Book picks similar to
Selling Your Father's Bones: Manifest Destiny and the American West by Brian Schofield
history
native-american
american-history
indigenous-peoples
Edward S. Curtis: Visions of the First Americans
Don Gulbrandsen - 2006
The photos are somewhere between documentary and romanticism. Where he could have taken straight documentary photos of poverty and tattered Western/white clothing, he instead staged warrior meetings on horseback and the like.
Sun Chief: The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian
Don C. Talayesva - 1945
Talayesva, the Sun Chief, who was born and reared until the age of ten as a Hopi Indian, and then trained as a white man until he was twenty. Although torn between two worlds and cultures, he returned to Hopiland and readopted all the tribal customs. This is his autobiography, written for Leo Simmons, a white man who was a clan brother.
Black Hawk: An Autobiography
Black Hawk - 1833
Perhaps no Indian ever saw so much of American expansion or fought harder to prevent that expansion from driving his people to exile and death.He knew Zebulon Pike, William Clark, Henry Schoolcraft, George Catlin, Winfield Scott, and such figures in American government as President Andrew Jackson and Secretary of State Lewis Cass. He knew Chicago when it was a cluster of log houses around a fort, and he was in St. Louis the day the American flag went up and the French flag came down.He saw crowds gather to cheer him in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York - and to stone the driver of his carriage in Albany - during a fantastic tour sponsored by the government.And at last he dies in 1838, bitter in the knowledge that he had led men, women, and children of his tribe to slaughter on the banks of the Mississippi.After his capture at the end of the Black Hawk War, he was imprisoned for a time and then released to live in the territory that is now Iowa. He dictated his autobiography to a government interpreter, Antoine LeClaire, and the story was put into written form by J. B. Patterson, a young Illinois newspaperman. Since its first appearance in 1833, the autobiography has become known as an American classic.
The Captured
Scott Zesch - 2004
Traded to Comaches, he thrived in the rough, nomadic existence, quickly becoming one of the tribe's fiercest warriors. Forcibly returned to his parents after three years, Korn never adjusted to life in white society. He spent his last years in a cave, all but forgotten by his family.That is, until Scott Zesch stumbled over his own great-great-great uncle's grave. Determined to understand how such a "good boy" could have become "Indianized" so completely, Zesch travels across the west, digging through archives, speaking with Comanche elders, and tracking eight other child captives from the region with hauntingly similar experiences. With a historian's rigor and a novelist's eye, Zesch paints a vivid portrait of life on the Texas frontier, offering a rare account of captivity.
Killing Custer: The Battle of Little Big Horn and the Fate of the Plains Indians
James Welch - 1994
Much less understood is how disastrous it was for the "victors, " the Sioux and Cheyenne under the leadership of Sitting Bull: within fifteen years all Native Americans were confined to reservations, their culture in ruins. James Welch poignantly resurrects their side of the story from beneath a mountain of myth and misinterpretation, relating in masterful prose the pride and desperation of a people stripped of treaty rights and hounded from ancestral hunting grounds into wretched reservations. Through this critical missing piece that tells the Indian side of the story, " Killing Custer" rethinks the meaning of the Little Bighorn for a multicultural society.
Bad Land: An American Romance
Jonathan Raban - 1985
"-Washington Post Book WorldIn 1909 maps still identified eastern Montana as the Great American Desert. But in that year Congress, lobbied heavily by railroad companies, offered 320-acre tracts of land to anyone bold or foolish enough to stake a claim to them. Drawn by shamelessly inventive brochures, countless homesteaders--many of them immigrants--went west to make their fortunes. Most failed. In Bad Land, Jonathan Raban travels through the unforgiving country that was the scene of their dreams and undoing, and makes their story come miraculously alive. In towns named Terry, Calypso, and Ismay (which changed its name to Joe, Montana, in an effort to attract football fans), and in the landscape in between, Raban unearths a vanished episode of American history, with its own ruins, its own heroes and heroines, its own hopeful myths and bitter memories. Startlingly observed, beautifully written, this book is a contemporary classic of the American West. "Exceptional. . . . A beautifully told historical meditation. "--Time"Championship prose. . . . In fifty years don't be surprised if Bad Land is a landmark."--Los Angeles Times
Gaining Daylight: Life on Two Islands
Sara Loewen - 2013
But for Sara Loewen it becomes her way of life each summer as her family settles into their remote cabin on Uyak Bay for the height of salmon season. With this connection to thousands of years of fishing and gathering at its core, Gaining Daylight explores what it means to balance lives on two islands, living within both an ancient way of life and the modern world. Her personal essays integrate natural and island history with her experiences of fishing and family life, as well as the challenges of living at the northern edge of the Pacific.Loewen’s writing is richly descriptive; readers can almost feel heat from wood stoves, smell smoking salmon, and spot the ways the ocean blues change with the season. With honesty and humor, Loewen easily draws readers into her world, sharing the rewards of subsistence living and the peace brought by miles of crisp solitude.
