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Overview
This collection brings together the best recent essays covering over five hundred years of American Indian history. Attached to each essay are primary historical documents that deal with issues of survival, resistance, accommodation, and adaptation, all of which illuminate the complexity and diversity of American Indian experiences.
Synopsis
This collection brings together the best recent essays covering over five hundred years of American Indian history. Attached to each essay are primary historical documents that deal with issues of survival, resistance, accommodation, and adaptation, all of which illuminate the complexity and diversity of American Indian experiences.
Booknews
Shoemaker (history, U. of Connecticut) has gathered seven scholarly articles on Native American history from the mid-1990s, arranged them in historical order (from ancient America, to the 19th century removal of the Cherokees along the Trail of Tears, the Indian takeover of Alcatraz), and briefly introduced and then supplemented each one with relevant historical documents. The general introduction discusses Indian historiography from its white, anthropological beginnings with Lewis Henry Morgan and Franz Boas wanting to document a static and dying culture, to "The New Indian History" which began in the 1970s<-->an approach viewing Indian culture as dynamic and still vital and Indian history as more complex than previously thought. The volume's strength is that it is not just a relentless historical parade of facts/events, but instead pauses to consider this history, contextualize and turn it over from multiple viewpoints, both Native American and white. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Editorials
From the Publisher
"Pairing well-chosen primary sources with the best in contemporary scholarship, Nancy Shoemaker has devised an extraordinary book. Using treaty speeches, government documents, memoirs, and oral history, she matches Native voices with those of colonizers, bureaucrats, and historians. Lively and accessible introductions frame questions of method, evidence, historiography and analysis, making American Indians a compelling classroom book." Philip Deloria, University of Colorado.