2012/01/01 by James H. Merrell · 56 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · Environmental Science · Social Sciences · #American Environmental and Regional History #American History and Culture #Archaeology #Archaeology and Natural History #Colonialism #History #Political science
paper · doi:10.5309/willmaryquar.69.3.0451
published in The William and Mary Quarterly 69(3), 451 (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture)
openalex publication_date 2012/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/15
I N the winter of I 9 5 3 the anthropologist William N. Fenton made his way to Williamsburg, Virginia, to clear common where ethnologists and historians could come together as ethnohistorians (then a newly minted term) to enhance our understanding of the past. The common ground Fenton proposed was Indian-white relations in eastern North America before i830, and it was no coincidence that he issued his call for action at the Institute of Early American History and Culture, then as now the leading center for study of America's formative years.1 A check of the contents of the Institute's journal, the William and Mary Quarterly, suggests that students of early America were slow to answer Fenton's call.2 In the decade before he arrived in Williamsburg, the Quarterly published three articles and three documents relating to Indians; for the following fifteen years the comparable figures were three and one. This is not to say that nothing at all was being done: Nancy Oestreich Lurie, Allen W. Trelease, and others were exploring some of the terrain Fenton had mapped out.3 Nonetheless, it seems fair to say that the attempt