THE INDIAN AND THE WHITE MAN.

Edited, with an introduction by WilcombE. Washburn '48. Garden City, NewYork: Doubleday & Co., 1964. 480 pp.$1.95.

As the traditional disciplines have become more and more specialized, paradoxically they have become increasingly interdependent. As the gaps have widened between them, new and hybrid specialties have developed to fill these gaps, viz. biochemistry, geophysics, psycholinguistics, and ethnohistory. The last-named is an attempt to bridge the gap between anthropology and history by utilizing the documents and methods of the historian to fill in ethnographic and chronological gaps in our knowledge of nonliterate peoples, a classic concern of the anthropologist.

Early anthropologists were well aware of the value of historical sources, but the newer breed, concerned more with "structure and function" and a search for "laws," have tended to become ahistorical, or even antihistorical. The subdiscipline of ethnohistory, really more of a method than a separate field of knowledge, attempts to correct this imbalance and now has its own professional society and journal. Interestingly enough, three of the leaders in this movement are Dartmouth men: William N. Fenton '30, John C. Ewers '31, both professional anthropologists, and Wilcomb E. Washburn '48, a historian.

The present volume, edited by Washburn, appears in the "Documents of American Civilization," a series whose aim is to make primary materials of American history available in paperback form. Washburn has brought together an amazingly interesting group of first-hand observations on the American Indian, gleaned from a wide variety of original sources and arranged under eight heads: (1) First Contact, (2) Personal Relations (including some observations on sex), (3) Dispossession, (4) Trade, (5) Missionaries, (6) War, (7) Governmental Relations, (8) Literature and Art. Included are such early observers as Christopher Columbus, John Rolfe, Father Hennepin, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, together with an on-the-scene description of "Mr. Wheelock's Indian School." As is so often the case with anthologies, many of the selections are so short that they are merely titillating. But if readers are titillated to read further in the field of ethnohistory one of Dr. Washburn's purposes will have been served.

Professor of Anthropology