New World Babel

About this book

New World Babel is an innovative cultural and intellectual history of the languages spoken by the native peoples of North America from the earliest era of European conquest through the beginning of the nineteenth century. By focusing on different aspects of the Euro-American response to indigenous speech, Edward Gray illuminates the ways in which Europeans' changing understanding of "language" shaped their relations with Native Americans. The work also brings to light something no historian has treated in any sustained fashion: early America was a place of enormous linguistic diversity, with acute social and cultural problems associated with multilingualism.