THE BARBAROUS MASSACRE RECONSIDERED: THE POWHATAN UPRISING OF 1622 AND THE HISTORIANS

The Powhatan Uprising of March 22, 1621/22, was the single most significant event of Anglo-Indian relations in Virginia. An early example of a native culture’s rebellion against intruding European civilization, the uprising climaxed a mere decade and a half of intercultural contact. Its impact upon trans-Atlantic ideology and policy was impressive: it brought to an end the first (forty year) phase of British imperialis [imperialist] accelerated Virginia\u27s unique course of development, and hastened the doom of an American Indian empire with vast potential

Book Review: Unaffected by the Gospel: Osage Resistance to the Christian Invasion, 1673-1906: A Cultural Victory

As he did in his 1992 The Osage: An Ethno-historical Study of Hegemony on the Prairie-Plains, Willard Rollings expands and enhances our understanding of that historically significant, but often neglected, Native nation in this new study of Christian missions

Fighting "Fire" With Firearms: The Anglo-Powhatan Arms Race in Early Virginia

In 1628 Governor William Bradford of Plymouth Plantation expressed his fear and outrage that local Indians were equipped with European muskets. "O, the horribleness of this villainy!" he wrote. "How many both Dutch and English have been lately slain by ... these barbarous savages thus armed with their own weapons." With powder, bullet-molds, and even replacement parts for their firearms, the Indians were, according to Bradford, "ordinarily better fitted and furnished than the English themselves." The militant first decades of seventeenth-century English America produced well-armed Indian forces among the Algonquians of coastal New England and the Iroquois further west, but a similar, if less well-known, phenomenon occurred in tidewater Virginia. Much sooner than most early American scholars have realized, the Powhatans desired, acquired, and used firearms-with lethal effect-against the English invaders of the James River basin. While Geronimo's Apache riflemen of the late 1805 have been recognized as the epitome of heavily-armed Indian warriors, few persons would associate the Native Americans' quest for equality in weaponry with the early Jamestown years. But in fact, no sooner had the English invaded the fertile lowlands of tidewater Virginia than the Powhatans adopted new technology and tactics and entered into a deadly arms race for cultural survival and territorial sovereignty