Reviewed by Ann M. Little | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.3

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Reviewed by Ann M. Little | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Ann M. Little, Colorado State University

A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America. By Nancy Shoemaker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 211 pages. $29.95 (cloth).

Nancy Shoemaker has issued a powerful and persuasive challenge to the prevailing consensus that perceptions of difference were fundamental to colonial encounters between Indians and Europeans. In the past fifteen years, scholars who have tried to explain the emergence of race as a fixed (though contrived) category for organizing colonial and early national United States society have focused on the shifting presumptions and attitudes of European and Euro-American colonists toward Indians and Africans, and the ways in which they turned these attitudes into practices (such as slavery, warfare, or other forms of disenfranchisement). Shoemaker suggests that these historians may be guilty of taking the explanations of these colonists too seriously, and of being too credulous of Europeans and Indians who insisted that the differences in their cultures were more important than the similarities. She argues that "under the metal armor and beards, face paint and tattoos, there rested a bedrock of shared ideas" (3). Though Indians and Europeans found each other quite strange, they nevertheless shared some broad notions of property ownership, political leadership, historical memory, and the organization of society around gender roles (in particular, the supremacy of men over women); these shared assumptions are the basis of Shoemaker's investigation.

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