With support from the University of Richmond

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Turning West, Historians Take a Wider View of Early America

Elizabeth Fenn often gets the question: "What do you work on?" Her reply evokes quizzical looks: "Late medieval and early modern North Dakota."

Ms. Fenn studies the Mandan Indians, a people known mainly because Lewis and Clark wintered among them in 1804-5.

But the Mandans have lived at the center of North America for centuries. With her quip, Ms. Fenn, an associate professor of history at the University of Colorado at Boulder, hopes to get people thinking about that deep history.

"American history does not begin when Europeans and Africans arrive," says Ms. Fenn, who this year published a book on the Mandans, Encounters at the Heart of the World (Hill and Wang).

Her work is part of a broader effort among historians to expand and revise how we think about early American history. Scholars of the period often focus on the 13 British colonies. The field’s canonical texts cover many "greatest hits": Pilgrims and Puritans, the American Revolution, the drafting of the Constitution.

But those 13 colonies occupied only about 4 percent of North America. The other 96 percent "has been largely unexplored by early American historians," says Claudio Saunt, a professor of history at the University of Georgia...

Read entire article at The Chronicle of Higher Education