War Under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, and the British Empire by Gregory Evans Dowd (review)

BOOK REVIEWS exploring a number of other ideas and experiences, nor does it undermine the narrative cohesion of the book as a whole. In this, his volume is far superior to Walter Havighurst' s now dated thematic study Obio:A History. Despite its many excellent points,this book ( like any) has some shortcomings. There are, for example ,a few factual errors, for example, the minimum number of acres for purchases under Congress' s 1820 Land Act was 80,not 8 Ip. 16]; the dates of Rhodes' s and Celeste's terms as governor are misreported Ipp. 385 and 3931; and former Daytonian Larry Flynt publishes Hustler,not Penthouse [ p. 390]). But these small glitches are not enough to detract significantly from the text' S utility as a reference. In addition, Cayton's laudable desire to let the words of Ohioans tell the story too often gets the better of his own manifest literary gifts. As a result, many sections are littered with fragments of quotationsoften as short as one or two wordsinterspersed with similarly fragmented links of his own. The overall effect can be distracting , leaving the reader to wish the author had brought his considerable talent to bear on paraphrasing a bit more. Other significant limitations in this book arise from Cayton' s otherwise welcome thematic approach . For example, his presentation sometimes precludes a meaningful discussion of aspects that do not " fit" within his thematic contexts, for example , Ohio's Native American,colonial,and territorial heritage. At the same time,Cayton's desire to emphasize his major themes sometimes feels forced, resulting in generalizations that seem too broad. The idea of " progress"is a useful theme to be sure, for example,but did the pioneers clearing their land in the early 1800s understand this concept ,if they thought about it at all,in the same way that industrialage progressives did? Was it true that nineteenthcentury Ohioans never meant for their art, architecture, songs, and literature to be strictly ornamental, but " always in the cause of something larger than aesthetic satisfaction?" ( 76) Were all " respectable Protestants" of the late 1800s really " aware of the dilemma created by their advocacy of a public culture that reflected their values and silenced alternatives?" ( 215) Statements like theseas well as several others starting with Ohioans felt" or " Ohioans thought" leave the critical reader asking, " Can he really say that?" None of this is meant to slight the importance of this work to the field of Ohio history. While it does not replace George Knepper's classic Obio and 1ts People as a comprehensive volume o f the state's history ,it is not really meant to do so. Rather,it serves as an impressive complement to that work,and one that all devotees of the subject must read. Kevin Kern University of Akron Gregory Evans Dowd. War linder Heaven: Pontiac,tbe Indian Nations, and tbe Britisb Empire. Johns Hopkins University Press,2002. 384 pp. ISBN: 0801870798 ( cloth) $ 32.00. I ndian resistance to the assertion of British authority over the region that is now the American Midwest has been studied by several historians recently,but prior to the publication of Gregory Evans Dowd's War Under Heaven,the last scholarly monograph with a sharp focus on Pontiac to appear was Howard Peckham' s Pontiac and tbe Indian Uprising which was published in 1947. Since that time most discussions of Pontiac' s War have presented it as an episode in a larger process occurring over decades on a continental scale. Thus in The Middle Ground Richard White begins his analysis in New France in the seventeenth century and proceeds through the end of the War of 1812. Eric Hinderaker in Elusive Empires and Dowd himself in his earlier book,A Spirited Resistance, start their stories in earnest in colonial Pennsylvania,and proceed like White to the nineteenth century. War Under Heaven is different, both in focusing on 56 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY events in 1763 and 1764,and in concentrating on a narrower region , though admittedly a large one, south of the Great Lakes, north of Ohio River,and east of the Mississippi. Dowd gains much by keeping this focus. He convincingly demonstrates that neither the...