Paul Otto's The Dutch-Munsee Encounter in America

'Part-time' reformational blogger and full-time historian, Paul Otto, has a new book: The Dutch-Munsee Encounter in America.

Seventeenth-century North America witnessed the encounter of numerous European nations and Native American groups. In the Hudson Valley, where the Dutch established New Netherland, Dutch and Munsee Indians met and interacted in myriad ways. Employing a frontier framework, this volume considers how Dutch-Munsee relations developed over the life of the colony. At each stage of European colonization—first contact, trade, and settlement—the Munsees faced the increasing imposition of Dutch societal structures and sovereignty over them. In response, the Munsees variously chose accomodation, resistance, or acculturation. The volume concludes with a suggestive afterword in which the author applies his frontier framework to Dutch-indigenous relations in the Cape Colony of southern Africa.