The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History by Ned Blackhawk

This book seeks to reorient U.S. history by redressing the absence of American Indians within it. Covering five hundred years of history, it builds on the work of many other scholars while recognizing that not all peoples, themes, and places can be held within a single study. American history developed out of the epic encounter between Indians and European empires and out of the struggles for sovereignty between Native peoples and the United States. American Indians were central to every century of U.S. historical development.

Few history books have the kind of popular cache that Ned Blackhawk's The Rediscovery of America does. There have been other big "retellings" of American history through the lens of Indigenous Americans--Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz's comes to mind--but this one appeared to meet the moment of a post-Standing Rock awareness of Indigenous people. It won the National Book Award, and it's not hard to see why: it's a scrupulous, thoughtful telling of history that most readers have never heard before. It begins with the colonization of what's now the American Southwest by Spanish--a colonization effort that predates English and other powers on the east coast of the U.S. by over a century--and moves steadily toward the late 20th century, taking every opportunity to show the ways in which what we think of as American history is also Native American history. The "Rediscovery" in the title cheekily shows what the game is.

In many ways, the broader strokes will be familiar to anyone who has read about Indigenous Americans. I see reflected here the same periodizing that David Treuer talks about in The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee--colonization, frontier, allotment, termination, etc. I attended a seminar with an accomplished historian of Indigenous American history where I overheard her call the book a disappointment--I couldn't really hear much of her complaints, but I caught suggestions of cheap, sloppy errors and, most significantly, a sense that the book covers little ground that a historian wouldn't already know. That said, I'm not a historian, and I found a lot of the material here to be very new to me, if not in the broader strokes, the specific details that Blackhawk chooses to pull. I appreciated the reliance on specific anecdotes and primary sources from Indigenous people who lived through each of this different eras.

So, here are some of the big takeaways for me. I came away with a greater sense of how powerful Native tribes, especially the Iroquois/Haudenosaunee Confederacy, were during the colonial period. Far from being a vassal to great powers, the Iroquois were a powerful union of tribes whose possessions constituted, for Blackhawk, a true Empire. The Iroquois, according to Blackhawk, were both a formidable military foe who frequently got the better of the English and French, but clever diplomats who knew how to forge allies with one power or another to keep the other at bay. Such triangulation might have continued apace, if not for the collapse of the French control of Haiti and the country's swift divestment from North America. Nor did I realize how much of the Revolutionary War was precipitated by hatred and suspicion of Native peoples on the margin of the first colonies. Colonists turned to a strong patriot government to help protect them from the Native nations that they felt threatened them, and to help legitimize a growing sense of racial and ethnic superiority that entitled them to seize interior lands.

These battles for the first frontier--what Blackhawk calls the "Inland Sea," the Great Lakes--make up what felt like the most important and interesting part of the book, for me. It may be that I'm just less familiar with that chapter of American history than any other. The parts that were more familiar--the expansion of American interests across the interior west, then the legacies of allotment and termination in the 20th century--had less interest for me. More than anything, I came away thinking that I'd love to read a more specific and narrowly tailored history about the battles for the Great Lakes and the immediate interior preceding the Civil War. 

The Twilight War by David Crist

"[This] is a story in which I have been a participant, dispassionate scholar, and, most recently, an advistor to senior Defense Department officials." - David Crist

I remember a professor of mine in grad school telling me, "People love secret histories and untold stories. It's annoying. People aren't interested in books that expand on existing knowledge." For some reason, that stuck with me, and I've come back to it over the years. I think it is mostly correct. Intrigue sells. However, just because a work of history focuses on some heretofore unknown or little-known facet of history doesn't render it unworthy of attention. David Crist's The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict With Iran is an excellently researched work of history. That was Crist is writing about is little-known makes the book that much more interesting.

Crist spent eight months in Iraq during the First Gulf War. He was part of a marine armor reconnaissance battalion. After the war, he went back to graduate school for a doctorate in Middle Eastern history. In 2003, he found himself back in Iraq as on of the few marines assigned to the navy's elite SEALS. As you might imagine, this brings a unique perspective to his writing.

Crist takes us on a methodical, detailed account of the conflict between Iran and the United States, beginning with the fall of the Shah of Iran and ending with the 2011 sanctions against Iran. His extensive military knowledge and connections enable him to describe military equipment and maneuvers in a detailed and informative manner. Crist rarely introduces a new person in the story without given at least a quick physical description of them. He style slips back and forth between detailed and casual, in a nearly seamless manner.

