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

Blackhawk, Ned (author.). Yale University Press, (publisher.).

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, with 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."--

Record details

ISBN: 9780300271249
ISBN: 0300244053
ISBN: 9780300244052
Physical Description: viii, 596 pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm.
print
Publisher: New Haven, [Connecticut] : Yale University Press, [2023]
Copyright: ©2023

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 449-550) and index.

Formatted Contents Note:

Introduction: Toward a new American history -- American genesis : Indians and the Spanish borderlands -- The native Northeast and the rise of British North America -- The unpredictability of violence : Iroquoia and New France to 1701 -- The native inland sea : the struggle for the heart of the continent, 1701-55 -- Settler uprising : the indigenous origins of the American Revolution -- Colonialism's constitution : the origins of federal Indian policy -- The deluge of settler colonialism : democracy and dispossession in the early republic -- Foreign policy formations : California, the Pacific, and the borderlands origins of the Monroe Doctrine -- Collapse and total war : the indigenous West and the U.S. Civil War -- Taking children and treaty lands : laws and federal power during the reservation era -- Indigenous twilight at the dawn of the century : native activists and the myth of Indian disappearance -- From termination to self-determination : Native American sovereignty in the Cold War era.