As part of their contests for power, colonial and Indigenous societies made many attempts to transform one another's appearance: changing clothes, cutting hair, piercing or stretching ears (or removing earrings), and applying (or removing) paint and makeup, as well as deploying a range of violent acts that maimed, mutilated, or marked both the dead and the living. The enslaved might be branded, war captives might have finger joints removed, and those punished for crimes might have ears or noses cropped. There, were other marks, less consciously crafted by human hands yet still legible: scars and blindness from smallpox, rotting noses from syphilis. These traces on the body could prompt panic and hostility, or curiosity and research, or desire, mockery, or wonder. Most notably, they prompted new stories about which types of difference mattered-and how to create, or erase, those differences.... Studying the marks of collective and personal experience on early American bodies makes visible to us a world of signs that could indicate affiliation, alienation, conflict, and commodification. In a world characterized by increasing long-distance travel, imperial expansion, and the circulation of stories about and images of strange people and places, crucial questions existed: Who are you? What are your allegiances? And what does your appearance tell us, not just about you but about the people you have met and the places you have been? Book jacket.