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Book Review
| Unconquered: The Iroquois League at War in Colonial America. By Daniel P. Barr. (Westport: Praeger, 2006. xx, 193 pp. $49.95, ISBN 0-275-98466-4.)
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| This work presents a synthesis of Iroquois military history from the period of initial contact with Europeans to the close of the American Revolution. Daniel P. Barr has aimed at writing "a book accessible to a general readership ranging from high school to collegiate level, while also trying to provide something useful for scholars, specialists, and Iroquois enthusiasts" (p. xviii). The work relies heavily on recently published scholarship, although there are some citations to published primary sources (especially The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents [1896–1901]). Almost all of the older literature on Iroquois history and ethnography is ignored. Students will have to go to the secondary sources cited by Barr for guidance to those studies. |
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The story Barr tells is not one of continuous Iroquois victories. Indeed, the titles (which use the metaphor of the Longhouse for the Iroquois Confederacy) of four of his eight chapters reveal an emphasis on Iroquois defeats: "The Longhouse in Peril," "The Longhouse under Siege," "The Longhouse Divided," and "The Longhouse in Flames." One might well wonder how the Iroquois played the central role they did in the frontier diplomacy of the colonial era. |
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