Displaying 1 of 1 2023 Format: Book Author: Blackhawk, Ned, author. Title: The rediscovery of America : Native peoples and the unmaking of U.S. history / Ned Blackhawk. Publisher, Date: New Haven : Yale University Press, 2023. Description: viii, 596 pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm. Summary: "The most enduring feature of U.S. history is the presence of Native Americans, yet most histories focus on Europeans and their descendants. This long practice of ignoring Indigenous history is changing, however, as a new generation of scholars insists that any full American history address the struggle, survival, and resurgence of American Indian nations. ... Ned Blackhawk interweaves five centuries of Native and non-Native histories, from Spanish colonial exploration to the rise of Native American self-determination in the late twentieth century"-- Publisher description. Series: Henry Roe Cloud series on American Indians and modernity Henry Roe Cloud series on American Indians and modernity. Subjects: Indians of North America -- History. United States -- History. Other Title: Re-discovery of America : Native peoples and the unmaking of U.S. history Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index. Library Journal Prepub Alert, 010123, p. 15 Kirkus Review - Adult,020123 Publisher's Weekly,021323 LCCN: 2022944823 ISBN: 9780300244052 0300244053 * 9780300271249 Other Number: 1367847670 System Availability: 2 # Local items: 1 Call Number: 973.049 Blackha, N Rediscov # Local items in: 1 # System items in: 2 Current Holds: 0 Place Request Add to My List Expand All | Collapse All Where is it? Suggestions and more Large Cover Image Trade Reviews Publishers Weekly Review"American Indians were central to every century of U.S. historical development," argues Yale historian Blackhawk (Violence over the Land) in this sweeping study. He begins with the arrival of Spanish explorers in Mexico and Florida in the 16th century, before shifting to French and British colonization efforts in the Northeast and the Ohio River Valley. In both instances, Native communities endured extreme violence and devastating epidemics, while employing fluid survival strategies (fighting, relocating, converting to Christianity, trading, intermarrying) that influenced imperial ambitions and behavior. Blackhawk also makes a persuasive case that in the wake of the Seven Years' War and the expulsion of French forces from the interior of North America, "the growing allegiances between British and Indian leaders became valuable fodder in colonists' critiques of their monarch," helping to lead to the Revolutionary War. In Blackhawk's telling, "Indian affairs" remained a potent political and social issue through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the New Deal and Cold War eras, as the removal of more than 75,000 Native children to federally funded boarding schools between the 1870s and 1920s and the dispossession of nearly a hundred million acres of reservation land during the same time period gave rise to a new generation of activists whose efforts to regain Native autonomy reshaped U.S. law and culture. Striking a masterful balance between the big picture and crystal-clear snapshots of key people and events, this is a vital new understanding of American history. (Apr.)CHOICE ReviewThe Rediscovery of America joins a growing historiography that insists American history cannot be accurately told by continuing to ignore the presence, persistence, and contributions of Native Americans. Blackhawk's ambitious book embarks on an overview of American history from the 16th to the 20th centuries, grounding Native Americans in the center of that history. Throughout, Blackhawk (Yale Univ.) focuses on telling a story that more fully integrates Native American history and US history into a richer, more accurate rendering of the past. As with any synthesis, there will be areas that specialists dispute or wish to add more nuance to. Nevertheless, as an entire work, this volume's strengths lie in the author's impressive synthesis of recent scholarship, his challenge to readers to question the roles to which they have limited Native Americans, and his reframing of US history that does more than periodically insert a token Native American figure but instead spotlights the consistent presence and impact of Native Americans in shaping the US through its entire history. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers through faculty. --Jessica Lynn Wallace, Georgia College & State UniversityKirkus ReviewA wide-ranging study that moves Indigenous peoples from the periphery to the core of continental history. "Indigenous absence has been a long tradition of American historical analysis," writes Blackhawk, a professor of history and faculty coordinator for the Yale Group for the Study of Native America. In recent years, this has changed thanks to the efforts of a new generation of historians to count marginalized groups such as women and ethnic minorities in the larger narrative. By the author's account, American history represents an "epic encounter" between empires, Native and European, each conditioning the other. For example, pressures on the nations of the Iroquois Confederacy by British/American collision with the French