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Struggle for Dominance in the Ohio River Valley
The struggle for dominance in the Ohio River Valley spanned a time from the late 1740s to the 1850s. This century of turbulence is characterized by Native American and Anglo-American conflict. It pitted each side against each other in a battle for supremacy of the land, economics and culture. On one hand, the expansion of the Western frontier would provide for economic development and the increase of the United States as a legitimate world power. In contrast, from the perspective of Native American tribes, the Ohio River Valley was their homeland and had been for many generations. If the expansion continued it would harm their way of life, encroach upon their homeland, and make their resources scarcer. The battle for dominance is a good representation of how continuity and change help determine the outcome of the Western frontier.
Anglo-Americans that will be examined as influential in the formation of the Ohio River Valley are Daniel Boone, Henry Clay, and William Harrison. In a rapidly developing society these men represented, in different ways, the forces of continuity and change. In their quest to expand and "civilize" the west, these men were forced into a struggle for dominance in the Ohio River Valley. The Native American movement in the Ohio River Valley during this time is represented through the Shawnee, lead by Tecumseh. The Shawnee also battle with conflicts of continuity and change in the hope of keeping their homeland, culture, and economic sustenance. Hence, Americans represented by Boone, Clay and Harrison, and Native Americans represented by the Shawnee and Tecumseh, both represent change and continuity in their struggle for dominance of the Ohio River Val...
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...terized by a struggle for culture, economics, and land. The relevance of this struggle in American history is that it allows the present to examine what the forces for change and continuity were and how they relate to contemporary issues. Today we still see some members of society ignorant and afraid of those who are different. We also see the Indians struggle for a voice in our democracy. They represent a group of persons depleted of resources and removed from their land. As the Americans continued to push further west after the Ohio River Valley victories, they continued to displace more and more Native Americans. But Americans
couldn't entirely remove them from existence, and today we are starting to realize the implications of our lust for land. The United States has received its status as a world power and is economically and culturally rich, but at what cost?
Turner fails to realize the extent to which Native Americans existed in the ‘Wilderness’ of the Americas before the frontier began to advance. Turner’s thesis relies on the idea that “easterners … in moving to the wild unsettled lands of the frontier, shed the trappings of civilization … and by reinfused themselves with a vigor, an independence, and a creativity that the source of American democracy and national character.” (Cronon) While this idea seems like a satisfying theory of why Americans are unique, it relies on the notion that the Frontier was “an area of free land,” which is not the case, undermining the the...
Dr. Daniel K. Richter is the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History at University of Pennsylvania. His focus on early Native American history has led to his writing several lauded books including Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Past, and The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization. Richter’s Facing East is perhaps, a culmination of his latter work. It is centered from a Native American perspective, an angle less thought about in general. Through the book, Richter takes this perspective into several different fields of study which includes literary analysis, environmental history, and anthropology. Combining different methodologies, Richter argues Americans can have a fruitful future, by understanding the importance of the American Indian perspective in America’s short history.
When the Europeans first migrated to America, they didn’t know much about the ancestral background of the different types of the Indian tribes that were settled in Virginia and along the East Coast. Many of the Indian tribes became hostile towards the colonist because the colonists were interfering with their way of life. This lead the natives to attempt to destroy the frontier settlements. Many forts in this area were erected to protect the settlers and their families. One the historical land...
There are many ways in which we can view the history of the American West. One view is the popular story of Cowboys and Indians. It is a grand story filled with adventure, excitement and gold. Another perspective is one of the Native Plains Indians and the rich histories that spanned thousands of years before white discovery and settlement. Elliot West’s book, Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers and the Rush to Colorado, offers a view into both of these worlds. West shows how the histories of both nations intertwine, relate and clash all while dealing with complex geological and environmental challenges. West argues that an understanding of the settling of the Great Plains must come from a deeper understanding, a more thorough knowledge of what came before the white settlers; “I came to believe that the dramatic, amusing, appalling, wondrous, despicable and heroic years of the mid-nineteenth century have to be seen to some degree in the context of the 120 centuries before them” .
This book is complete with some facts, unfounded assumptions, explores Native American gifts to the World and gives that information credence which really happened yet was covered up and even lied about by Euro-centric historians who have never given the Indians credit for any great cultural achievement. From silver and money capitalism to piracy, slavery and the birth of corporations, the food revolution, agricultural technology, the culinary revolution, drugs, architecture and urban planning our debt to the indigenous peoples of America is tremendous. With indigenous populations mining the gold and silver made capitalism possible. Working in the mines and mints and in the plantations with the African slaves, they started the industrial revolution that then spread to Europe and on around the world. They supplied the cotton, rubber, dyes, and related chemicals that fed this new system of production. They domesticated and developed the hundreds of varieties of corn, potatoes, cassava, and peanuts that now feed much of the world. They discovered the curative powers of quinine, the anesthetizing ability of coca, and the potency of a thousand other drugs with made possible modern medicine and pharmacology. The drugs together with their improved agriculture made possible the population explosion of the last several centuries. They developed and refined a form of democracy that has been haphazardly and inadequately adopted in many parts of the world. They were the true colonizers of America who cut the trails through the jungles and deserts, made the roads, and built the cities upon which modern America is based.
