Hello and welcome to a history of the United States.

Episode 70, Native Americans 10, the Eastern Woodlands.

Today I want to begin with a plug for something that isn't my own.

Friend of the show Z from the British History podcast has recently launched her own show called

Decode the News.

It builds on her recently completed PhD, which I won't even try and explain.

I met her and Jamie a few months ago in London, and she basically explained her PhD to me, with the way that the media portrays news and what that

means and how that affects the news itself and it was all just superbly interesting and I can't

recommend it enough really there are very few people that I will listen to as just an

expert on something and listening to Z Talk about this. It's very, you just do it, just do it,

basically just do it. The name again is decode the news. But now, back to our stuff. Having covered the Pacific Northwest last time out, now we turn to the eastern United States in more detail.

Indigenous Farmers by Linda Cordell and Bruce Smith, Chapter 4 of the Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas,

Volume 1, Part 1, will be our introduction. Quote,

The natural and historical landscape of the eastern woodlands of North America contrasts

sharply with that of the arid southwest in many respects Bounded on the west by grasslands on the east

and south by water, and with a northern length of growing season, dividing line between farming

and entirely hunter-gatherer adaptations, the east was a vast expanse of forest, broken only by a complex

system of large rivers and their various major and minor tributaries. The Mississippi River and

its tributaries dominate the interior heartland of the East. The Missouri, Arkansas, and Red Rivers reach into the

grasslands of the west, while the Ohio, Cumberland and Tennessee extend eastwards to the Appalachian Wall.

East of the mountains and along the Atlantic and Gulf Coastal Plains, other river systems, large and small, flow into the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico.

Often providing main routes of movements for early European explorers, traders and settlers, these river and stream valleys were the setting of Native American farming societies

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