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Showing posts with label native american history. Show all posts

Showing posts with label native american history. Show all posts

Conquering the Southern Plains (Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars, 1865-1890) Review

Conquering the Southern Plains (Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars, 1865-1890)

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(More customer reviews)The first book in the series that I read. Cozzens provides a nice introduction, followed by a great series of primary documents, grouped by event. Beecher's Island is an example of an event, and there are several accounts from the men who fought there. Each account is well footnoted, and the footnotes themselves make for great reading. Maps are included inside front and back covers showing forts, battle sites, etc. Illustrations throughout.

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On The Border With Crook Review

On The Border With Crook

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(More customer reviews)The concept of Manifest Destiny took root during the Mexican American War, and assumed grander proportions following the Civil War. Gen. Crook had been a calvery officer whose services proved to be of considerable value, as much for his ability as for his compassion for the Indians. His job was to protect the settlers and subdue the Indians by locating them on reservations. The author was with Crook during his first and second Southwest campaigns as well as that of the Northern Plains. His love for his commander and appreciation of the Indians made him the perfect writer for the topic. Gen. Crook seems the ideal officer for the job, but was defeated, not by the Indians but Agents assigned, after the army had done its work, to reservations by Washington. The book is a wonderful description of the duty performed by Gen. Crook who, had his system been utilized, would have led to a better life for all. In the end, Bourke feels, Crook died of a broken heart. Important history, and a story too beautifully told to miss.

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Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples Review

Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples

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(More customer reviews)This book used historical sources from explorers, priests, and colonizers to describe the appearance of the indigenous peoples found in the Americas in the 14th, 15th, 16th centuries. From the witnesses own descriptions these people were dark copper-toned woolly-haired peoples often referred to by the witnesses as ethiopian and or negro. These are the ancestors so many so-call African-American elders spoke of to their children and grandchildren. This book should be required reading as well as be on every "black" family's book shelf. A fascinating read without the politics of the western scholar. I would also suggest another book entitled When Rocks Cry Out by Horace Butler.

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The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians through the Era of Revolution Review

The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians through the Era of Revolution

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(More customer reviews)"The Dividing Paths" by Tom Hatley is a commendable work of scholarship concerning Cherokees and South Carolinians in the colonial period. It is well researched with many quotes from primary sources. The book surveys Cherokee culture and interaction with South Carolinians in matters of trade, religion, intermarriage and kinship, and war. It should serve as a valuable reference for anyone studying Cherokee history or the colonial history of the southeastern United States.
The strongest part of this work is Hatley's description and research of the various military campaigns of the South Carolinians against the Cherokees. The reasons for going to war, the specific events of the campaigns, and their devastating results are explored with proper detail. Hatley gives account of the Yamassee War beginning in 1715, the three campaigns of the so-called "Cherokee War" from 1759-1761, and Cherokee and South Carolinian conflict with each other during the American Revolution. Through Hatley's narrative, insights and colorful quotes are also obtained on some of the prominent figures of the times: Governor James Glen, British General James Grant, Cherokee Chiefs Little Carpenter and Dragging Canoe, British Indian Superintendent John Stuart, Colonial General Andrew Pickens, and numerous others.
This book is highly recommended as an important academic resource.

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Parading through History: The Making of the Crow Nation in America 1805-1935 (Studies in North American Indian History) Review

Parading through History: The Making of the Crow Nation in America 1805-1935 (Studies in North American Indian History)

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(More customer reviews)This well researched text provides great insight into the Crow Indian culture. Beginning with earliest recorded written accounts, proceding through the forced move of the Crow, or Apslaloke, from historic homelands and concentrated on their modern day reservation, this is an excellent introduction or supplement to a basic understanding of this plains nation. There is a lot of first person quotes, good photo documentation and scholarly posings. The book concludes with a interesting analysis of Chief Plenty Coups presentation at the dedication of the tomb of the unknown soldier and it's meaning as representative of Native American society at that time.

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This history of the Crow Indians links their nineteenth-century nomadic life and their modern existence. The Crows not only withstood the dislocation and conquest visited on them after 1805, but acted in the midst of these events to construct a modern Indian community--a nation.Their efforts sustained the pride and strength reflected in Chief Plenty Coups' statement in 1925 that he did "not care at all what historians have to say about Crow Indians," as well as their community's faith in the beauty of its traditions and its inventions. Frederick E. Hoxie demonstrates that contact with outsiders drew the Crows together and tested their ability to adapt their traditions to new conditions.He emphasizes political life, but also describes changes in social relations, religious beliefs, and economic activities.His final chapter discusses the significance of the Crow experience for American history in general.

