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Book Review
| The Dutch-Munsee Encounter in America: The Struggle for Sovereignty in the Hudson Valley. By Paul Otto. (New York: Berghahn, 2006. xvi, 225 pp. $75.00, ISBN 1-57181-672-0.)
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| Paul Otto's book focuses on an often neglected aspect of Indian-European relations in New Netherland and colonial New York. Most historians of those colonies have emphasized the influential role of the Iroquois Five Nations who were located west of the upper Hudson Valley, but Otto chooses as his topic Dutch interactions with the Algonquian-speaking Munsee Indians of the lower Hudson Valley. |
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Otto analyzes the ordeals of the Munsees by applying an influential frontier model developed by the historians Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson in the early 1980s. Lamar and Thompson define a frontier as a region and a process in which two distinct cultures compete for political control. According to Otto, the Munsee-Dutch frontier opened in 1609 when a Dutch expedition lead by the English navigator Henry Hudson explored the river that was later named after him. During three successive stages—first contact, trade, and settlement—the Dutch increasingly established political authority over the various Munsee bands in the region. By the time of the English conquest of New Netherland in 1664, the Munsees had lost their political sovereignty to the Dutch colonizers. |
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