Description: In Cherokee Medicine, Colonial Germs Kelton challenges the "virgin soil thesis," or the widely held belief that Natives' lack of immunities and their inept healers were responsible for their downfall. Eschewing the metaphors and hyperbole routinely associated with the impact of smallpox, he firmly shifts the focus to the root cause of indigenous suffering and depopulation--colonialism writ large; not disease.
Brief description:
Paul Kelton is Professor and Gardiner Chair in American History at Stony Brook University. He is the author of Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast, 1492-1715 and co-editor of Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America.
Review Quotes: "This book joins distinguished scholarship on early American Indian history that is centered on the Indian experience and revises historians' knowledge of a time and place they thought they knew well."--H-Net Reviews in the Humanities & Social Sciences