Jan. 31, 2002 -- "Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America," a newbook by University of Pennsylvania history professor Daniel K. Richter, rediscovers early America as Indian Country, one in which Native American experiences were at the core of the nation's birth and identity.

For three centuries after Columbus, native people controlled most of eastern North America and shaped its destiny. Richter keeps native people center-stage throughout the story of the origins of the United States.

The 16th century was an era in which Native Americans discovered Europeans and struggled to make sense of a new world. Well into that century, the most profound challenges to Indian life came less from the arrival of a relative handful of European colonists than from the biological, economic and environmental forces the newcomers unleashed.

Drawing upon their own traditions, Indian communities reinvented themselves and carved out a place in a world dominated by transatlantic European empires. In 1776, however, when some of Britain's colonists rebelled against that imperial world, they overturned the system that had made Euro-American and Native American coexistence possible. Eastern North America only ceased to be an Indian country because the revolutionaries denied the continent's first peoples a place in the nation they were creating.

Richter challenges assumptions about times and places and reveals the Native American experience at the core of the nation's birth and identity.

Richter is the director of The McNeil Center for Early American Studies at Penn and is the author of "The Ordeal of the Longhouse."