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The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire: The Covenant Chain Confederation of Indian Tribes with English Colonies Review

The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire: The Covenant Chain Confederation of Indian Tribes with English Colonies

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(More customer reviews)Francis Jennings, long associated with the Newbury Library American Indian collections has brought his vast knowledge to bear on the subject of the Iriquois as the fearsome 5 or 6 nations who independently cowed both their fellow tribes and the English and French colonists. He proves it wasn't so with so many documents of which we have never heard in our schoolbook history texts that I wonder how such material escaped notice previously. In the process he slays some American Sacred Cows such as Francis Parkman. One learns that the Indian frontier was no such thing and didn't exist but was a commonly inhabited piece of terrain, peopled by various tribes and the European invaders who traded with them. Relations were, for the most part, reasonably amicable, which accounts for the fact that during later wars the Eastern Indians frequently exhibited what we call civilized treatment of enemies and prisoners. (Of course there were the exceptions, usually well justified.) But in the beginning, the Dutch, Swedes, English and French, all found it necessary to deal with the various tribes quite diplomatically in order to survive, and use them in their wars of empire with one another. Furs in return for trade goods were king. The undoubted reality is such a vast contrast with the accepted picture of our frontier that this book, as well as Jennings others in this series, should be required reading to repair the damage done in our schools by claptrap such as Parkman and other revered historians who followed his lead, writing off the Indians as barabarians and the frontier as a clearly delineated line across which whites stepped only if they were willing to take their lives into their hands. Instead we find two cultures living amicably in common communities up until the first half of the 1700's when the balance was upset by driving out the Indians such as the Delewares and Shawnees so that they located in the Ohio country and became relatively independent. The Iriquois had a large hand in this and it was their undoing. Read the book. It is a complicated subject but well worth digesting. I recommend reading it in small doses and having an atlas nearby.

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The Texas Indians (Centennial Series of the Association of Former Students, Texas A&M University) Review

The Texas Indians (Centennial Series of the Association of Former Students, Texas AandM University)

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(More customer reviews)Written by history professor David La Vere (who has been specifically honored for his writings on Native Americans), The Texas Indians is a comprehensive history of the native people who lived in during the past twelve thousand years in what is today called Texas. The time span and comprehensive coverage ranges from the earliest prehistoric remains found, to a wide variety of Native American tribes (including the mound-building Caddos, the Karankawas and Atakapas who fished along the coast, town-dwelling Jumanos, and more) whose lives, cultures, and societies were thrown into tremendous upheaval with the coming of European colonizers in the 1500's. Apaches, Comanches, Kiowas, Puebloan Tiguas, and many others would in time come to know Texas as home as well, whether seeking refuge or simply coming to embrace the land. A welcome addition to Native American Studies shelves, The Texas Indians presents a simply fascinating and informative interplay of societies and cultures, and is written for non-specialist general readers and Native American History students alike.

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The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Studies in North American Indian History) Review

The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Studies in North American Indian History)

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(More customer reviews)Anyone who has attended an academic history conference in the last five or so years already realizes the impact that this densely-written, but provocatively argued book by an historian of the American west has had on the study of American history. For both good and ill, White's central thesis -- that Indians and Europeans in the Great Lakes region created together and sustained an elaborate system of cultural and political contact that endured for centuries based not on mutual understandings, but mutual MISunderstandings, often deliberate ones -- has come to set the tone for the most recent studies of cultural encounter and creolization in the New World. Indeed, White's "middle ground" bids fair to assume the blanket hegemony exercised over the American historical imagination a decade or more back by the idea of "republicanism." And, not without cause: White's book is in many respects a stupendous achievement -- exhaustively researched, laser-subtle analyses, and ambitious in scope. What weakens the book is White's tendency to often assert the existence of a so-called cultural "middle ground" between Indians and others in advance of the evidence he presents. The "middle ground" is too often presented as a given, one that can act as the explanation, rather than as the hypothetical that it actually is, the actual subject that should be under investigation. This said, the influence of this book will be felt for years to come.

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This book seeks to step outside the simple stories of Indian/white relations--stories of conquest and assimilation and stories of cultural persistence. It is, instead, about a search for accommodation and common meaning. It tells how Europeans and Indians met, regarding each other as alien, as virtually nonhuman, and how between 1650 and 1815 they constructed a common, mutually comprehensible world in the region around the Great Lakes that the French called the "Pays d'en haut". Here the older worlds of the Algonquins and various Europeans overlapped, and their mixture created new systems of meaning and of exchange. Finally, the book tells of the breakdown of accommodation and common meanings and the recreation of the Indians as alien and exotic. The process of accommodation described in this book takes place in a middle ground, a place in between cultures and peoples, and in between empires and non-state villages. On the middle ground people try to persuade others who are different than themselvesby appealing to what they perceive to be the values and practices of those others. From the creative misunderstandings that result, there arise shared meanings and new practices.

