Lenape Country

Jean R. Soderlund is Professor of History at Lehigh University and editor of William Penn and the Founding of Pennsylvania: A Documentary History, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

"A commonly held idea is that Quaker settlers led by William Penn established Delaware Valley society's emphases on freedom, tolerance, and peaceful conflict. In Lenape Country, however, Jean R. Soderlund demonstrates that these Delaware Valley hallmarks originated with the Lenape Indians and were the bases of Lenape economic and political dominance through successive waves of European colonization in the region... Lenape Country is meticulously researched and cautiously analyzed, qualities that strengthen Soderlund's assertions for the primacy of Lenape influence in the formation of Delaware Valley identity. It is a much needed study of this pivotal time in American history and a valuable contribution to Native American and colonial-era scholarship."-American Studies "Succinct and imaginatively conceived, Lenape Country is one of the best narrative histories I have read to date on the European-Indian interaction along the Delaware River."-Gunlog Fur, author of A Nation of Women: Gender and Colonial Encounters Among the Delaware Indians

• Note on the Text Introduction Chapter 1. A Free People, Subject to No One Chapter 2. Controlling the Land through Massacre and War, 1626-38 Chapter 3. Managing a Tenuous Peace, 1638-54 Chapter 4. Allies against the Dutch, 1654-64 Chapter 5. Allies against the English, 1664-73 Chapter 6. Protecting Sovereignty amid Wars, 1673-80 Chapter 7. Negotiating Penn's Colony, 1681-1715 Chapter 8. Strategies of Survival and Revenge Conclusion Note on Methodology Notes Index Acknowledgments