Thank you so much for this thread, and for others that you may have underway, Jeff. As a relative newbie and outsider to this literature, working on a "River 101) multimedia work on he Mississippi River, I'm learning all I can while being wary of generalizing. Thanks again!
NOT STOLEN is an expansion of Fynn-Paul’s 2020 Spectator article “The Myth of the Stolen Country,” which I posted about on then twitter and which was discussed by several others at the time. https://twitter.com/Jeff__Ostler/status/1311760509281038336
NOT STOLEN was published by Post Hill Press, which publishes “pop-culture, business, self-help, health, Christian, and conservative political books.” Readers should be aware that the book did not go through the usual peer review process for an academic book.
The lack of peer review allowed F-P to indulge in the same cherry-picking, strawman arguments, name-calling, distortions, outlandish assertions, and outright falsehoods as in the Spectator article. At close to 400 pages, there are a lot more of them in the book than the article.
This thread is about chapter 13, “Was America Stolen?” Given the title of Fynn-Paul’s book, you would think the answer would be an obvious NO. That’s what F-P may think he’s arguing, but—get ready for this, I am not kidding—his actual answer is YES.
F-P starts the chapter with the Walking Purchase of 1737 when Pennsylvania stole lands from Delawares (Lenapes) by having runners instead of walkers mark off the boundary of a previous land sale.
F-P admits the Walking Purchase was “one of the more egregious instances of fraud” (so, yes, STOLEN) in the colonial period, but asks was it “normative?” F-P answers this by saying that the “Long Peace of 1682-1737” was more typical.
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https://twitter.com/Jeff__Ostler/status/1311760509281038336