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An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
"Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally-recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire. In An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. As the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: "The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them." Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples' history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative."--Publisher's description
Call Number: E 76.8 .D86 2014
ISBN: 9780807057834
Publication Date: 2015-08-11
An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North America by Michael Witgen
Explores the formation and development of a Native New World in North America. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, indigenous peoples controlled the vast majority of the continent while European colonies of the Atlantic World were largely confined to the eastern seaboard. Through imaginative use of both Native language and European documents, historian Michael Witgen re-creates the world of the indigenous peoples who ruled the western interior of North America.
Call Number: E 91 .W58 2012
ISBN: 0812222865
Publication Date: 2013-06-05
American Settler Colonialism: A History by Walter L. Hixson
"Over the course of three centuries, American settlers spread throughout North America and beyond, driving out indigenous populations to establish exclusive and permanent homelands of their own. In doing so, they helped to create the richest and most powerful nation in human history, even as they caused the death and displacement of millions of people. This groundbreaking historical synthesis demonstrates that the United States is and has always been fundamentally a settler colonial society--and, indeed, that its growth as a country represents the most sweeping, violent, and significant instance of the phenomenon in history. Linking episodes too often treated in isolation--including Indian removal, the Mexican and Civil Wars, and the settlement of Alaska and Hawaii--it upends many familiar categories of U.S. history and presents a compelling yet disturbing framework through which to understand America's rise to global dominance"--Publisher's Web site.
Call Number: E 179.5 .H59 2013
ISBN: 113737425X
Publication Date: 2013-12-05
Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants by Kent Lightfoot
Annotation California's earliest European colonists--Russian merchants and Spanish missionaries--depended heavily on Native Americans for labor to build and maintain their colonies, but they did so in very different ways. This richly detailed book brings together disparate skeins of the past--including little-known oral histories, native texts, ethnohistory, and archaeological excavations--to present a vivid new view of how native cultures fared under these two colonial systems. Kent Lightfoot's innovative work, which incorporates the holistic methods of historical anthropology, explores the surprising ramifications of these long-ago encounters for the present-day political status of native people in California. Lightfoot weaves the results of his own significant archaeological research at Fort Ross, a major Russian mercantile colony, into a cross-cultural comparison, showing how these two colonial ventures--one primarily mercantile and one primarily religious--contributed to the development of new kinds of native identities, social forms, and tribal relationships. His lively account includes personal anecdotes from the field and a provocative discussion of the role played by early ethnographers, such as Alfred Kroeber, in influencing which tribes would eventually receive federal recognition. Indians, Missionaries, and Merchantstakes a fascinating, yet troubling, look at California's past and its role in shaping the state today.
ISBN: 9780520940352
Publication Date: 2004-01-01
Beyond 1492: Encounters in Colonial North America by James Axtell
In this provocative and timely collection of essays--five published for the first time--one of the most important ethnohistorians writing today, James Axtell, explores the key role of imagination both in our perception of strangers and in the writing of history. Coinciding with the 500th anniversary of Columbus's'discovery'of America, this collection covers a wide range of topics dealing with American history. Three essays view the invasion of North America from the perspective of the Indians, whose land it was. The very first meetings, he finds, were nearly always peaceful. Other essays describe native encounters with colonial traders--creating'the first consumer revolution'--and Jesuit missionaries in Canada and Mexico. Despite the tragedy of many of the encounters, Axtell also finds that there was much humor in Indian-European negotiations over peace, sex, and war. In the final section he conducts searching analyses of how college textbooks treat the initial century of American history, how America's human face changed from all brown in 1492 to predominantly white and black by 1792, and how we handled moral questions during the Quincentenary. He concludes with an extensive review of the Quincentenary scholarship--books, films, TV, and museum exhibits--and suggestions for how we can assimilate what we have learned.
ISBN: 9780195359824
Publication Date: 1992
Violence over the Land by Ned Blackhawk
"Blackhawk, a Western Shoshone himself, does not portray the natives as victims. Instead, he demonstrates that their perseverance and ability to adapt to changing conditions over the last two centuries allowed them to help shape the world around them ... This is one of the finest studies available on native peoples of the great basin region." -- John Burch, Library Journal, from the bookjacket.
ISBN: 9780674020993
Publication Date: 2008-04-30
Native but Foreign: Indigenous Immigrants and Refugees in the North American Borderlands by Brenden W Rensink. Sterling Evans
Winner, 2019 Spur Award for Best Historical Nonfiction Book, sponsored by Western Writers of America In Native but Foreign, historian Brenden W. Rensink presents an innovative comparison of indigenous peoples who traversed North American borders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, examining Crees and Chippewas, who crossed the border from Canada into Montana, and Yaquis from Mexico who migrated into Arizona. The resulting history questions how opposing national borders affect and react differently to Native identity and offers new insights into what it has meant to be "indigenous" or an "immigrant." Rensink?s findings counter a prevailing theme in histories of the American West?namely, that the East was the center that dictated policy to the western periphery. On the contrary, Rensink employs experiences of the Yaquis, Crees, and Chippewas to depict Arizona and Montana as an active and mercurial blend of local political, economic, and social interests pushing back against and even reshaping broader federal policy. Rensink argues that as immediate forces in the borderlands molded the formation of federal policy, these Native groups moved from being categorized as political refugees to being cast as illegal immigrants, subject to deportation or segregation; in both cases, this legal transition was turbulent. Despite continued staunch opposition, Crees, Chippewas, and Yaquis gained legal and permanent settlements in the United States and successfully broke free of imposed transnational identities. Accompanying the thought-provoking text, a vast guide to archival sources across states, provinces, and countries is included to aid future scholarship. Native but Foreign is an essential work for scholars of immigration, indigenous peoples, and borderlands studies.
ISBN: 9781623496562
Publication Date: 2018
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