MDMD:

[Doug Millison]

http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=22481917013388

review of

Andrew R.L. Cayton and Fredricka J. Teute. _Contact Points: American
Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750-1830_. Omohundro
Institute of Early American History and Culture (Chicago) and the Historic
New Orleans Historic Collection. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1998. x + 390 pp. Illustrations, bibliographical references, and
index. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8078-2427-5; $18.95 (paper), ISBN
0-8078-4734-8.

This book sounds like fun background reading for M&D; it includes an essay
that discusses Sir William Johnson, who appears as a character in M&D, plus
others that focus on the Ohio River valley and Pennsylvania. Academic
insight into many of the themes Pynchon plays with in his novel:  "how this
frontier served as an arena where individual  identities and community
stability were uncertain, flexible, and contested"; how "the economies and
some other cultural aspects of Natives and newcomers overlapped in some
ways and differed in others, particularly in their attitudes towards
animals and in the roles of women, suggesting the causes for both
cooperation and bitter conflicts"; how "women were absolutely essential,
informal ambassadors between families and cultures".

Not to mention an essay with overarching Pynchonian overtones:  "Pigs and
Hunters: 'Rights in the Woods' on the Trans-Appalachian Frontier".


D O U G  M I L L I S O N  [http://www.online-journalist.com]
"I didn't remember the cherry chocolates."
    --Bill Clinton, Aug. 17, 1998