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An Award-Winning Book

  Frederick Jackson Turner Award (1993)

  Ray Allen Billington Prize

  Choice Outstanding Academic Book (1994)

“Daniel Richter’s The Ordeal of the Longhouse is a long-needed and rewarding overview of that important first century of Iroquois-white relations. Skillfully organized and written, it offers a rare synthesis of this period of political intrigue and cultural accommodation. Few have so well described the diversity of attitudes and policies that existed between the three competing European powers and their Indian allies and adversaries.”

“Richter breaks through the many myths and clichés surrounding Iroquois life and power in colonial America. To do so, he draws on Dutch, French, and English documents, the work of archaeologists, Iroquois oral traditions, and the methods and insights of cultural anthropology. The result is a thorough, highly informed, subtly nuanced account of the Iroquois people from their pre-contact beginnings to the mid-eighteenth century. The Ordeal of the Longhouse will be invaluable not only to historians of the Iroquois and other Indians but to those with an interest in the imperial, frontier, social, and cultural history of colonial North America.”

“Provides the best account yet written of one of the most remarkable stories of any period of America’s history—how the Iroquois peoples conceived of their own unique destiny and thereby shaped both their own lives and those of all with whom they came into contact. A work of exceptional balance and lucidity, the book is both an illuminating example of interdisciplinary analysis and a model of how political history in its broadest sense can be written.”