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Rotting Face: Smallpox and the American Indian Review

Rotting Face: Smallpox and the American Indian

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(More customer reviews)Rotting Face by author and historian R. G. Robertson is an accurate and revealing historical account of the cruelty of a devastating disease that decimated a people with no immunological defense against it. Variola major, commonly known as smallpox, dubbed "Rotting Face" was first carried to Native American peoples by means of a steamboat voyage, and carved a deadly swath of sickness, suffering, and death everywhere it spread. It destroyed the American Indian cultures of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arickara in less than a year, devoured entire villages of the Blackfeet, and claimed more lives from the Northern Plains tribes in one year than all the military expeditions ever sent against American Indians. Rotting Face is a compelling, graphic account dedicated to providing cold, hard facts and dispelling myths, particuarly in regard to the role of whites in the spread of this lethal disease. Highly recommended reading for anyone with an interest in Native American history, as well as the history of deadly diseases.

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Natives and Newcomers: The Cultural Origins of North America Review

Natives and Newcomers: The Cultural Origins of North America

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(More customer reviews)This book deals with northeast North America, east of the Appalachians, in the period 1492-1783, i.e. from the first Columbus' voyage to the end of the Independence War. The main argument of the book is that cultural frontiers in early North america were "two-way"- interactive and dynamic. Thus, both sides influenced each other. The author attempted also to "write history from the other side of the frontier." (p.10) He is sympathetic to the Indian's point of view and tries to shed some light and understanding upon it.
He rejects the perception about the European moral superiority over the Indians and argues that the French and the English governments periodically fostered scalping of European and Indian enemies by offering bounties or other economic incentives. (p.269)
The only drawback of the book is the Axtell is repating himself, because this book is a compilation of papers and chapters from previous books, so he doesn't have a lot of new information in this book.

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In the past thirty years historians have come to realize that the shape and temper of early America was determined as much by its Indian natives as it was by its European colonizers. No one has done more to discover and recount this story than James Axtell, one of America's premier ethnohistorians. Natives and Newcomers is a collection of fifteen of his best and most influential essays, available for the first time in one volume. In accessible and often witty prose, Axtell describes the major encounters between Indians and Europeans--first contacts, communications, epidemics, trade and gift-giving, social and sexual mingling, work, cultural and religious conversions, military clashes--and probes their short- and long-term consequences for both cultures. The result is a book that shows how encounters between Indians and Europeans ultimately led to the birth of a distinctly American identity. Natives and Newcomers is an essential text for undergraduate and graduate courses in Colonial American history and Native American history.

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The Sac and Fox Indians (Civilization of the American Indian Series) Review

The Sac and Fox Indians (Civilization of the American Indian Series)

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(More customer reviews)This book appears to be the standard for history of the two tribes. Informative and interesting.

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Of all the aboriginal tribes of the Americas none had a more courageous or tragic destiny than the twin tribes of the Mississippi Valley, the Sacs and the Foxes.

Occupying a parkland area midway between the powerful Iroquois and Sioux tribes in present Illinois and Wisconsin, the Sacs and the Foxes were prosperous agrarian people who held their own against their more numerous neighbors. The white frontier moved threateningly closer, and in the War of 1812 the Sacs and the Foxes, resisting the Americans' encroachment on their lands, joined forces with the British.

Black Hawk, the great Sac and Fox leader, refused to accept land cessions to the whites, and in 1832 the tribe's worst fears came true: a group of white squatters claimed the site of Black Hawk's village in Illinois. In the "war" that followed, Black Hawk and his force retreated before an overwhelming force of whites and were virtually wiped out in a battle at the mouth of the Bad Axe River in Wisconsin.

Pushed out onto the plains, the remnants of the tribes had to content with the dominant Comanches. Their destiny had been changed forever.

