James H. Merrell

Historian

• Born: 1953
• Place of Birth: Minnesota

Contribution: James H. Merrell is an award-winning historian and author, best known for his study of American Indian and European colonialist interactions in the early Americas.

Background

James Hart Merrell was born in 1953 in Minnesota. He received his undergraduate degree from Lawrence University, a liberal arts college in Appleton, Wisconsin, in 1975. He then went on to study American history as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University in Oxford, England.

Merrell returned to the United States to continue his studies, which have focused on early American history, particularly up to 1830, and the interaction between European colonialists and American Indians during that time. He earned a PhD from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1982. After completing his degree, he was granted fellowships at the Newberry Library Center for the History of the American Indian in Chicago, Illinois, and at the Institute of Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg, Virginia.

In 1984, Merrell became a history professor at Vassar College, a liberal arts college in Poughkeepsie, New York. During the 1998–99 academic year, he taught as a visiting professor at Northwestern University in Chicago.

Career

In 1987 the book Beyond the Covenant Chain: The Iroquois and Their Neighbors in Indian North America, 1600–1800 was published. The work, coedited by Merrell along with historian Daniel K. Richter, takes a look at diplomatic and military relations among American Indian peoples in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North America.

Merrell continued his research and in 1989 his first two books were published: The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal and The Catawbas. The Indians’ New World details the American Indians who resided in the Carolina Piedmont known as the Catawba Nation. Merrell argues that the European colonists and African slaves they brought over created a new world for the native peoples and he traces how the Catawba people adapted to it.

Before The Indians’ New World, American Indian scholarship tended to deal with warfare, suppression, and the wiping out of native nations by the colonists. Work in this field had mostly ignored what it was like for native peoples to adapt to the new culture that they were thrust into. Merrell describes in his book the Catawbas’ encounter with various changes brought by the colonists, including their diseases, trade, and Christianity.

The book won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, the Merle Curti Award from the Organization of American Historians, as well as the Bancroft Prize, awarded to books about the history of the Americas. Scholars have noted that Merrell’s first book brought about a new direction for the study of American Indians.

In 1991 Merrell was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship grant. This grant allowed him to research his third book, published in 1999, called Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier. In this study Merrell details the interaction between American Indians and Europeans colonialists. Specifically, he looks at the Europeans and natives who moved between cultures in the frontiers of Pennsylvania in attempts to maintain diplomacy and make peace between the 1680s and the 1750s.

Into the American Woods was highly acclaimed by scholars and more mainstream book critics alike. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history in 2000 and won Merrell his second Bancroft Prize, making him only the fifth historian to win the award twice.

A year after Into the American Woods was published, Merrell and historian Peter C. Mancall coedited American Encounters: Natives and Newcomers from European Contact to Indian Removal, 1500–1850 (2000). The book features a collection of scholarly essays on the American Indian experience, from the arrival of Europeans in the Americas to the period of American Indian removal in the nineteenth century. Merrell has edited and coedited other works as well. In 2008, he published The Lancaster Treaty of 1744, for which he wrote the introduction. In 2011 Merrell, Jerald Podair, and Andrew Kersten published a two-volume collection of primary documents titled American Conversations: From Colonization through Reconstruction, which Merrell edited himself, and From Centennial through Millennium, edited by Podair and Kersten.

Merrell, who has also been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies, has contributed scholarly articles to several collections and a number of journals as well. Notable essays include “The Indians’ New World: The Catawba Experience,” in The American Indian: Past and Present (1986), edited by historian Roger L. Nichols; and “Indian History during the Colonial Era,” in a study of colonial history titled A Companion to Colonial America (2003), edited by historian Daniel Vickers.

Merrell continues to teach early American history and advise graduate students as the Lucy Maynard Salmon Professor of History at Vassar College.

Impact

Scholars agree that Merrell’s work has helped shape the contemporary study of American Indian and early American history. He is a foremost expert on the interactions between colonialists and American Indians in early American history, which, until his work on the subject, had been a neglected area of study. For his contributions to the field of history, Merrell was given Lawrence University's Lucia Russell Briggs Distinguished Achievement Award in 1994 and was inducted into the Virginia History Series' Historical Hall of Fame.

Personal Life

Merrell married Linda Keiko Yamane, who was a fellow Lawrence University student also from Minnesota. Together they had two sons.

Bibliography

"James H. Merrell, PHD." Vassar, 2023, www.vassar.edu/faculty/emeriti/merrell. Accessed 24 Sept. 2024.

Merrell, James H. “Some Thoughts on Teaching: An Interview with James H. Merrell.” By Rachel Herrmann. The Junto: A Group Blog on Early American History. Junto, 16 Feb. 2013. Web. 23 July 2013.

Pencak, William. “Complicating Native American–White Relations in British North America.” Rev. of Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier, by James H. Merrell. Ethnohistory 52.2 (2005): 437–448. Print.

Rountree, Helen C. Rev. of The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors, by James H. Merrell. American Historical Review 95.5 (1990): 1619. Print.

Usner Daniel H., Jr. Rev. of The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors, by James H. Merrell. Journal of American Ethnic History 11.2 (1992): 77–85. Print.

White, Ed. Rev. of Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier, by James H. Merrell. American Quarterly 52.1 (2000): 179. Print.

Witgen, Michael. “Rethinking Colonial History as Continental History.” Rev. of “Second Thoughts on Colonial Historians and American Indians,” by James H. Merrell. William & Mary Quarterly 69.3 (2012): 527–530. Print.