| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

In Search of New England's Native Past: Selected Essays by Gordon M. Day. Ed. by Michael K. Foster and William Cowan. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. xvi, 328 pp. Cloth, $70.00, ISBN 1-55849-150-3. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 1-55849-151-1.)

Selected from works published from 1953 to 1981, this collection of twenty-four essays and articles provides a valuable retrospective of Gordon M. Day's pioneering research on the Western Abenakis of northeastern North America. Although much of Day's work has now been superseded by that of younger scholars (in particular Colin Calloway), this volume clearly establishes that he laid much of the groundwork for sorting through and mapping out the confusion of indigenous New England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 1

In his introductory chapter, the coeditor Michael K. Foster offers a detailed sketch of Day's life and work. Born in Vermont in 1911 and trained as a forest ecologist, Day wrote his doctoral dissertation on earthworms. After several years of teaching at Rutgers University, he worked for a New England forestry firm and developed a passion for the region's indigenous cultural and ecological history. In 1953, thirty years before William Cronon took up the same issue in his highly lauded book Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, Day effectively challenged the popular notion that the first Europeans entered a primeval wilderness in his groundbreaking article (the first one in this volume) titled "The Indian as an Ecological Factor in the Northeastern Forest." . . .

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