Despite Crist's fluid writing, the book is not a quick or necessarily easy read. The subject matter is dense and complex. The story cuts across five decades and six U.S. presidencies. However, if you are interested in U.S. military history, international relations or the Middle East, you will find this book engrossing.

Midnight Rising by Tony Horwitz

"Harpers Ferry and Lincoln's assassination became bookends to the great national bloodletting over slavery."
Tony Horwitz, Midnight Rising

John Brown is one of those polarizing figures in American history. Some people see him as a hero, a martyr for a righteous cause. Other see him as a fanatic, who was deservedly hanged for his terroristic actions. I can sympathize with both sides, and am not altogether sure that both can't be correct.

As someone who studied history in college, I am no stranger to the use of sub- or extended titles. I had one professor who routinely referred to the title of a work as "the contract with the reader." While I didn't care for that professor, I did like this definition. Tony Horwitz does not breach his contract with Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War. In this book, Horwitz does two things: 1) he illuminates the often murky historical figure John Brown and 2) he makes the argument that John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry pushed the United States into civil war.

I had read Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic a few years back, so I thought I knew what type of book I was getting into. In Confederates and other previous works of his, Horwitz weaved past and present, not all that dissimilar to Sarah Vowell's style. Midnight Rising, however, proved to be different. This book stays rooted in the 19th century, with occasion dips into the early 20th century in the final chapters.

Drawing from primary sources and building on the existing scholarship on John Brown, Horwitz fleshes out the boney figure of John Brown. He provides insights into Brown's childhood and life as a young adult, insights that hint at the man that is to come.

Horwitz directly connects Brown with leading figures of that time, including Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Robert E. Lee, John Wilkes Booth, and many others. Establishing that John Brown was well known bolsters Horwitz argument that the Harpers Ferry Raid sparked the Civil War. The raid forced many abolitionist to make a choice: whether to publicly distance themselves from Brown and his men or to side with Brown and his violent defense of freedom for all.

Futhermore, Horwitz shows how the Harpers Ferry Raid quickly became an integral part to the national debate over slavery. The new congress, which had convened just three days after Brown's hanging, found itself starkly divided over slavery, with Harper Ferry getting mentioned often on the floor of the House and the Senate. Henry Wise, governor of Virginia during Brown's Raid, devised a secret plan to take Harpers Ferry for the Confederacy before Virginia had official seceded from the Union. Following his Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln looked to Brown's attack as a model. He proposed organizing a band of black scouts "whose business should be somewhat after the original plan of John Brown."

I enjoyed learning more about the men who joined John Brown is his raid on Harpers Ferry, who came from all sorts of backgrounds and brought with them many different ideas for how to end the institution of slavery.

Horwitz has produced a well researched and exceptionally readable book about one of the more enigmatic figures in American history. Well worth the read.

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable

There are two basic approaches to biographies. The first is the "Great Man," the tome, the multi-volume approach. The idea behind this approach is that readers will be better suited to understand the life of a person if they have all the facts--all the facts. The second model is a more focused approach. Gone are the superfluous details. Gone are the tangents that often lead readers into the proverbial weeds. What remains is a carefully crafted story of a life.

Both of these models serve a purpose. And it is true that the streamlined biographies frequently rely on the tomes that have come before them. They also often highlight a certain aspect--albeit usually rather broad--of a person's life. This is the case with Manning Marable's excellent Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention.

In 1988, Marable was teaching a course in African-American politics that included The Autobiography of Malcolm X. He states, "A close reading of the text revealed numerous inconsistencies, errors, and fictive characters at odds with Malcolm's actual life." Marable didn't begin working on this book in earnest until the early 2000s. According to Marable, his initial breakthrough came when he "finally realized that critical deconstruction of the Autobiography held the key to reinterpreting Malcolm's life." The Malcolm X Project began in 2001 at Columbia University. At one point, more than twenty graduate and undergraduate students were employed by the Malcolm X Project, writing hundreds of profiles and abstracts of important individuals, institutions, and groups that were mentioned in the Autobiography. Much of their work is available at http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/malcolmx and the subsequent more multimedia-rich website http://mxp.manningmarable.com.

