Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History

Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History is an address by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (1793-1864), the American geographer, geologist, and ethnologist who was the leading nineteenth-century United States authority on the Ojibwe and other Algonquian peoples of the Upper Great Lakes. Schoolcraft served as Indian agent at Sault Ste. Marie and later at Mackinac Island, and his collected Ojibwe tales were a primary source for Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha. He produced the six-volume Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the History, Condition and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States for the federal government in the 1850s. This address argues for the serious historical study of pre-Columbian and early colonial America at a time when the field was still dominated by amateur antiquaries. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.