The rediscovery of America Native peoples and the unmaking of U.S. history

Review by Choice Review

The 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 University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's 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.)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A 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.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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