Empire in North America pushed Iroquoian peoples into the Ohio River Valley, creating further conflict among Indigenous groups. In his lucid exposition, Blackhawk rightly notes, "while violence was an essential institution of colonialism, it was never enough to achieve permanent goals of empire." While violence may have secured certain short-term goals, it introduced still more instability into an already unsettled situation that endangered everyone involved. "Once it is initiated," writes the author, "none can predict its ultimate course." Blackhawk locates some of the most fraught moments of westward expansion in the years of the Civil War, when a preoccupied Abraham Lincoln left matters of Native policy largely to his generals in the West, advocating instead an abstract program of "assimilation, land cessions, and eventual disappearance." Violence naturally ensued, with new Native confederations such as alliances of the Sioux and Cheyenne against the U.S. Army leading to Little Big Horn. The author closes with an analysis of the doctrine of "termination," which attempted to dismantle Native communities, assimilate their members, and steal away their treaty lands, plans that eventually failed. Even today, though, Blackhawk notes that conflict exists as interest groups attempt to erase "the hard-fought gains of the modern sovereignty movement." A well-reasoned challenge for future American historians to keep Native peoples on center stage. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission. Summary National Bestseller Winner of the 2023 National Book Award in Nonfiction * Finalist for the 2023 Los Angeles Times Book Award in History * Winner of 2024 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Nonfiction * Winner of the 2024 Mark Lynton History Prize Named a best book of 2023 by New Yorker , Esquire , Publishers Weekly , Barnes & Noble A New York Times Notable Book of 2023 * A Washington Post Notable Work of Nonfiction of 2023 * An NPR "Book We Love" for 2023 "Eloquent and comprehensive. . . . In the book's sweeping synthesis, standard flashpoints of U.S. history take on new meaning."--Kathleen DuVal, Wall Street Journal "In accounts of American history, Indigenous peoples are often treated as largely incidental--either obstacles to be overcome or part of a narrative separate from the arc of nation-building. Blackhawk . . . [shows] that Native communities have, instead, been inseparable from the American story all along."-- Washington Post Book World , "Books to Read in 2023" A sweeping and overdue retelling of U.S. history that recognizes that Native Americans are essential to understanding the evolution of modern America The most enduring feature of U.S. history is the presence of Native Americans, yet most histories focus on Europeans and their descendants. This long practice of ignoring Indigenous history is changing, however, as a new generation of scholars insists that any full American history address the struggle, survival, and resurgence of American Indian nations. Indigenous history is essential to understanding the evolution of modern America. Ned Blackhawk interweaves five centuries of Native and non‑Native histories, from Spanish colonial exploration to the rise of Native American self-determination in the late twentieth century. In this transformative synthesis he shows that * European colonization in the 1600s was never a predetermined success; * Native nations helped shape England's crisis of empire; * the first shots of the American Revolution were prompted by Indian affairs in the interior; * California Indians targeted by federally funded militias were among the first casualties of the Civil War; * the Union victory forever recalibrated Native communities across the West; * twentieth-century reservation activists refashioned American law and policy. Blackhawk's retelling of U.S. history acknowledges the enduring power, agency, and survival of Indigenous peoples, yielding a truer account of the United States and revealing anew the varied meanings of America. Table of Contents List of MapsixIntroduction: Toward a New American History1Part IIndians and Empires1American Genesis: Indians and the Spanish Borderlands172The Native Northeast and the Rise of British North America483The Unpredictability of Violence: Iroquoia and New France to 1701734The Native Inland Sea: The Struggle for the Heart of the Continent, 1701-551065Settler Uprising: The Indigenous Origins of the American Revolution1396Colonialism's Constitution: The Origins of Federal Indian Policy176Part IIStruggles for Sovereignty7The Deluge of Settler Colonialism: Democracy and Dispossession in the Early Republic2118Foreign Policy Formations: California, the Pacific, and the Borderlands Origins of the Monroe Doctrine2509Collapse and Total War: The Indigenous West and the U.S. Civil War28910Taking Children and Treaty Lands: Laws and Federal Power during the Reservation Era32911Indigenous Twilight at the Dawn of the Century: Native Activists and the Myth of Indian Disappearance36512From Termination to Self-Determination: Native American Sovereignty in the Cold War Era408Notes449Acknowledgments551Index553 Librarian's View Series Information Similar Titles Similar Series Summary Reader Reviews Displaying 1 of 1
