• "By joining diplomatic history to Native American history
Sadosky compels us to change the way we think about both subjects.
He also offers us a wonderful narrative that we can assign to our
students. If one measure of the importance of a young scholar is
the way it changes how we think about the past, and our use of the
scholar's book in class, then I would include Sadosky in a group
of a handful of historians from his generation who will have a large
impact on the field of early American history." -- Paul A. Gilje,
George Lynn Cross Research Professor, University of Oklahoma
• "Sadosky's achievement in this outstanding work is to cast
an altogether fresh light on the early diplomacy of the United States,
in which were mingled closely together the imperatives of constructing
union among the thirteen states and conducting diplomacy with European
and Indian nations. With equal parts attention to inner travails
of the union and the diplomacy of its eastern and western borders,
we gain a portrait of the relationship among these spheres that
is very original and convincing." —David Hendrickson, Colorado
College, co-author of The Imperial Temptation: The
New World Order and America's Purpose
|
Revolutionary Negotiations: Indians, Empires, and Diplomats
in the Founding of America |
| |
| Leonard J. Sadosky |
| 288 pages, 6 x 9 |
| 1 map |
| Cloth ISBN 978-0-8139-2864-7 • $40.00 |
| Jeffersonian
America
|
| January 2010 |
 |
Revolutionary Negotiations examines early American diplomatic
negotiations with both the European powers and the various American
Indian nations from the 1740s through the 1820s. Sadosky interweaves
previously distinct settings for American diplomacy—courts
and council fires—into one singular, transatlantic system
of politics.
Whether as provinces in the British Empire or as independent
states, American assertions of power were directed simultaneously
to the west and to the east—to Native American communities
and to European empires across the Atlantic. American leaders
aspired to equality with Europeans, who often dismissed them,
while they were forced to concede agency to Native Americans,
whom they often wished they could ignore. As Americans used diplomatic
negotiation to assert their new nation's equality with the great
powers of Europe and gradually defined American Indian nations
as possessing a different (and lesser) kind of sovereignty, they
were also forced to confront the relations between the states
in their own federal union.
Acts of diplomacy thus defined the founding of America, not only
by drawing borders and facilitating commerce, but also by defining
and constraining sovereign power in a way that privileged some
and weakened others. These negotiations truly were revolutionary.
Leonard J. Sadosky is Assistant Professor of History
at Iowa State University and co-author, with Peter Onuf, of Jeffersonian
America.
|