The next major element in the writing of this biography was the construction of a detailed chronological grid of Malcolm X's life. Each entry on this grid would indicate the source or sources of the information. It took Marable and his team of historians six years to construct the massive chronology that would form the foundation for this biography.

Marable's writing is clear, straightforward and very readable. He includes a great amount of detail about Malcolm's life without getting in to the aforementioned weeds. The parts I enjoyed the most were those that dealt with the periods in Malcolm's life that the Autobiography glossed over or skipped altogether. I found particularly interesting the odd beliefs and historical traditions of the Nation of Islam and the extremely complicated relationship between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad. Marable handles the convoluted events surrounding Malcolm's death exceptionally well.

I would recommend this book to anyone. Marable and his team of researchers do an excellent job reconstructing and portraying the life of one of America's most enigmatic political and cultural figures. If you don't think you want to commit the time to reading this book, I seriously recommend the nine-page epilogue "Reflections on a Revolutionary Vision."

For further reading on the relationship between Malcom X, Elijah Muhammad, Muhammad Ali, I recommend Gerald Early's "Muhammad Ali as Third World Hero" in his book This is Where I Came In.

Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne

Subtitled: "Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History." This was an extremely riveting account of a very significant period in American history that I knew basically nothing about. Am I the only one?

Pre-colonization, the Comanche tribe was living what Gwynne calls a stone-age existence, scratching out their survival mostly by foraging, falling victim to neighboring tribes with more complex culture, technology and religious rites. Post-colonization, as the invading Spanish managed to lose entire herds of horses to the wilderness, they transformed themselves with fierce determination into an unrivaled force, building their warrior culture around their almost superhuman skill on horseback.

Boys were given their first horse at age two or three, and within a few years were expected to perform small tricks, like picking up an object from the ground while riding. This little trick gets progressively more challenging until adulthood, at which point they could approach a fallen comrade, pick him up, and put him on the back of their horse without breaking stride. They were known to drop to the side of their horses when passing an enemy, with just one heel hooked over the back of the animal, and could release between ten and twenty arrows from beneath its neck before their opponent could reload their cumbersome ball and powder guns. This incredible discipline allowed them to master the art of mounted warfare apparently better than anyone before or since, and stop the advancing line of settlement in western Texas for over 150 years, at times even reversing it.

A large portion of the book is devoted to extremely graphic descriptions of the kind of brutality the Comanche inflicted on their enemies, rival tribes and white settlers alike. The mutilation, rape and murder of white settlers by Comanche bands was widely published (and often exaggerated) in Texas, drumming up anti-Indian sentiment to a fever pitch. Gwynne's timeline of the different militia groups and federal dispatches that tried and failed to solve the "Indian problem" gets muddled and confusing (how many unsuccessful military engagements am I supposed to keep track of?), but engaging nonetheless. He presents the Texas Rangers as a filthy, ragtag band of bloodthirsty adventure-seeking young men who proved the most successful opponent to the Comanches until the federal military managed to subdue them completely in the late 19th century (SPOILER ALERT).

Quanah Parker starts as something of a side story that Gwynne keeps returning to, and eventually takes center stage as the leader of one of the last free bands of Comanches that managed to resist the reservation, the Quahadis. His story is emblematic of the American west at the time: his mother, captured by a Comanche war band at age 9, was adopted into the tribe as an equal. She married a minor war chief, had two sons, and was forcibly returned to white society after her band was attacked by General So-and-so's latest expedition. She spent the rest of her life trying to return to them. Quanah went on to rally the remaining Comanche bands to form a resistance movement that managed to route the federals for a while but, surprisingly, surrendered when he realized it was hopeless. He went on to become a strong proponent of his tribe's assimilation, becoming the first principal chief of the Comanche tribe.

I'm rambling, but it's hard to know where to stop. The entire book is completely engaging, and manages to stay relatively impartial throughout. I don't know if I expected this going into it, but there's no clear picture of who held the moral high ground throughout, and Gwynne gives as much attention to the bloodlust and brutality of the Comanches as he does to the groups of settlers who would strike down Comanche women and children on revenge raids. There are moments of tenderness and humanity on both sides, and the clearest picture I can take away from such a complex history is that these were two cultures doing everything they could to preserve their ultimately irreconcilable ways of life.

