Review of Lenape Country: The Delaware Valley before William Penn. By Jean R. Soderlund (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015)

Lipman, Andrew Charles

For many historians, the seventeenth-century Delaware Valley has long been a blank space on the map, a terra incognita in the heart of early America. Soderlund’s Lenape Country fills this empty canvas with a dynamic picture of a Native-controlled region, where Lenapes--the people later known as Delawares--built a stable set of alliances with neighbors and maintained their independence for decades after the colonial arrival. Countering a long-standing “portrayal of the Lenapes as a powerless people,” Soderlund argues that Lenapes’ political “primacy” defined the region’s early colonial history.

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Title
Journal of Interdisciplinary History

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Academic Units
History (Barnard College)
Publisher
MIT Press
Published Here
March 28, 2016