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A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733-1816 (Studies in North American Indian History) Review

A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733-1816 (Studies in North American Indian History)

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(More customer reviews)Claudio Saunt has provided a scholarly exploration into the causes of the dramatic changes that took place within the Creek Confederacy during the latter portion of the 18th Century. Using primary sources, Saunt shows that it was the influence of the mestizos (children produced by marriages of Creek women with British and American traders) that introduced revolutionary concepts such as leadership through force and government by coercion, private property, reliance on plantation economy rather than hunting-trade for subsistence. No other mestizo accelerated the transformation than the brilliant leader Alexander McGillivray. Even though Saunt's work is scholarly, it is an easy read. It is certainly a must read for those who are interested in Creek History or an understanding of the Southeast during the latter half of the 18th Century and early 19th.

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One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark (History of the American West) Review

One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark (History of the American West)

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(More customer reviews)Colin Calloway has written an impressive debut volume for the University of Nebraska Press' History of the American West series. It weaves the latest archeological discoveries together with Native American oral history into cotemporary European accounts to produce a panoramic overview of 15,000 years of human existence is western America. His narrative ends at the point where coventional school textbooks begin -- with Lewis and Clark. This book has expanded my understanding by showing me that "The West is not a land of empty spaces with a short history..." Calloway wants us to see western history as a "long and unbroken continuum" that stretches backward in a vast spiral of years and forward beyond our own lifetimes.
Most of us have a static view of Native American culture in the West; a 19th century snapshot with tribal characteristics and territories frozen in place. Calloway gives the reader a motion picture full of swirling migrations and altered identitites -- the result of altered climate, technology, as well as of European intervention. He integrates important events in native history into the timeline of world history in a way I have not previously encountered. As the Revolutionary War raged east of the Appalachians, a great smallpox epidemic that reduced native populations by 50-75% was raging to the west. The land Lewis and Clark explored was far emptier than it had been just a generation earlier.
The diffusion of corn-growing into cooler regions of North America, starting in the sixth century C.E. initiated a revolution in Native American life. At the time the Normans invaded England, the Cahokias were building monumental earthworks and plazas amid fields of corn at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi. It was probably the largest city North America had seen until New York surpassed it at the end of the 18th Century. The Cohokias, like the Anasazi of the Southwest, had vanished before Lewis and Clark pushed west. The arrival of the horse on the plains in the 16th century coicided with climatic changes that expanded buffalo populations. Some native groups that had adopted the agrarian life forsook their cornfields, moved out onto the plains, and morphed into nomadic warrior cultures. The Sioux, Apaches, and Cheyenne were farmers before they were buffalo hunters.
Although ONE VAST WINTER COUNT is unapologetically academic, it is well written and very readable. Without interrupting the narrative flow, Calloway identifies his sources and earmarks points of scholarly disagreement. The book devotes less space to native cultures of the Pacific coast than to others. Calloway's explanation is that he had to rely heavily on the record created by Europeans (who came later to that region). He says he chose to make his primary focus "centers of action and interaction". He ends the book by pointing to the depopulation of the rural West, the exhaustion of water resources, and the return of the buffalo as signs that the endless spiral of winters may be making another turn.

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Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835 (Indians of the Southeast) Review

Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835 (Indians of the Southeast)

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(More customer reviews)Perdue's work looks at gender roles in Cherokee society during the dramatic cultural upheaval of the 18th Century. It is a fascinating work which adds flesh to the historical skeletons that have centered on the Cherokee and European men's actions. One cannot truly understand the history and culture of a matrilineal people without a work of this type. This book is required reading for all scholars oof the Cherokee.

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Theda Perdue examines the roles and responsibilities of Cherokee women during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a time of intense cultural change. While building on the research of earlier historians, she develops a uniquely complex view of the effects of contact on Native gender relations, arguing that Cherokee conceptions of gender persisted long after contact. Maintaining traditional gender roles actually allowed Cherokee women and men to adapt to new circumstances and adopt new industries and practices.

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Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West Review

Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West

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(More customer reviews)I think the thing I like most about this book is that Blackhawk uses the colonizer's written words and interprets them through a native frame.
It has the tendency to feel one-sided, almost goes across the line of making indigenous people victims rather than empowering them through the exploration of violence.
All in all it is an interesting way to frame history of the Great Basin region and provides good information for those who don't know anything about the area.