Talking Back to Civilization , edited by Frederick E. Hoxie, is a compilation of excerpts from speeches, articles, and texts written by various American Indian authors and scholars from the 1890s to the 1920s. As a whole, the pieces provide a rough testimony of the American Indian during a period when conflict over land and resources, cultural stereotypes, and national policies caused tensions between Native American Indians and Euro-American reformers. This paper will attempt to sum up the plight of the American Indian during this period in American history.
Anthem is a story of man’s struggle to be free and to fight the masses of conformity. It tells of human nature and the want to gain all the knowledge that one could possibly attain. Man loses his safe haven and his security when he lets this lust for knowledge overpower him and lets it be seen by others. He becomes vulnerable Like Johann Faust, Prometheus sells his life for wisdom. Unlike Faust, however, Prometheus is expelled from his society but gains his freedom of individuality and his freedom of knowledge and the ability to understand. In Anthem, Prometheus and Gaea sin against society to become singular and understanding much like Adam and Eve’s sin against God when they ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge to gain wisdom; as a result, they can be compared to each other by there desire for learning and by their damnation.
Through all stages, a conflict existed between the Indigenous peoples and the United States. Under the illusion of forging a new democracy, free of hierarchies and European monarchies, the United States used the plantation labor of enslaved Africans and dispossessed massive numbers of Native peoples from their lands and cultures to conquer this land.15 Many Americans continue to experience the social, political, cultural and economic inequalities that remain in our Nation
When the shape of America first started to grow from just land to the 13 colonies to the westward expansion of our country in less than a century, it sure feels like hopes and dreams came true. Though it might have seemed like an easier task, it took luck, labor, and intense warfare. The long process of American territorial expansion was justified by a mid-century ideology known as Manifest Destiny (pg 1). The one people we seem to forget about when we discuss the growing settlement of our country are the Native Americans. They had inhabited the country long before Columbus had discovered America, and still play an important part in today’s society. Manifest Destiny justified the displacement and domestication of Native Americans all while
Native American’s place in United States history is not as simple as the story of innocent peace loving people forced off their lands by racist white Americans in a never-ending quest to quench their thirst for more land. Accordingly, attempts to simplify the indigenous experience to nothing more than victims of white aggression during the colonial period, and beyond, does an injustice to Native American history. As a result, historians hoping to shed light on the true history of native people during this period have brought new perceptive to the role Indians played in their own history. Consequently, the theme of power and whom controlled it over the course of Native American/European contact is being presented in new ways. Examining the evolving
In “Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Leadership”, Tecumseh and the many Indian tribes in west America spent years fighting for their land and trying to keep their culture alive. The story illustrates cultural aspects of the period through elucidating the important figure
Women in Prison. Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Justice Statistics Varnam, Steve. Our prisons are a crime (reforming the prison system). Editorial. Christianity Today 21 June 1993
Anthem takes place in a future dystopian society in which every facet of its member’s lives is controlled. This society came into existence after a great war. The leaders have suppressed any information about pre-war life in the age known as the “Unmentionable Times.” All remnants of the “Evil Ones” were destroyed and society has reverted to the dark ages. The leaders fear independence of mind. Individuals have no rights and exist solely to serve society. They must spend their lives working the job that is chosen for them. They have no personal lives and cannot choose their friends or romantic partners. The word “I” has been erased from their language and is the “Unspeakable Word” that they must never speak lest they be killed. Only collectivist thoughts and speech are permitted.
Many people today know the story of the Indians that were native to this land, before “white men” came to live on this continent. Few people may know that white men pushed them to the west while many immigrants took over the east and moved westward. White men made “reservations” that were basically land that Indians were promised they could live on and run. What many Americans don’t know is what the Indians struggled though and continue to struggle through on the reservations.
In the article review “ How the West was Lost” the author, William T. Hagan explains that in a brief thirty-eight year period between 1848 and 1886, the Indians of the Western United States lost their fight with the United States to keep their lands. While nothing in the article tells us who Hagan is, or when the article was written, his central theme of the article is to inform us of how the Indians lost their lands to the white settlers. I found three main ideas in the article that I feel that Hagan was trying to get across to us. Hagan put these events geographically and chronologically in order first by Plains Indians, then by the Western Indians.