Download or read book Unworthy Republic The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory written by Claudio Saunt and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2021 Bancroft Prize and the 2021 Ridenhour Book Prize Finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Nonfiction Named a Top Ten Best Book of 2020 by the Washington Post and Publishers Weekly and a New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2020 A masterful and unsettling history of “Indian Removal,” the forced migration of Native Americans across the Mississippi River in the 1830s and the state-sponsored theft of their lands. In May 1830, the United States launched an unprecedented campaign to expel 80,000 Native Americans from their eastern homelands to territories west of the Mississippi River. In a firestorm of fraud and violence, thousands of Native Americans lost their lives, and thousands more lost their farms and possessions. The operation soon devolved into an unofficial policy of extermination, enabled by US officials, southern planters, and northern speculators. Hailed for its searing insight, Unworthy Republic transforms our understanding of this pivotal period in American history.

Download or read book Unworthy Republic written by Claudio Saunt and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In May 1830, the United States formally launched a policy to expel Native Americans from the East to territories west of the Mississippi River. Justified as a humanitarian enterprise, the undertaking was to be systematic and rational, overseen by Washington’s small but growing bureaucracy. But as the policy unfolded over the next decade, thousands of Native Americans died under the federal government’s auspices, and thousands of others lost their possessions and homelands in an orgy of fraud, intimidation, and violence. Unworthy Republic reveals how expulsion became national policy and describes the chaotic and deadly results of the operation to deport 80,000 men, women, and children. Drawing on firsthand accounts and the voluminous records produced by the federal government, Saunt’s deeply researched book argues that Indian Removal, as advocates of the policy called it, was not an inevitable chapter in U.S. expansion across the continent. Rather, it was a fiercely contested political act designed to secure new lands for the expansion of slavery and to consolidate the power of the southern states. Indigenous peoples fought relentlessly against the policy, while many U.S. citizens insisted that it was a betrayal of the nation’s values. When Congress passed the act by a razor-thin margin, it authorized one of the first state-sponsored mass deportations in the modern era, marking a turning point for native peoples and for the United States. In telling this gripping story, Saunt shows how the politics and economics of white supremacy lay at the heart of the expulsion of Native Americans; how corruption, greed, and administrative indifference and incompetence contributed to the debacle of its implementation; and how the consequences still resonate today.

Download or read book Black White and Indian written by Claudio Saunt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-04-21 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deceit, compromise, and betrayal were the painful costs of becoming American for many families. For people of Indian, African, and European descent living in the newly formed United States, the most personal and emotional choices--to honor a friendship or pursue an intimate relationship--were often necessarily guided by the harsh economic realities imposed by the country's racial hierarchy. Few families in American history embody this struggle to survive the pervasive onslaught of racism more than the Graysons. Like many other residents of the eighteenth-century Native American South, where Black-Indian relations bore little social stigma, Katy Grayson and her brother William--both Creek Indians--had children with partners of African descent. As the plantation economy began to spread across their native land soon after the birth of the American republic, however, Katy abandoned her black partner and children to marry a Scottish-Creek man. She herself became a slaveholder, embracing slavery as a public display of her elevated place in America's racial hierarchy. William, by contrast, refused to leave his black wife and their several children and even legally emancipated them. Traveling separate paths, the Graysons survived the invasion of the Creek Nation by U.S. troops in 1813 and again in 1836 and endured the Trail of Tears, only to confront each other on the battlefield during the Civil War. Afterwards, they refused to recognize each other's existence. In 1907, when Creek Indians became U.S. citizens, Oklahoma gave force of law to the family schism by defining some Graysons as white, others as black. Tracking a full five generations of the Grayson family and basing his account in part on unprecedented access to the forty-four volume diary of G. W. Grayson, the one-time principal chief of the Creek Nation, Claudio Saunt tells not only of America's past, but of its present, shedding light on one of the most contentious issues in Indian politics, the role of "blood" in the construction of identity. Overwhelmed by the racial hierarchy in the United States and compelled to adopt the very ideology that oppressed them, the Graysons denied their kin, enslaved their relatives, married their masters, and went to war against each other. Claudio Saunt gives us not only a remarkable saga in its own right but one that illustrates the centrality of race in the American experience.

