Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast episode 156. I'm your host, Jack Heneman,

and I'm recording this episode on July 4th, 2024 in New Orleans. Happy Independence Day, everyone.

A decent respect for the opinions of mankind

requires that we tell the history of the lands

now encompassed by the United States

from the beginning without intentional presentism.

In the last episode on the timeline, War on the Hudson Part 1,

we talked about the Asopus Indians,

who occupied both banks of the Hudson River

in the vicinity of Kingston, New York.

The Asopas were part of a larger tribal group

that in the 1720s would come to be known as the Muncie's.

Robert S. Gremitt in his 2009 book The Muncie Indians A History puts them in context.

Quote, just 400 years ago, four bears of Delaware-speaking people, who had later

be known as Muncie's, lived quietly in an ancestral homeland that was wholly their own.

It was a land of dense forests, broad marshlands and clear waters that stretched across the mid-Atlantic slope

of North America between the Lower Hudson and Upper Delaware River valleys. Two islands,

Manhattan on the lower Hudson and minisink in the Upper Delaware, lay at the margins of this homeland.

Near its eastern end, Indians on Manhattan, looking out on the bay on a fall morning in 1609,

saw Henry Hudson's ship, the half-moon, sail into and up the river that would bear its captain's name.

150 years later, descendants of these same Manhattan Islanders living at Menacek,

that's on the Delaware River in the far northwest corner of New Jersey, for those of you

...