Book Review

Although both of these books deal with the effects of Euro-American expansion on the Iroquois nations in New York State, they could not be more different. Max M. Mintz's Seeds of Empire strikes me as exactly the kind of book the American public wants historians to write. A detailed narrative of the American army's scorched-earth campaign through Iroquois territory during the Revolution, the book breathlessly races from one skirmish to another, pausing for occasional character sketches of the main players, from the shape of their eyebrows to their portly paunches to their penchant for drink. This old-fashioned style of writing history probably appeals to a larger constituency than the drier, analytical style cultivated by most academics does. But unfortunately Mintz has gone Victorian all the way and fills his narrative with people he refers to as half-breeds and squaws and with lurid descriptions of scalpings, mutilations of the dead, and captives' intestines being wrapped around trees. While I am not surprised that such a book could be published in our own times, I am puzzled at who published it. I thought New York University Press stood at the cutting edge with their publications on race as a cultural construction, but then why would they publish a book that harks back to the dark ages? If the American public does want a good read on the American Revolution and the Iroquois, I would still recommend Barbara Graymont's The Iroquois in the American Revolution (1972) or Colin G. Calloway's The American Revolution in Indian Country (1995).

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