Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early North America By Gary B. Nash

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This book is very dry and somewhat boring. I had to read it for my history class. Gary B. Nash There isn't really a lot to write about Red, White, and Black. It's an accurate but uninspired account of race relations in North America up to the late 18th century. To summarize it in a sentence; it's the kind of book I would reference from, but never read. Gary B. Nash Although I believe this is often required reading in high school American history classes, it wasn't required in mine. I read it, strangely, while living in Austria. Austrians asked me often about the history/plight of native Americans - they were, to stereotype, fascinated by them - and I realized that I had next to zero real knowledge about them. Even weirder than reading this book while in Austria, I attended these little workshops about native Americans while there, in peoples' homes, in German. But, I digress. This book SHOULD be required reading. Reading it, I felt for the first time that I was getting the real story of American history, a story that wasn't just about and from the perspective of white people. And, how cool is the title? Tres cool. Gary B. Nash I think that, since it uses a racial lens, this work would make a great survey text for an undergrad course. However, it needs to be more inclusive of women to really create a representative picture of early America. Also, Nash is a master at writing awkwardly-constructed sentences. Gary B. Nash First published in 1974, this exploration of inter-cultural relations in early America has all the did you know retelling of our Bicentennial Age. Nash's comparative history of European, African, and Native experiences -- enslaved and free, loyalist and rebel, Protestant, Catholic, and Quaker -- is an engaging read, chockful of pre-revolutionary quotes and primary sources.

As an academic resource, it is pretty solid, though I noticed that in nearly 40 years of revisions, Nash's cited sources have not been updated. Newer scholarship (1990s and beyond) are listed as Further Readings at the chapters' ends, rather than enhancing (or even challenging)earlier sources. Footnotes that were not of the period, tended to be 1950s to 1980s at the latest. I did wonder whether Nash's own scholarship on this subject had changed significantly since his first publication.

As a textbook, it is a little weak. Critical Thinking Questions are not at all critical thinking; they are Check Your Understanding questions that ask the student to restate the material. There is no other teaching material included other than learning objectives and summaries, elements I always find unnecessarily repetitive.

I was confused by Nash's consistent capitalization of White, while Black was only occasionally capitalized, and red never. This made phrases like black, White, and red people... seem immediately lopsided. When Nash took such care to refer to enslaved people rather than slaves, and to call prominent Native American leaders by both their given names and their European/historical names, it was strange to see this comfort with lower-case red and upper-case White. Perhaps we can charge the editor on this one. Gary B. Nash

Written by highly acclaimed historian Gary B. Nash, this book presents an interpretive account of the interactions between Native Americans, African Americans, and Euroamericans during the colonial and revolutionary eras. It reveals the crucial interconnections between North America's many peoples--illustrating the ease of their interactions in the first two centuries of European and African presence--to develop a fuller, deeper understanding of the nation's underpinnings. Coverage explores the interaction of many peoples at all levels of society, from various cultural backgrounds and across the centuries; African-Americans as active participants in the cultural process, drawing upon the work of African and African-American historians; the origins of racism, tracing the development of racial attitudes and the mixing of people across racial boundaries; Indians as much more than victims, reaching beyond the Europeans that discovered North America to explore the society that had already been here for thousands of years; profiles of the various European colonizers, examining French, Dutch, and Spanish settlers and comparing their treatment of enslaved Africans and Native Americans with that of the English. For those interested in Colonial American History. Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early North America

Red, White, and Black offers many partial answers to the question: in the 16th and 17th centuries, what did the First Americans think about the hairy, smelly people from Europe who invaded their country?
Nash offers a scholarly, fully informed, insightful account of the lifestyles and world views of the estimated 60-70 million indigenous people who had a variety of highly developed civilizations.
Some European promoters and some uninformed explorers and colonists that the “New World” was a “virgin wilderness,” but the first colonists were happy to steal the Native Americans’ food and delighted to be able to use their cultivated lands.
The misnamed Indians valiantly tried to maintain their way of life, but European diseases and European guns and steel tipped the balance for the much outnumbered invaders.
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www.richardsubber.com Gary B. Nash Gary Nash's finest. Gary B. Nash This is a great book. Really! I actually gave my copy away to someone to read for leisure! A fascinating, easy to read book. Gary B. Nash Informative. Sometimes if felt like it repeated itself but I also was reading lots of supplemental information too so it’s possible I’m confused. Pretty straight to the point and not too biased though it might be and I do t see it because I lean the way the relate history. Recommend to anyone wanting to know about the people of the America pre 1776. Gary B. Nash And I thought we learned American history in high school... shed a lot of light as to what it means to be an American, slightly more disturbing than what I previously thought. Gary B. Nash