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The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717 Review

The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717

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(More customer reviews)The second part of the title, The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, is a more accurate description of what this good book describes. Gallay presents a detailed description and analysis of the interaction between European colonists, particularly the English in what we now call South Carolina, and the native peoples of the Southeast at the end of the 17th and the early 18th centuries. Gallay is primarily concerned with 2 issues. First, how did the native peoples respond to European colonization? Second, what led to the British gaining the upper hand over the French and Spanish? According to Gallay, the key feature that addresses both these questions is the Indian slave trade. While the French and Spanish pursued colonization for essentially strategic reasons with very limited resources, the British Carolina colony originated as a commercial enterprise originally supporting Caribbean sugar plantations. The British colonists became enmeshed in relatively large scale commerce involving virtually the whole Southeast while the French pursued diplomacy with commercial elements in a more limited area and the Spanish attempted to use a mission system in the Florida region. Gallay presents the Indian slave trade as the key feature of the English trade system. The British colonists used European goods to barter for slaves and other products, particularly hides, from native groups. The slave trade connects the Carolina colony to the larger Atlantic plantation economy and drives development of the colony. This led to an increase in warfare between Indian communities as warfare became commerce driven. The British colonists were then able to exploit their commercial leverage and the increase in turmoil to establish a preeminent position in the South. Gallay is careful to point out that the South was anarchic and conflict ridden prior to European intervention and that slavery was a traditional institution, though expanded greatly with commercial slaving. While Gallay does not say so, this is essentialy an extension of the model of slaving developed to describe the African end of the great Atlantic slave trade. In both the case of Africa and Gallay's discussion of the American South, the model points up the key roles of, and the power of the indigenous communities, which were actually more powerful than the European communities.
This is a creditable interpretation but the data that Gallay actually presents about Indian slaving is relatively modest. There is some anecdotal information and he does make an estimate of the number of slaves taken, arguing that more slaves were shipped out of Charles Town (modern Charleston) than came in. Gallay is clearly limited by his documentary material, most of which does not address directly the issue of the Indian slave trade. Most of the book, however, is not directly about the Indian slave trade but a detailed account of 2 related topics. The first, and best documented, is about the struggles between colonists, the colonial government, and the governing investors in England to regulate the colony, particularly trade with the Indians. The second is an effort to reconstruct the diplomacy and warfare between the different European groups and Indian communities in this period. This is arguably the best part of the book; an effort to describe realistically the independent roles of native communities. Again, though Gallay does not mention this but pioneering work by Francis Jennings and others have demonstrated the powerful and independent role played by North American native communities, particularly the Iroquois, in this period.
Overall, this is a valuable and clearly written book.

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This title focuses on the traffic in Indian slaves in the American South. For decades the Indian slave trade linked southern lives and created a whirlwind of violence and profit-making. Alan Gallay documents in vivid detail the operation of the slave trade, the processes by which Europeans and Native Americans became participants in it, and the profound consequences it had for the South and its peoples.

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American Colonies: The Settling of North America (The Penguin History of the United States, Volume1) (Hist of the USA) Review

American Colonies: The Settling of North America (The Penguin History of the United States, Volume1) (Hist of the USA)

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(More customer reviews)I first noticed the Native American void in history books just a few years ago. I was trying to find which tribes lived near Frederick Co. Maryland, and the information simply wasn't there. I am a hired researcher, so when I say the information wasn't there, I mean that it would take the average person about a year to track down anything at all on the topic. There is a real void in the history of the Americas and there are very few books that treat pre-colonial, non-European American history with any sense of depth or fairness.
This book truly gives you a full-scale idea of what shaped the Americas into what they are today. Finally you can read about what was happening with the native population during the time of contact and conquest. Finally you can get an idea about the environmental and economical impacts of colonialization, both in the Americas and in Europe.
This book is truly a history of "actions" and not "thoughts". Often what we learn in American schools today is what the Puritans were thinking about doing, or what our founding fathers wanted to create out of the Americas. Instead, we learn about the actions they actually took. Which colonies took up the practice of slavery, and why? How succesful where the Puritans in being pure? What was Colombus really thinking?
While the book feels slanted to the leftist mentality, I think you'll find the author treats all groups fairly, focused on their actions and not their intentions. The few books I've read that tried to cover a more holistic history of the Americas usually go too far in the opposite direction, painting all colonists as depraved ravagers, and all natives as white-washed saints. Instead, this book portrays both peoples in their full depth, portraying a complicated, terrible and all too human history.
While I mostly address the native vs. European issue in this review, there is much more going on here. Impacts of trade, morality, religion, government all play out. This is the book we all should have read in our Intro to American History class.
To finish up, this is one of those rare books that I think everyone should read. We will never understand how we can do better unless we learn what we have done wrong. I was truly floored at how much new information was here. Why is it so difficult to find books that cover the full scope of U.S. history? How can we understand what's going on in our country, if we don't understand how it even came to exist?
This book is easy to read, well-written, and amazingly well-researched. If you want a real idea about what shaped the Americas into what they are today, this is what you should be reading. (10 out of 10)

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