History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations Who Once Inhabited

Heckewelder, John Gottlieb Ernestus, 1743-1823Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.9
Word count
920K words
Chapters
93

Tags

English Originals History and Culture Human GeographyHistorical ReappraisalSocial ObservationDocumentary NarrativeCultural ChangeFolk CustomsCross-Cultural View

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations Who Once InhabitedAuthor: Heckewelder, John Gottlieb Ernestus, 1743-1823,Language: English, Class: E011: History: America: America, Release Date: Oct 31, 2015

Editor's review

This work, written by the eighteenth-century Moravian missionary Heckewelder, is one of the earlier English documents recording the social life of North American Indigenous nations from a firsthand perspective. The author lived for a long time with the Delaware and other nations, so the descriptions of council procedures, festival etiquette, food and daily life, marriage customs, and oral traditions carry the texture of on-site observation rather than secondhand compilation. As a public-domain ebook, it preserves the original appearance of the nineteenth-century edited edition and has primary-source value for studying early ethnographic writing paradigms and the cultural contact history of the colonial period. It can be read both as historical material and as an observational text with period limitations: the author's identity and standpoint inevitably introduce bias and idealization into the narrative. It is suitable for slow browsing alongside maps and notes.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the introduction or editor's note first to understand the background of the book's composition and editing process before entering the main text.
  2. Prepare a map of eastern North American nations and compare place names and group names as you read.
  3. Mark passages with evaluative coloring to distinguish observational records from the author's inferences.
  4. Read alongside modern ethnographic works to form a critical perspective.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

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FAQ

Is this book based on the author's firsthand experience or secondhand compilation? Much of the content comes from Heckewelder's direct observation during long residence with the nations, but he also included relayed materials and was influenced by the ideas of his time. When reading, one should distinguish firsthand portions from quoted and inferred portions and not treat the whole as objective record.
How difficult is the English, and what foundation is needed? The text is nineteenth-century English with longer sentences and many proper nouns and old spellings; it roughly requires the ability to read long English nonfiction smoothly. It is recommended to read slowly with a dictionary and notes and not chase speed.
Does the electronic edition include complete notes and maps? This version comes from a public-domain ebook project and preserves the content of the edited edition on which it is based; whether charts are included depends on the original book. It is recommended to browse the table of contents and appendices after downloading to confirm available materials before planning a reading schedule.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Heckewelder, John Gottlieb Ernestus, 1743-1823 Author · 1743–1823

John Gottlieb Ernestus Heckewelder (1743–1823) was a Moravian missionary. He spent many years preaching among the Delaware Indians of North America and used the opportunity of living alongside them to record their language and customs. His best-known work, History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations Who Once Inhabited, is based on these experiences and is regarded as an important early source on the native peoples of North America. Public information about him is limited; apart from his missionary work and writings, little can be confirmed about the details of his life. As far as is known, he combined the roles of missionary and observer. His writing relies not on rhetorical flourish but on firsthand testimony, offering fairly specific accounts of the Delaware language, social customs, and daily life. These materials served missionary purposes but also left later scholars an early textual record of Native American society.