Captives among the Indians: Firsthand Narratives of Indian Wars, Customs, Tortures, and Habits of Life in Colonial Times
Horace Kephart - 2015
This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Stone Song: A Novel of the Life of Crazy Horse
Win Blevins - 1995
Of all the iconic figures of Native American history, Crazy Horse remains the most enigmatic. To this day he strides across American history as a man who lived—and died—on his own terms.
“’Stone Song’ is a deeply spiritual story about the soul journey of a great and mysterious American hero.” ~ The Dallas Morning News.
Ridiculed as a boy for his white-man looks, he called for a vision, and received a great one . . . a vision that would shape his life. He was to fight for his people. In order to be successful, he must not accept traditional Lakota finery, rewards, and would sacrifice the dream of a wife and children. By following his vision, and his destiny of that as a mystic warrior, he was able to lead his people to their greatest victory—the defeat of General Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.Called to his monumental task, and tortured by his deeply passionate love of a woman, Crazy Horse found peace only in battle. Drawing inspiration from the eternal wisdom of his people, he discovered the means to defeat the U.S. Army at its own deadly game.
Come enjoy this new 20th century Anniversary Edition with an intimate introduction by the author, Win Blevins.
Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab
Steve Inskeep - 2015
At its center stood two former military comrades locked in a struggle that tested the boundaries of our fledgling democracy. Jacksonland is their story. One man we recognize: Andrew Jackson—war hero, populist, and exemplar of the expanding South—whose first major initiative as president instigated the massive expulsion of Native Americans known as the Trail of Tears. The other is a half-forgotten figure: John Ross—a mixed-race Cherokee politician and diplomat—who used the United States’ own legal system and democratic ideals to oppose Jackson. Representing one of the Five Civilized Tribes who had adopted the ways of white settlers—cultivating farms, publishing a newspaper in their own language, and sending children to school—Ross championed the tribes’ cause all the way to the Supreme Court. He gained allies like Senator Henry Clay, Chief Justice John Marshall, and even Davy Crockett. In a fight that seems at once distant and familiar, Ross and his allies made their case in the media, committed civil disobedience, and benefited from the first mass political action by American women. Their struggle contained ominous overtures of later events like the Civil War and set the pattern for modern-day politics. At stake in this struggle was the land of the Five Civilized Tribes. In shocking detail, Jacksonland reveals how Jackson, as a general, extracted immense wealth from his own armies’ conquest of native lands. Later, as president, Jackson set in motion the seizure of tens of millions of acres—“Jacksonland”—in today’s Deep South. Jacksonland is the work of renowned journalist Steve Inskeep, cohost of NPR’s Morning Edition, who offers here a heart-stopping narrative masterpiece, a tragedy of American history that feels ripped from the headlines in its immediacy, drama, and relevance to our lives. Harrowing, inspiring, and deeply moving, Inskeep’s Jacksonland is the story of America at a moment of transition, when the fate of states and nations was decided by the actions of two heroic yet tragically opposed men.
CANDICE MILLARD, author of Destiny of the Republic and The River of Doubt
“Inskeep tells this, one of the most tragic and transformative stories in American history, in swift, confident, colorful strokes. So well, and so intimately, does he know his subject that the reader comes away feeling as if Jackson and Ross’s epic struggle for the future of their nations took place yesterday rather than nearly two hundred years ago.”
