Analysis Of Ned Blackhawk s Violence Of The Land And...

Culture involves the socially mediated human capacity to differentiate, to categorize the world experience according to what is important to pay attention to, and what is not, and to assign meanings to the categories created . How does culture happen? Is it learned, shared, innate, and adaptive? For each or any of these how so? We will address the theme of culture of the Early American West through the writings of Ned Blackhawk’s Violence of the Land and Susan Johnson’s Roaring Camp – while thinking along the lines of: How are the cultures similar? Different? What are the symbolic gestures? American history frequently centers on the issues of ethnic diversity and resource allocation. In the contemporary, we begin to see the experiences of the Native inhabitants of the Americas in contrast to European settlers and colonizers, is a prime example of this process in motion. When European settlers first arrived to the New World in the 15th century, firstly the Spanish, they brought with them a material cultural based upon an economic standard of resource exploitation, which in a sense was hostile to most of the Native peoples of the Americas. For instance, as Blackhawk notes that, Europeans built permanent settlements consisting of immovable structures, whereas many of the Great Basin peoples were semi-migratory in nature. Additionally, as Europeans claimed possession over the land, its resources, and began a process of territorial delimitation, Native peoples whose lives