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Much the same problem afflicts Bourne's treatment of race.  He leaves the impression that as soon as Europeans showed up, a biracial frontier was formed with clear and static notions of who was white and who was red.  The trouble is most of the evidence from the colonial era suggests something different.  Racial categories seem to have taken a long time to form (at least into the eighteenth century), were often malleable, and anything but self-evident.  The fact that Bourne uses the term "red" throughout his history, whereas Euro-Americans did not use the word to describe or refer to Native Americans until the 1700s, is itself a clue that he needed to offer a more complex—no, a more accurate—view of race in early America.

Even if this book had provided more satisfying analyses of cultural and racial formation in America, there would still be reasons to be leery of its ultimate goal of explaining how America got to be America.  For one thing, until 1800, it focuses exclusively on the northeast and never considers European-Indian interaction in Louisiana or New Spain.  Were religious encounters in colonial Virginia and the Carolinas, not to mention Florida and New Mexico, somehow irrelevant to what the republic-to-be became?

More important, by orienting our attention on how the competition of religious systems forged later American civilization, we run the risk of missing what might have been or might have seemed vitally important at that present historical moment.  Understanding the myriad meetings and exchanges of Native Americans and Europeans on their own terms and within their own peculiar historical contexts, rather than in relation to some future American identity or American culture, strikes me as essential for doing justice to each particular religious encounter.  No doubt some of these encounters had long-lasting effects.  But we do a disservice to those involved, and to what happened in early America itself, if we assign primary or solitary value to how the meetings of Indians and Europeans contributed to what was to be rather than what was.

Richard W. Pointer is professor of history at Westmont College.

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Books & Culture Corner appears Mondays at ChristianityToday.com. Earlier Books & Culture Corners include:

Books Present, Books Past, and Books to Come | Plus: A new format for this column. (Jan. 13, 2002)

Double Indemnity Meets Dead Souls | A conversation with novelist Richard Dooling. (Jan. 6, 2003)

Books of the Year | The top ten. (OK—make that twelve.) (Dec. 30, 2002)

Entertain Us | Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and the rapture of distress. (Dec. 16, 2002)

Boys Will Be Boys | A new book by a leading Christian feminist scholar inadvertently reveals the flawed assumptions underlying much talk about "flexibility" in gender roles. (Dec. 9, 2002)

Street Cred | Dave Eggers: The portrait of an artist as a … what? (Dec.2, 2002)

Epicurus'—and Darwin's—Dangerous Idea | How we became hedonists. (Nov. 18, 2002)

Weird Science? | A Darwinian debate continues. (Nov. 11, 2002)

Of Moths and Men Revisited | A Darwinian debate. (Nov. 4, 2002)

Angels in Heaven | A game that's more than a game. (Oct. 28, 2002)

Number One with a Bullet | America's foist family as a tool for evangelism. (Oct. 21, 2002)

Train Up a Child | Helping children to become intimately familiar with Scripture. (Oct. 14, 2002)

Acting Like Those 'Evangelicals' | Guilty as charged? (Sept. 30, 2002)

Ugly Evangelicals | Is this us? (Sept. 23, 2002)

Herbie Goes Bananas | The rise and fall and rise and fall and rise of the VW Beetle. (Sept. 16, 2002)

So Far, So Near | A graduate of Murree Christian School in Pakistan, the site of a deadly assault by Islamic terrorists in August, reflects on his growing-up years, on what has changed in the interim, and on the beleaguered Christian community in Pakistan (Sept. 9, 2002)

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January (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47