On Full Automatic: Surviving 13 Months in Vietnam
William V. Taylor Jr. - 2021
Taylor Jr. and his brother Marines are assembled into a new reaction force that is immediately tested in the fire of a bloody conflict known as Operation Beaver Cage. After a traumatic first fight, they push through back-to-back operations with little time to rest or reflect. Those who survive will return home ensnared by everlasting memories of a real, but entirely surreal nightmare. Now after more than fifty years of holding everything in, Taylor shares his experience in explicit and often horrific detail and with a reverent honor for those Marines who did not live to tell the tale.Taylor reveals what it truly means to walk the path of a warrior, to sacrifice, and to live a lifetime with the memories of a war—seeking answers to the question, “Was it worth it?"
One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark
Colin G. Calloway - 2003
Emphasizing conflict and change, One Vast Winter Count offers a new look at the early history of the region by blending ethnohistory, colonial history, and frontier history. Drawing on a wide range of oral and archival sources from across the West, Colin G. Calloway offers an unparalleled glimpse at the lives of generations of Native peoples in a western land soon to be overrun.
Crying Wind: Beaten, Deserted, and Afraid of Both Death and Life, a Young Indian Girl Finds Life
Crying Wind - 1977
Simply and sensitively written, Crying Wind's true story gives insights into American Indian culture and the cultural barriers an Indian must hurdle when he accepts Christ.
The History of the United States: A Captivating Guide to American History, Including Events Such as the American Revolution, French and Indian War, Boston Tea Party, Pearl Harbor, and the Gulf War
Captivating History - 2019
Free History BONUS Inside! When the first settlers reached the United States of America and started to chip out a living in the wilderness that seemed so fierce and unfamiliar to their European eyes, they could never have dreamed that someday the land upon which they stood would become one of the most powerful countries in the entire world. When Native Americans first witnessed those white sails bringing ships with white sailors into their world for the first time, they could never have dreamed that within a few centuries their population would be all but destroyed, that they would have to endure massacre after massacre, be stripped of their freedom and confined to comparatively tiny reservations, and walk the Trail of Tears within the next few hundred years. When the preachers of the Great Awakening stood on the backs of wagons or bits of old tree stumps and told the American people a new story of individual freedom and the power of ordinary people, they could never have dreamed that their preaching would trigger a landslide of abolitionism that would end in a civil war that almost tore the entire country apart. When the Civil War was finally won by the Union, and all African Americans' chains were broken at last, the military leaders could never have dreamed that within the next half century, the United States would emerge as one of the world's greatest military powers during the Spanish-American War. And when those soldiers won the struggle against Spain in Cuba, they could never have dreamed that later in the century, Cuba itself would turn against them and become the single greatest threat of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War. When the Wright Brothers first took to the air and Thomas Edison made the lightbulb, they could never have dreamed that American innovation would produce not only the Ford car, basketball, the telephone, and Facebook, but it would also be instrumental in creating the atomic bombs that killed hundreds of thousands of people and finally brought an end to the Second World War. As for Martin Luther King, Jr., he did dream. He had a dream of equality and brotherhood, and his dream at least partially came true in 2008 when America saw the inauguration of its first black president. Never could the slaves of the great plantations of the South have dreamed that that day would ever come, but it did. Nobody could have dreamed it, but it all came to pass, and it became the history of the United States of America. And this is how it all happened... In The History of the United States: A Captivating Guide to American History, Including Events Such as the American Revolution, French and Indian War, Boston Tea Party, Pearl Harbor, and the Gulf War, you will discover topics such as
The People Who Were There First
A Time of Exploration
Colonizing America
The French and Indian War
The Boston Tea Party
The American Revolution
The First President
Restless Times
Horrors for the Natives
Awakening
Civil War
Seeking for Peace
A Rising Power
Progress
Disaster Strikes
The Biggest Bomb in the World
Icy Tension
Freedom on the Home Front
Terror and Its War
And much, much more!
So if you want to learn more about the history of the United States, then sc
Missing in the Minarets: The Search for Walter A. Starr, Jr.
William Alsup - 2001
Rigorous and thorough searches by some of the best climbers in the history of the range failed to locate him despite a number of promising clues. When all hope seemed gone and the last search party had left the Minarets, mountaineering legend Norman Clyde refused to give up. Climbing alone, he persevered in the face of failure, resolved that he would learn the fate of the lost man. Clyde’s discovery and the events that followed make for compelling reading. Recently reissued with a new afterword, this re-creation of a famous episode in the annals of the Sierra Nevada is mountaineering literature at its best.