of interest to specialists, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates.—Journal of Southern History



A wide-ranging exploration of American Indian's engagement with the Atlantic world across roughly a millennium of time. . . . Rich in both anecdote and reflection, this is a capacious, thought-provoking, and engaging book.—Studies in American Indian Literatures



A valuable contribution to the growing literature that stands in opposition to the traditionalist 'White Atlantic'.—Journal of American Ethnic History



Manages to bring together players and stories in ways that make reading his book an engaging and . . . gratifying experience.—American Studies



A much-needed treatment of indigenous intellectuals who adapted to the vicissitudes of colonialism without forsaking themselves or the larger communities they represented.—The Historian

From the Publisher

04/01/2014
Weaver (Franklin Professor of Native American Studies, Univ. of Georgia; Notes from a Miner's Canary) contends that oppressed Native Americans throughout the Western Hemisphere found ways to participate actively in their personal destinies. He terms this collective group the Red Atlantic and was inspired to reexamine Native American agency in this way as a result of numerous studies dedicated to how African slaves had constructed a Black Atlantic. The author finds it astounding that an equal amount of research has not been dedicated to how "red Indians" played a vital role in the Atlantic system. Rather than being simply victims of European commerce and imperialism, Native Americans, as Weaver shows employing a variety of relevant primary sources from biographies to newspaper reports, used the system established by the incursive Vikings and subsequent European groups to their own benefit. The book is organized by the various roles that these original peoples played: chapters are dedicated to their positions as slaves and prisoners, soldiers and sailors, spectacles in Wild West shows, and their evolution into statesmen and cosmopolitans fully participating in both politics and cultural endeavors. VERDICT While Weaver creates a helpful platform to discuss this engaging topic, he fails to provide enough proof of Native American cause to completely uphold his thesis. Cautiously recommended.—Brian Renvall, Mesalands Community Coll., Tucumcari, NM

Library Journal