In fact, this book benefits from Blackhawk’s wide and savvy reading of the many scholars who, during the last 50 years, have restored Native peoples to their prominent place within a fuller, richer American history.

Built to serve and expand a settler society, the United States limited full citizenship to white men helped them start new farms on lands taken from Indians and protected their property rights, including their possession of enslaved people.ĭespite this promising premise, “The Rediscovery of America” gets off to a slow start by belaboring a straw man: “historians” who have neglected the American Indian past because they have been in thrall to “tropes of discovery” and notions of “the superiority of Europeans” that “have bred exclusion and misunderstanding.” Who are these bad historians? Blackhawk’s introduction identifies only two, one of them dead. More boldly still, he insists that “Indigenous dispossession facilitated the growth of white male democracy and African American slavery” to constitute America’s historical trifecta of flaws. Instead, he asserts that “American Indians were central to every century of U.S. History.” A historian at Yale and a member of the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone, Blackhawk rejects the myth that Native Americans fell quick and easy victims to European invaders. “How can a nation founded on the homelands of dispossessed Indigenous peoples be the world’s most exemplary democracy?” This is the provocative question with which Ned Blackhawk opens his important new book, “The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. THE REDISCOVERY OF AMERICA: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S.

The one straw revolution book