Encounters at the Heart of the World

Paperback

English language

Published Nov. 30, 2015 by Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

ISBN:: 978-0-374-53511-7

A book that radically changes our understanding of North America before and after the arrival of Europeans Encounters at the Heart of the World concerns the Mandan Indians, iconic Plains people whose teeming, busy towns on the upper Missouri River were for centuries at the center of the North American universe. We know of them mostly because Lewis and Clark spent the winter of 1804-1805 with them, but why don't we know more? Who were they really? In this extraordinary book, Elizabeth A. Fenn retrieves their history by piecing together important new discoveries in archaeology, anthropology, geology, climatology, epidemiology, and nutritional science. Her boldly original interpretation of these diverse research findings offers us a new perspective on early American history, a new interpretation of the American past. By 1500, more than twelve thousand Mandans were established on the northern Plains, and their commercial prowess, agricultural skills, and reputation for hospitality …

A book that radically changes our understanding of North America before and after the arrival of Europeans Encounters at the Heart of the World concerns the Mandan Indians, iconic Plains people whose teeming, busy towns on the upper Missouri River were for centuries at the center of the North American universe. We know of them mostly because Lewis and Clark spent the winter of 1804-1805 with them, but why don't we know more? Who were they really? In this extraordinary book, Elizabeth A. Fenn retrieves their history by piecing together important new discoveries in archaeology, anthropology, geology, climatology, epidemiology, and nutritional science. Her boldly original interpretation of these diverse research findings offers us a new perspective on early American history, a new interpretation of the American past. By 1500, more than twelve thousand Mandans were established on the northern Plains, and their commercial prowess, agricultural skills, and reputation for hospitality became famous. Recent archaeological discoveries show how they thrived, and then how they collapsed. The damage wrought by imported diseases like smallpox and the havoc caused by the arrival of horses and steamboats were tragic for the Mandans, yet, as Fenn makes clear, their sense of themselves as a people with distinctive traditions endured. A riveting account of Mandan history, landscapes, and people, Fenn's narrative is enriched and enlivened not only by science and research but by her own encounters at the heart of the world. - Publisher.

3 editions

Ben Waber reviewed Encounters at the Heart of the World by Elizabeth A. Fenn

An Illuminating if Incomplete History

5 stars

This is a great, albeit necessarily unsatisfyingly incomplete, history of arguably one of the most important yet poorly known indigenous cultures of North America. Fenn does an excellent job assembling the disparate sources that do exist on the Mandan in their heyday, detailing their unique nearly urban and highly commercial culture through the centuries. It's scant because written sources were non-existent until European contact, which happened exceptionally late and then only sporadically until the first few decades of the 19th century, when a smallpox epidemic felled 90% of the Mandan already decimated by various agricultural and epidemiological calamities. Using that brief window, as well as more recent oral histories and archaeological research, Fenn paints a vivid picture of the lifeways and festivals of the Mandan of the time (the Okipa is absolutely bonkers). Highly recommend

Encounters at the Heart of the World

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