Weathering the Storm: Inside Winslow Homer's Gulf Stream by Peter H. Wood

I met Peter H. Wood a few years ago, during the planning stages of America I AM. He was part of two of the scholarly panels that we convened to flesh out new ideas for the exhibit. While we were in New York, we would get breakfast early before each day's meeting began. He was very friendly and easy going. On the last day we were there, he gave me two of his books: Strange New Land and Weathering the Storm.

Peter H. Wood is not a formally-trained art historian, but his long term interests in race relations and in American painting led him to collaborate with art historian Karen Dalton in 1988 on an exhibition and a related book, Winslow Homer's Images of Blacks. Continuing this line of research and writing, Wood wrote an exploratory paper about Winslow Homer's watercolor The Gulf Stream. This was the basis for his book Weathering the Storm. Wood contends that "Winslow Homer's works generally, and The Gulf Stream specifically, take on richer and deeper meaning when viewed through the prism of history."

The book is divided into three equal parts. Wood begins with an analysis of the reviews and critiques of The Gulf Stream, detailing how they changed from 1899 until it was purchased years later by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He also provides some background on the painter. Next, Wood provides some context--geographical, personal, political, and social--for the time that Homer completed The Gulf Stream. Wood finishes his analysis of this painting with a long look back toward slavery. Much of his career as a historian has been devoted to slavery and issues of race. As a result, this third section is excellent.

Drawing from the life of Winslow Homer, the time in which he lived, and the history that informed that time; Wood creates a new and compelling interpretation of Winslow Homer's most recognizable painting. He invites you to stop and linger in front of The Gulf Stream.

This Is Where I Came In by Gerald L. Early

This Is Where I Came In is made up of three essays about the black experience in the 1960s. Early first delivered these at the 2000 Abraham Lincoln Lectures at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Each essay focuses on a specific person, someone who left an indelible mark on American culture.

"Muhammad Ali as Third World Hero" is an analysis of the GOAT's international prestige, his views on the United States government, and his relationship with the religious and political leaders Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad. It is no surprise that the Nation of Islam wanted Muhammad Ali as a spokesperson--even if Elijah Muhammad was unimpressed with the young boxer. It was interesting to read about the ways in which Malcolm and the NOI courted Ali and, in turn, what he thought of them.

"Sammy Davis Jr., Establishment Revel" made me totally rethink my opinion of the legendary entertainer. One of the most unexpected revelations was his remarkable fund raising activities for the Civil Right Movement. Davis was able to parlay his Brat Pack connections into big-time contributions and fund raising events. Early describes Davis as a true pioneer, with a career that began in vaudeville and transitioned into television, music, and movies.

I had almost no prior knowledge of the subject of the essay "Cecil B. Moore and the Rise of Black Philadelphia, 1964-1968." Unlike the other essays, Early lends some personal insights from his time growing up in Philadelphia, and his thoughts on Moore, the controversial leader of the local NAACP.

Gearld Early is a good scholarly writer. By that, I mean that he his writing is scholarly and tempered without being uninteresting. This Is Where I Came In is a quality addition to the 1960s history cannon.

Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show by Joy S. Kasson

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West is a study of the creation of celebrity and popular memory. The life of William F. Cody is at the center of this study. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, his Wild West show enthralled people the world over. Joy S. Kasson makes the case that Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was instrumental in creating popular memory about the American West, and ultimately shaping the American national identity.

In 1869, Edward Zane Carroll Judson, writing under the name Ned Buntline, published the first part of his serial novel Buffalo Bill, The King of the Border Men in the New York Weekly. Judson was a writer of dime-novels, a type of publication known for its clichéd characters and “good guy vs. bad guy” plots. Some of these novels were turned into plays. This created a public persona for William Cody that he would not have otherwise had.

American was still divided in the postbellum environment from which Buffalo Bill’s Wild West emerged. The West was a new place where boundaries between the North and South did not exist in the same way that they did in the East. In 1883, when Cody created Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, the western part of the United States was a place that many people had not experienced first hand. The Wild West show gave them a chance to experience the West in a safe and entertaining way. Audience members who had never seen a real Indian before got to see them, charging around the arena in their headdresses and war paint. Among other things, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West fulfilled the public’s desire for the exotic.

Buffalo Bill could be described as the first, world-wide celebrity. He sold himself and his show to the world, and the world bought both. Kasson equates him with General Philip Sheridan, President Theodore Roosevelt, and John Wayne. According to Kasson, “The success of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was a triumph of good luck, good management, and good timing.”

