Imagine an entire civilization being driven away from their homeland and placed in an anonymous environment. Families, friends, and loved ones are disconnected, abused, and murdered for nameless reasons. Unfortunately, these events occurred to the Native Americans and Africans in early American history. In Natives and Strangers, Leonard Dinnerstein, Roger Nichols, and David Reimers explain the cruelties that Native Americans and Africans faced based upon the color of their skin, and the greedy mindsets of early European settlers.
[...] As time went by, a group of European settlers called the Puritans immigrated to the New World and settled into the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Like the early settlers, they also feared the Indians, but expected to use their land and resources. A majority of New Englanders were farmers which led them into direct competition with the tribesmen for land. At this time, Native Americans were continuously being driven away from their homeland, while European settlers began to increase. One interesting fact about the decreasing population of Native Americans is how the Europeans used Indians to fight among themselves. [...]
[...] When the Europeans first settled into America, they were outnumbered by millions of Native American tribes, but ultimately, they dramatically decreased the Indian population to almost nothing. With Africans, Europeans invaded their homeland and brought them to a place unfamiliar. Despite the large number of Africans that were in America, they remained in a defeated standing that kept them from overpowering the people who stripped them from their homeland. The statements that were presented in Natives and Strangers were well thought out and the authors portrayed each fact in a way that caught my attention. [...]
[...] Penalties such as nose-slitting, the chopping off of hands and ears, or even being burned alive would result if a slave tried to escape, was disobedient, or if the slave-owner was just unimpressed with their work ethic. White men resorted to these tactics because runaway and rebellious blacks were not only a labor loss but a threat to white supremacy. Slavery was present in all the colonies before the American Revolution and it was an important basis for the economy because of the expansion of tobacco and cotton. [...]
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