The Empire's New Clothes: Constructing the "American" in the Colonial Northeast

This project explores how material and cultural exchanges between Native and settler populations informed European and Euro-American perceptions of Native society from early contact and throughout the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. While early settlers defined their fragile identities in opposition to Native peoples, later colonists appropriated the image of a Native, created by European and Euro-Americans over the centuries of colonization, in order to create a new ?American? identity leading up to the American Revolution.