For many historians, the seventeenth-century Delaware Valley has long been a blank space on the map, a terra incognita in the heart of early America. Though located midway between Virginia and New England, the region’s sparse population of Swedish, Finnish, and Dutch colonists left few marks, making it all too easy to ignore until 1681, when the new colony of Pennsylvania swiftly transformed the Valley into one of the densest sites of European settlement in North America. Soderlund’s Lenape Country fills this empty canvas with a dynamic picture of a Native-controlled region, where Lenapes—the people later known as Delawares—built a stable set of alliances with neighbors and maintained their independence for decades after the colonial arrival. Countering a long-standing “portrayal of the Lenapes as a powerless people,” Soderlund argues that Lenapes’ political “primacy” defined the region’s early colonial history (5). Although the Swedish, Dutch, and English empires each claimed the...

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