Long Knives and the Longhouse will appeal most to readers interested in the political history of Virginia's colonial era expansion. Politicians and land speculators figure prominently in the story, but so too do Iroquois diplomats and British officials who abetted the Old Dominion's imperialism. Matthew L. Rhoades focuses more on the intercultural diplomacy that drove Virginia's expansion rather than internal processes that have been detailed in many other excellent studies of the Old Dominion in the colonial period.