Seneca Possessed: Indians, Witchcraft, and Power in the Early American Republic

Acknowledgments

acknowledgments So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925) Fitzgerald was surely right that the past pulls on us, like the current we fight as we push upstream. If only historical research and writing were as easy as riding with the stream into the past. Instead, the historian’s task is often to row out against an incoming tide, and then in again after the tide has shifted—the journey into the past through research is matched by the perils of the return passage to deliver prose analysis to contemporary readers. Let me therefore acknowledge those who have helped with the oars over this arduous but ultimately satisfying voyage. I sincerely appreciate and acknowledge the assistance of numerous libraries and archives and their helpful staffs, especially the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania Library, the Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College, and the Library Company of Philadelphia ; the New-York Historical Society and the New York Public Library; the New York State Archives and New York State Library; Cornell University Library; the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society and the Ontario County Historical Society; the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and Yale University Library; the Princeton University Library; the Library of Congress and the National Archives in Washington, D.C.; the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts; the Newberry Library in Chicago; the Huntington Library in San Marino, California; and the University of Oregon Library, in Eugene, Oregon. My research was funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Center 312 acknowledgments for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon, the Oregon Humanities Center, the University of Southern California–Huntington Library Early Modern Studies Institute, and of course the University of Oregon , my day job. I am most grateful for their beneficence. I would like to thank various friends and colleagues for their diverse contributions to this project, including Steve Aron, Ray Birn, Andy Burstein, Richard Clark, Kathleen DuVal, Carla Gerona, Polly Good, Eric Hinderacker, Tom Humphrey, Nancy Isenberg, Paul Johnson, Richard Johnson, Bob Lockhart, Peter Mancall, Jane Merritt, George Miles, Ken Minkema, Michael Oberg, Paul Otto, Ann Plane, Lizzie Reis, Dan Richter, Nat Sheidley, John Smolenski, Ernie Stromberg, Kirk Swinehart, Alan Taylor , and Karim Tiro. I would also like to thank the staff at the University of Pennsylvania Press, especially Ashley J. Nelson, Jennifer Shenk, Senior History Editor Robert Lockhart, and Associate Managing Editor Erica Ginsburg. I am particularly indebted to Bob Lockhart and Dan Richter, for their readings, constructive criticisms, and support, and to Michael Oberg, who read the manuscript for the press and provided inestimable help in my revisions. The contributions of some have been beyond description. Ray Birn read the manuscript twice and throughout provided critical suggestions and sustaining encouragement. Andy Burstein generously read and brilliantly critiqued a late version of the manuscript, when I needed his scholarly and editorial talents most. And Elizabeth Reis proved once again to be an incomparable partner in scholarship and, more important, in life. My children, Sam and Leah Reis-Dennis, know that my favorite book is MobyDick . With the completion of my scholarly journey in pursuit of Seneca Possessed, they can now be convinced that my alter ego is actually Starbuck or Ishmael, not the obsessive and ill-fated Ahab. At the very end of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald considered the moment when colonialism commenced in what became New York, imagining the Dutch sailors’ gaze upon ‘‘a fresh, green breast of the new world.’’ ‘‘For a transitory enchanted moment,’’ Fitzgerald wrote, ‘‘man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.’’ In fact, we know, this new world was old to its indigenous inhabitants, who possessed their own aesthetics and gendered visions, their own hopes acknowledgments 313 and dreams. History did not end with this colonialism, any more than colonialism itself ended. And we continue to face much that taxes our capacity to wonder—including the remarkable survival of America’s Native people, among them the resourceful Senecas, with and despite the help of friends. I thank them. ...