Malevolent Spirits Along the Hudson Valley

Susan Alette Dublin is a research associate in the anthropology department of Hunter College, City University of New York.

"Susan Dublin presents a richly detailed and compelling analysis of the role of alcohol among the Indigenous inhabitants of the Hudson Valley in the seventeenth century. With the support of extensive documentary research, she clarifies the subtly changing nature of its uses amid the increasing pressures of the colonial encounter."--Nan A. Rothschild, author of Colonial Encounters in a Native American Landscape: The Spanish and Dutch in North America "Susan Dublin gives both professional and general readers a compelling view of how and why alcohol took on ever greater importance for Munsees, Mahicans, and Mohawks. . . . Malevolent Spirits Along the Hudson Valley is a fine contribution to the scholarship on Indigenous peoples' use of alcohol in early America. It illuminates the particular contexts within the Hudson Valley that shaped the introduction and spread of alcohol and in that way provides a model of how future scholars might examine this same topic in other places."--Richard W. Pointer, author of Pacifist Prophet: Papunhank and the Quest for Peace in Early America "Susan Dublin's meticulously researched and powerfully argued new book is much more than a detailed study of the introduction of alcohol into the Hudson Valley. She has written a new history of a crucial colonial arena at a time when Indigenous peoples and Europeans were figuring out how to coexist. By paying careful attention to scores of encounters in the seventeenth century, Dublin shows us how the sale and use of a single commodity can shape human relations for better and, sadly in the case of alcohol, for worse. Brandy and rum were indeed malevolent spirits that damaged Native communities and became weapons of conquest for European colonizers."--Peter C. Mancall, author of Contested Continent: The Struggle for North America, c. 1000-1680