Download or read book West of the Revolution An Uncommon History of 1776 written by Claudio Saunt and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-06-16 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This panoramic account of 1776 chronicles the other revolutions unfolding that year across North America, far beyond the British colonies. In this unique history of 1776, Claudio Saunt looks beyond the familiar story of the thirteen colonies to explore the many other revolutions roiling the turbulent American continent. In that fateful year, the Spanish landed in San Francisco, the Russians pushed into Alaska to hunt valuable sea otters, and the Sioux discovered the Black Hills. Hailed by critics for challenging our conventional view of the birth of America, West of the Revolution “[coaxes] our vision away from the Atlantic seaboard” and “exposes a continent seething with peoples and purposes beyond Minutemen and Redcoats” (Wall Street Journal).

Download or read book Race and the Cherokee Nation written by Randal Hall and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-11-21 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "We believe by blood only," said a Cherokee resident of Oklahoma, speaking to reporters in 2007 after voting in favor of the Cherokee Nation constitutional amendment limiting its membership. In an election that made headlines around the world, a majority of Cherokee voters chose to eject from their tribe the descendants of the African American freedmen Cherokee Indians had once enslaved. Because of the unique sovereign status of Indian nations in the United States, legal membership in an Indian nation can have real economic benefits. In addition to money, the issues brought forth in this election have racial and cultural roots going back before the Civil War. Race and the Cherokee Nation examines how leaders of the Cherokee Nation fostered a racial ideology through the regulation of interracial marriage. By defining and policing interracial sex, nineteenth-century Cherokee lawmakers preserved political sovereignty, delineated Cherokee identity, and established a social hierarchy. Moreover, Cherokee conceptions of race and what constituted interracial sex differed from those of blacks and whites. Moving beyond the usual black/white dichotomy, historian Fay A. Yarbrough places American Indian voices firmly at the center of the story, as well as contrasting African American conceptions and perspectives on interracial sex with those of Cherokee Indians. For American Indians, nineteenth-century relationships produced offspring that pushed racial and citizenship boundaries. Those boundaries continue to have an impact on the way individuals identify themselves and what legal rights they can claim today.

Download or read book Katrina written by Andy Horowitz and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Bancroft Prize Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Book of the Year A Publishers Weekly Book of the Year “The main thrust of Horowitz’s account is to make us understand Katrina—the civic calamity, not the storm itself—as a consequence of decades of bad decisions by humans, not an unanticipated caprice of nature.” —Nicholas Lemann, New Yorker Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans on August 29, 2005, but the decisions that caused the disaster can be traced back nearly a century. After the city weathered a major hurricane in 1915, its Sewerage and Water Board believed that developers could safely build housing near the Mississippi, on lowlands that relied on significant government subsidies to stay dry. When the flawed levee system failed, these were the neighborhoods that were devastated. The flood line tells one important story about Katrina, but it is not the only story that matters. Andy Horowitz investigates the response to the flood, when policymakers made it easier for white New Orleanians to return home than for African Americans. He explores how the profits and liabilities created by Louisiana’s oil industry have been distributed unevenly, prompting dreams of abundance and a catastrophic land loss crisis that continues today. “Masterful...Disasters have the power to reveal who we are, what we value, what we’re willing—and unwilling—to protect.” —New York Review of Books “If you want to read only one book to better understand why people in positions of power in government and industry do so little to address climate change, even with wildfires burning and ice caps melting and extinctions becoming a daily occurrence, this is the one.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

Download or read book Georgia in Black and White written by John C. Inscoe and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2009-11-01 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eleven essays in this collection explore the variety of ways in which whites and blacks in Georgia interacted from the end of the Civil War to the dawn of the civil rights movement. They reveal the extent to which racial matters infused politics, religion, education, gender relationships, kinship structure, and community dynamics. In their focus on a broad range of individuals, incidents, and locales, the essays look beyond the obvious injustices of the color line to examine the intricacies, ambiguities, contradictions, and above all, the human dimension that made that line far less rigid or absolute than is often assumed. The stories told here offer new insights into, and provocative interpretations of, the actions and reactions of the men and women, black and white, engaged on both sides of the struggle for racial justice and reform. They provide vivid testimony to the complexity and diversity that have always characterized southern race relations.

Download or read book Knowledge Justice written by Sofia Y. Leung and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black, Indigenous, and Peoples of Color--reimagine library and information science through the lens of critical race theory. In Knowledge Justice, Black, Indigenous, and Peoples of Color scholars use critical race theory (CRT) to challenge the foundational principles, values, and assumptions of Library and Information Science and Studies (LIS) in the United States. They propel CRT to center stage in LIS, to push the profession to understand and reckon with how white supremacy affects practices, services, curriculum, spaces, and policies.

