The Memory of All Ancient Customs - by Tom Arne Midtrød (Hardcover)

About the Book

Tom Arne Midtrød examines the complex patterns of diplomatic, political, and social communication among the American Indian peoples of the Hudson Valley from the early seventeenth century through the American Revolutionary era.

Book Synopsis

In The Memory of All Ancient Customs, Tom Arne Midtrød examines the complex patterns of diplomatic, political, and social communication among the American Indian peoples of the Hudson Valley--including the Mahicans, Wappingers, and Esopus Indians--from the early seventeenth century through the American Revolutionary era. By focusing on how members of different Native groups interacted with one another, this book places Indians rather than Europeans on center stage.Midtrød uncovers a vast and multifaceted Native American world that was largely hidden from the eyes of the Dutch and English colonists who gradually displaced the indigenous peoples of the Hudson Valley. In The Memory of All Ancient Customs he establishes the surprising extent to which numerically small and militarily weak Indian groups continued to understand the world around them in their own terms, and as often engaged-- sometimes violently, sometimes cooperatively--with neighboring peoples to the east (New England Indians) and west (the Iroquois ) as with the Dutch and English colonizers. Even as they fell more and more under the domination of powerful outsiders--Iroquois as well as Dutch and English--the Hudson Valley Indians were resilient, maintaining or adapting features of their traditional diplomatic ties until the moment of their final dispossession during the American Revolutionary War.

Review Quotes

The Memory of All Ancient Customs makes an important contribution to our understanding of European-Native American relations in New York, offering an important supplement to works that focus on tribes rather than regions. The book helps make comprehensible the complex history of relations between culturally diverse peoples in early America.

His study of Indigenous Christianity makes a significant contribution to our understanding of both colonial approaches to Indigenous peoples and their own repurposing of them.

Midtrød has written a valuable account of the Native Americans of the Hudson Valley and environs.... While most historians emphasize that Native decline occurred in four wars with the Dutch from the 1640s to the early 1660s, Midtrød claims that these Native peoples had a 'remarkably tenacious' political and diplomatic life until the American Revolution. His focus is on how they networked to resolve disputes with other Native peoples in the valley as well as in southern New England and western Long Island.

Retelling the native past of the Hudson Valley is like making a quilt out of scraps. Thankfully, Tom Arne Midtreod has the patience to do patchwork. Meticulously, he stitches together many fragments of published and archival evidence in this new book about the valley's Indians in the colonial period. Along with the growing shelf of new titles on the region's natives, this study deepens our understanding of the people who lived in one of the busiest corridors of British North America yet too often are misunderstood or forgotten.... The book's finest moments come when Midtroed traces the 'change in posture' in river Indians' political position in the 1660s and 1670s. Making excellent use of a number of unpublished sources, he shows how the Hudson natives navigated a series of confluent events.... With its hard-earned insights drawn from wide and deep research, The Memory of All Ancient Customs is a valuable resource to historians of the region. Midtroed's admirable attention to Indian perspectives helps him put together his many swatches of evidence and re-create the fabric of the colonial-era Hudson.

About the Author

Tom Arne Midtrød is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Iowa.