Declarations of Independence: Indigenous Resilience, Colonial Rivalries, and the Cost of Revolution

＂On the cusp of the American Revolution, various groups in the Northern Susquehanna River Valley competed for land and political sovereignty, and the increasing turmoil between them set the terms of and ultimately shaped the meaning of the revolution to come. This book weaves the stories of the Susquehanna Nations, a confederation of nearly a dozen refugee Indigenous Nations that came together in the 1750s, and the Fair Play Squatter Republic, which formed outside colonial jurisdiction in the 1770s by unruly settlers trespassing on Native lands, into a riveting tale of declarations of independence won and lost. In so doing, historian Christopher Pearl highlights the complicated racial violence that suffused the Revolutionary Age and establishes the centrality of Indigenous peoples to the founding of the United States＂--

Christopher R. Pearl is Associate Professor of History at Lycoming College and the author of Conceived in Crisis: The Revolutionary Creation of an American State.