Download or read book Indian Removal written by David Stephen Heidler and published by W. W. Norton. This book was released on 2007 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This casebook traces the evolution of U.S. Indian policy from its British Colonial origins to the implementation of removal after 1830. Placing Indian removal in political and social contexts, the editors have selected contemporary primary-source documents that reveal the motives and perspectives of both whites and Indians and cover the complicated influences of Jacksonian Democracy and the early stirrings of what would later be called Manifest Destiny. Letters, treaties, and journal entries give readers a sense of the ordeal of removal for American Indians. About the series: The Norton Casebooks in History provide students with everything they need for in-depth study of select topics in major periods studied in American and world history. Each volume consists of an introductory essay by the editor on the topic, primary sources, and recent essays by historians that explore different interpretations. Each volume combines the most authoritative text available with contextual and critical materials that bring the topic to life for students.

Download or read book Facing East from Indian Country written by Daniel K. Richter and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-01 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the beginning, North America was Indian country. But only in the beginning. After the opening act of the great national drama, Native Americans yielded to the westward rush of European settlers. Or so the story usually goes. Yet, for three centuries after Columbus, Native people controlled most of eastern North America and profoundly shaped its destiny. In Facing East from Indian Country, Daniel K. Richter keeps Native people center-stage throughout the story of the origins of the United States. Viewed from Indian country, the sixteenth century was an era in which Native people discovered Europeans and struggled to make sense of a new world. Well into the seventeenth century, the most profound challenges to Indian life came less from the arrival of a relative handful of European colonists than from the biological, economic, and environmental forces the newcomers unleashed. Drawing upon their own traditions, Indian communities reinvented themselves and carved out a place in a world dominated by transatlantic European empires. In 1776, however, when some of Britain's colonists rebelled against that imperial world, they overturned the system that had made Euro-American and Native coexistence possible. Eastern North America only ceased to be an Indian country because the revolutionaries denied the continent's first peoples a place in the nation they were creating. In rediscovering early America as Indian country, Richter employs the historian's craft to challenge cherished assumptions about times and places we thought we knew well, revealing Native American experiences at the core of the nation's birth and identity.

Download or read book Floating Coast An Environmental History of the Bering Strait written by Bathsheba Demuth and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2019-08-20 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2021 AHA John H. Dunning Prize Longlisted for the 2020 Cundill History Prize Named a Best Book of the Year by Nature, NPR, Library Journal, and Kirkus Reviews "A monument to a people and their land… an allegory of the world we have created." —Sven Beckert, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist Empire of Cotton: A Global History Floating Coast is the first-ever comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic land and waters stretching from Russia to Canada. The unforgiving territories along the Bering Strait had long been home to humans—the Inupiat and Yupik in Alaska, and the Yupik and Chukchi in Russia—before American and European colonization. Rapidly, these frigid lands and waters became the site of an ongoing experiment: How, under conditions of extreme scarcity, would modern ideologies of capitalism and communism control and manage the resources they craved? Drawing on her own experience living with and interviewing indigenous people in the region, Bathsheba Demuth presents a profound tale of the dynamic changes and unforeseen consequences that human ambition has brought (and will continue to bring) to a finite planet.

Download or read book Land Too Good for Indians written by John P. Bowes and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2016-05-10 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of Indian removal has often followed a single narrative arc, one that begins with President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830 and follows the Cherokee Trail of Tears. In that conventional account, the Black Hawk War of 1832 encapsulates the experience of tribes in the territories north of the Ohio River. But Indian removal in the Old Northwest was much more complicated—involving many Indian peoples and more than just one policy, event, or politician. In Land Too Good for Indians, historian John P. Bowes takes a long-needed closer, more expansive look at northern Indian removal—and in so doing amplifies the history of Indian removal and of the United States. Bowes focuses on four case studies that exemplify particular elements of removal in the Old Northwest. He traces the paths taken by Delaware Indians in response to Euro-American expansion and U.S. policies in the decades prior to the Indian Removal Act. He also considers the removal experience among the Seneca-Cayugas, Wyandots, and other Indian communities in the Sandusky River region of northwestern Ohio. Bowes uses the 1833 Treaty of Chicago as a lens through which to examine the forces that drove the divergent removals of various Potawatomi communities from northern Illinois and Indiana. And in exploring the experiences of the Odawas and Ojibwes in Michigan Territory, he analyzes the historical context and choices that enabled some Indian communities to avoid relocation west of the Mississippi River. In expanding the context of removal to include the Old Northwest, and adding a portrait of Native communities there before, during, and after removal, Bowes paints a more accurate—and complicated—picture of American Indian history in the nineteenth century. Land Too Good for Indians reveals the deeper complexities of this crucial time in American history.

