Date of Graduation

2001

Document Type

Dissertation/Thesis

Abstract

European and white American conquest and settlement of the Upper Ohio River Valley during the second half of the eighteenth century transformed the region from Indian cultural domination to white American domination. The region's inhabitants, Lenapes, Shawnees, Senecas, and various other Indian nations, settled the Upper Ohio Valley during the first half of the century and brought their cultures to the region. White settlers soon followed. During this often violent period of frontier contact, whites borrowed from, Indian culture to improve their frontier life, which created a hybrid, or frontier, culture. As the white population increased, they eventually displaced the region's Indian population. By 1810, the pervasiveness of white institutions completed the Upper Ohio River Valley's cultural transformation. White settlement, however, did not bring civilization to the Upper Ohio Valley, as Frederick Jackson Turner had asserted, because the Indians had already established a civilization. Instead, the Upper Ohio Valley frontier was a meeting place of different nations and cultures.

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