Using a wide variety of sources, Kasson tells an interesting story of the intersection between history and entertainment, frontiersman and showman.

The West as America edited by William H. Truettner

The West as America is a collaborative project, a collection of essays on the American West. More specifically, the contributors to this collection analyze images, both popular and obscure, in an attempt to reshape the way in which westward expansion in America has been perceived.

The mid to late 19th century was a period of westward expansion in the America. It was also a time when America was reshaping its identity. Up to this time it had been largely perceived as a frontier nation, an area characterized by vast tracts of wilderness and open land. This availability of land is what attracted settlers to the New World in the 1600s. Two hundred years later, and most of America remained wilderness, but this was about to change. The idea of progress began to be used to define America. Tangible changes were taking place to the landscape, but this idea of progress was also something that was meticulously cultivated on many levels.

The idea of the West was something that had to be sold. According William H. Truettner, who is a senior curator at the National Museum of American Art and the editor of this book, guidebook writers played a large role in this selling of the West. Other writers contributed to this process of marketing the West, such as biographers, newspaper contributors, and government officials. In a guide published in 1857, the author poses the question, “If we boast of our own works of improvement in the West have we not on hand a thousand proofs to sustain us?” He then proceeds to list some of these proofs. This idea of progress becomes part of the definition of America during the 19th century.

The contributors to this collection challenge their readers to look past the composition and color of paintings and pictures, and find the deeper historical meaning in pieces of art. Elizabeth Broun, the Director of the National Museum of American Art, argues that 19th century artists portrayed westward expansion as the manifest destiny of America. The beauty of the West—its landscapes and animals—were regularly depicted by artists, but other aspects of frontier life were not as commonly used. The hardships of frontier life, the bleakness of the winters, and the almost complete destruction of Native American cultures, and severely underrepresented in the painting and pictures of the American West.

An image can be interpreted in a number of different ways, and it is one of the jobs of the historian to make sure that images do not present an inaccurate representation of the past. As William H. Truettner states that the point of this collection of essays was “to dispel traditional ideas about images of the West, to place them in a new context designed to question past interpretations.” Images can be extremely powerful tools for learning, but the proper interpretation is paramount to a correct understanding of the past.

The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell

As an undergrad majoring in history, I took a class called American Ideas. In the class we explored the ideas upon which the United States was established. As you can imagine, much of the class focused on Puritan ideology. But the end of the quarter we had made our way to some of the writings of the Founding Fathers. But even they were heavily influenced by the early colonists. The Puritans were a bizarre and interesting bunch, but no one can doubt the effect that they had on what would ultimately become the United States.

As Vowell points out, most Americans have a passing knowledge of the Puritans because of grade school Thanksgiving Day pageants, The Scarlett Letter, and the witch hunts that took place in Salem. Of course, Vowell rightly argues that this limited exposure paints an inaccurate picture of Puritan society. The Wordy Shipmates is about a specific group of Puritans. As Vowell says, it is about "those Puritans who fall between the cracks of 1620 Plymouth and 1692 Salem." She is referring to the the Puritans of the Massachusetts bay Colony and later those of Rhode Island.

I have always liked Sarah Vowell. The first time I heard of her was years ago on Conan. She was a guest (a last minute fill in, no doubt) and all they talked about was how cool Abraham Lincoln was. At the end of the interview Conan asked her if she had anything to plug, and she replied that she really didn't. So Conan mentioned that she was a regular contributor to NPR's The American Life and was the author several books. I read Take the Canoli a few weeks later. Last year I read Assassination Vacation. I am drawn to the quirky darkness in Vowell's writing. She is also a history nerd, which is cool.

While The Wordy Shipmates has the same slightly-skewed take on American history as Vowell's other works, it lacked any real structure. The book was loosely organized around the aforementioned group of Puritans, focusing heavily on John Winthrop. But this allows for a wide variety of topics: Puritan ideas of justice and punishment, Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, etc. Vowells jumps from one topic to the next, making much of the book feel disjointed. This could probably be blamed on the lack of chapters and the headings that usually come with them. I'm not sure what made Vowell choose to structure here book in this way, but I found it a little disorienting. However, this did not stop me from enjoying the book and actually learning quite a few things that I either didn't know who had forgotten about. Overall, The Wordy Shipmates was worth the read.