Download or read book Invisible Men written by Donn Rogosin and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2007-03-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Negro baseball leagues were a thriving sporting and cultural institution for African Americans from their founding in 1920 until Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947. Rogosin's narrative pulls the veil off these "invisible men" and gives us a glorious chapter in American history.

Download or read book Brutality Garden written by Christopher Dunn and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2001 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late 1960s, Brazilian artists forged a watershed cultural movement known as Tropic¡lia. Music inspired by that movement is today enjoying considerable attention at home and abroad. Few new listeners, however, make the connection between this music and the circumstances surrounding its creation, the most violent and repressive days of the military regime that governed Brazil from 1964 to 1985. With key manifestations in theater, cinema, visual arts, literature, and especially popular music, Tropic¡lia dynamically articulated the conflicts and aspirations of a generation of young, urban Brazilians. Focusing on a group of musicians from Bahia, an impoverished state in northeastern Brazil noted for its vibrant Afro-Brazilian culture, Christopher Dunn reveals how artists including Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, and Tom Z© created this movement together with the musical and poetic vanguards of Sao Paulo, Brazil's most modern and industrialized city. He shows how the tropicalists selectively appropriated and parodied cultural practices from Brazil and abroad in order to expose the fissure between their nation's idealized image as a peaceful tropical "garden" and the daily brutality visited upon its citizens.

Download or read book Sophonisba Breckinridge written by Anya Jabour and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2019-09-16 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sophonisba Breckinridge's remarkable career stretched from the Civil War to the Cold War. She took part in virtually every reform campaign of the Progressive and New Deal eras and became a nationally and internationally renowned figure. Her work informed women’s activism for decades and continues to shape progressive politics today. Anya Jabour's biography rediscovers this groundbreaking American figure. After earning advanced degrees in politics, economics, and law, Breckinridge established the University of Chicago's School of Social Service Administration, which became a feminist think tank that promoted public welfare policy and propelled women into leadership positions. In 1935, Breckinridge’s unremitting efforts to provide government aid to the dispossessed culminated in her appointment as an advisor on programs for the new Social Security Act. A longtime activist in international movements for peace and justice, Breckinridge also influenced the formation of the United Nations and advanced the idea that "women’s rights are human rights." Her lifelong commitment to social justice created a lasting legacy for generations of progressive activists.

Download or read book A True History of the United States written by Daniel A. Sjursen and published by Steerforth Press / Truth to Power. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 690 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Thought-provoking—a must read for [everyone] seeking a firm grasp of accurate American history." —Kirkus (starred review) Brilliant, readable, and raw. Maj. (ret.) Danny Sjursen, who served combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at West Point, delivers a true epic and the perfect companion to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Sjursen shifts the lens and challenges readers to think critically and to apply common sense to their understanding of our nation's past—and present—so we can view history as never before. A True History of the United States was inspired by a course that Sjursen taught to cadets at West Point, his alma mater. With chapter titles such as "Patriots or Insurgents?" and "The Decade That Roared and Wept", A True History is accurate with respect to the facts and intellectually honest in its presentation and analysis. Essential reading for every American with a conscience. Meticulously researched, Sjursen provides a more complete sense of history and encourages readers to view our country objectively. Sjursen’s powerful storytelling reveals balanced portraits of key figures and the role they played. "Sjursen exposes the dominant historical narrative as at best myth, and at times a lie . . . He brings out from the shadows those who struggled, often at the cost of their own lives, for equality and justice. Their stories, so often ignored or trivialized, give us examples of who we should emulate and who we must become." —Chris Hedges, author of Empire of Illusion and America: The Farewell Tour

Download or read book Be Antiracist written by Ibram X. Kendi and published by One World. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reflect on your understanding of race and discover ways to work toward an antiracist future with this guided journal from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist and Stamped from the Beginning. Antiracism is not a destination but a journey--one that takes deliberate, consistent work. Ibram X. Kendi's concept of antiracism has reenergized and reshaped the conversation about racial justice in America and pointed us toward new ways of thinking about ourselves and our society. Whether or not you've read How to Be an Antiracist, this stunning paperback journal offers the opportunity to reflect on your personal commitment to antiracism. Be Antiracist is both a confessional and a log of your journey toward a more equitable and just society. Be Antiracist helps you reflect on topics such as body, power, class, gender, and policy, as well as specific questions like, "Who or what scares you the most when you think about race?" and "How can we go about disconnecting Blackness from criminality?" and "What constitutes an American to you?" Kendi's multipronged approach to self-reflection will challenge you to make change in yourself and your community, and contribute to an antiracist future.