SubscribeSometime during the 1950s he discovered American Indian history and the appalling way historians had treated native people. Fittingly, his first published article, "Francis Parkman versus his Sources," was a meticulous dismemberment of the nineteenth-century historian's description of Native Americans (Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography , 87:3 [1963], 306-23). Encouraged by Dunn and Wallace, Jennings persisted. His dissertation, "Miquon's Passing: Indian-European Relations in Colonial Pennsylvania, 1674-1755," was a tour de force. It demonstrated the centrality of Indian people and Indian diplomacy in eighteenth-century colonial life, and poked large holes in the reputation of more than one of Pennsylvania's founding generation...
Despite his innovative scholarship, Jennings was not embraced by the academic establishment. As he continued to teach at local, undergraduate institutions--Moore College of Art (1966-1968), and Cedar Crest College (1968-1976)--and to write in relative obscurity, he published essays in Pennsylvania History, the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, American Quarterly, and Ethnohistory...
Jennings's career took another unexpected turn in 1975 when, at the age of 57, he published his first book, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest. A collection of essays on specific topics in colonial history--Indian population, the Pequot war, popular images--the book was a frontal attack on the generations of scholars who, he argued, had internalized the racist language of the seventeenth century and overlooked the violence and brutality of European settlement. By insisting that America began not with "discovery" but invasion, Jennings set himself apart from those who viewed the fate of the continent's indigenous people as somehow inevitable or natural. Jennings's angry, forceful prose still touches readers a quarter century after its publication.
...Jennings embarked on what is probably the most productive retirement in our field. He first completed two books on the Iroquois in the eighteenth century which he believed with Invasion completed what he called "the Covenant Chain Trilogy": The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire (1984) and Empire of Fortune (1988). Following his wife's death in 1989, he returned to Chicago to become a Senior Research Fellow at the Newberry. From that perch he wrote The Founders of America and Benjamin Franklin, Politician. He tried moving south for a time, but he missed his Chicago community too much. In 1995 he returned to take up residence at the King Home, a unique retirement residence for men, in Evanston. Despite occasional ill health, Fritz quickly settled in and became a leader in his new home. He interspersed trips down to the Newberry with a growing list of King Home activities: a daily crossword puzzle group, a play reading group, and conversations with new friends. They called him "the professor" and watched in awe as he sat in the common room, working on a new book. The Creation of America: Through Revolution to Empire was published a few months before his death.
Jenness, Diamond, 1886-1969. The Indians of Canada, University of Toronto Press.
posted by philfromhavelock at 6:06 PM on January 27, 2005