The Middle Ground Summary

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A historian at the University of Washington, Richard White, took a close look at ethnic, cultural, and racial interactions between whites, Hispanics, blacks, and Indians. In his book The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815, he discusses the geographic area from the Great Lakes to the upper Mississippi basin and the social terrain. His term “middle ground” was not created by the interaction between conquerors and conquered or by adaption of a defeated people (Birzer, 2014). Instead, the middle ground was the result of adjustments and accommodations made as both the Algonquins and the Europeans sought benefits from each other and tried to adjust to the new social order. All people were forced to

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