Enfilade

From Yale UP:

Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 616 pages, ISBN: 978-0300244052, $35.

A sweeping and overdue retelling of U.S. history that recognizes that Native Americans are essential to understanding the evolution of modern America

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.

Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone) is the Howard R. Lamar Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University, where he is the faculty coordinator for the Yale Group for the Study of Native America. He is the author of Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West.

C O N T E N T S

List of Maps

Introduction: Toward a New American History

Part I | Indians and Empire
1  American Genesis: Indians and the Spanish Borderlands
2  The Native Northeast and the Rise of British North America
3  The Unpredictability of Violence: Iroquoia and New France to 1701
4  The Native Inland Sea: The Struggle for the Heart of the Continent, 1701–55
5  Settler Uprising: The Indigenous Origins of the American Revolution
6  Colonialism’s Constitution: The Origins of Federal Indian Policy

Part II | Struggles for Sovereignty
7  The Deluge of Settler Colonialism: Democracy and Dispossession in the Early Republic
8  Foreign Policy Formations: California, the Pacific, and the Borderlands Origins of the Monroe Doctrine
9  Collapse and Total War: The Indigenous West and the U.S. Civil War
10  Taking Children and Treaty Lands: Laws and Federal Power during the Reservation Era
11  Indigenous Twilight at the Dawn of the Century: Native Activists and the Myth of Indian Disappearance
12  From Termination to Self-Determination: Native American Sovereignty in the Cold War Era

Notes
Acknowledgments
Index