Book picks similar to
William Bartram on the Southeastern Indians by William Bartram


history
american
early-american-history
ethnography-archaeology

Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story


LeAnne Howe - 2007
    The story focuses on an Indian baseball team but brings a new understanding of the term "America's favorite pastime." For tribes in Indian Territory, baseball was an extension of a sport they'd been playing for centuries before their forced removal to Indian Territory.The story centers on the lives of Hope Little Leader, a Choctaw pitcher for the Miko Kings, and Ezol Day, a postal clerk in Indian Territory who travels forward in time to tell stories to our present-day narrator. With Day’s help, the narrator pulls us into Indian boarding schools, such as the historical Hampton Normal School for Blacks and Indians in Virginia, where the novel’s legendary love story between Justina Maurepas—a character modeled after an influential Black educator—and Hope Little Leader, begins.Though a lively and humorous work of fiction, the narrative draws heavily on LeAnne Howe’s careful historical research. She weaves original and fictive documents into the text, such as newspaper clippings, photographs, typewritten letters, and handwritten journal entries."LeAnne Howe's Miko Kings is an incredible act of recovery: baseball, a sport jealously guarded by mainstream Anglo culture, is also rooted in Native American history and territory...[Howe's] compelling stories and narratives...expose the political games of the 20th century that Native Americans learned to play for resistance and survival."—Rigoberto González, author (So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water Until It Breaks and Butterfly Boy)

The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Literature to 1820 (Volume A)


Nina Baym - 1979
    This volume, Volume A, covers American Literature from its beginning to 1820.

Religions of Mesoamerica: Cosmovision and Ceremonial Centers


Davíd Carrasco - 1990
    Carrasco details the dynamics of two important cultures--the Aztec and the Maya--and discusses the impact of the Spanish conquest and the continuity of native traditions into the post-Columbian and contemporary eras. Integrating recent archaeological discoveries in Mexico City, he brings about a comprehensive understanding of ritual human sacrifice, a subject often ignored in religious studies.

The Dog of the South


Charles Portis - 1979
    "Norma had run off with Guy Dupree and I was waiting around for the credit card billings to come in so I could see where they had gone." The fussbudget is assailed by tropical storms, grifters, hippies, car trouble, and candy wrappers at high speed "wind came up through the floor hole in such a way that the Heath wrappers were suspended behind my head in a noisy brown vortex". Leech Dr Reo Symes is a font of dubious financial schemes and fluff such as a circus "fifty-pound rat from the sewers of Paris, France. Of course it didn't really weigh fifty pounds and it wasn't your true rat and it wasn't from Paris, France, either. It was some kind of animal from South America."

Potpourri


Ruskin Bond - 2007
    Covering an array of themes--horror, romance,humor,crime and mystery--these tales form an electric blend in this book..

Pieces of the Frame


John McPhee - 1975
    They take the reader from the backwoods roads of Georgia, to the high altitude of Ruidoso Downs in New Mexico; from the social decay of Atlantic City, to Scotland, where a pilgrimage for art's sake leads to a surprising encounter with history on a hilltop with a view of a fifth of the entire country. McPhee's writing is more than informative; these are stories, artful and full of character, that make compelling reading. They play with and against one another, so that Pieces of the Frame is distinguished as much by its unity as by its variety. Subjects familiar to McPhee's readers—sports, Scotland, conservation—are treated here with intimacy and a sense of the writer at work.

American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World


David E. Stannard - 1992
    Army's massacre of Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee in the 1890s - the indigenous inhabitants of North and South America endured an unending firestorm of violence. During that time the native population of the Western Hemisphere declined by as many as one hundred million people. Indeed, as historian David E. Stannard argues in this stunning new book, the European and white American destruction of the native peoples of the Americas was the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world. Stannard begins with a portrait of the enormous richness and diversity of life in the Americas prior to Columbus's fateful voyage in 1492. He then follows the path of genocide from the Indies to Mexico and Central and South America, then north to Florida, Virginia, and New England, and finally out across the Great Plains and Southwest to California and the North Pacific Coast. Stannard reveals that wherever Europeans or white Americans went, the native people were caught between imported plagues and barbarous atrocities, typically resulting in the annihilation of 95 percent of their populations. What kind of people, he asks, do such horrendous things to others? His highly provocative answer: Christians. Digging deeply into ancient European and Christian attitudes toward sex, race, and war, he finds the cultural ground well prepared by the end of the Middle Ages for the centuries-long genocide campaign that Europeans and their descendants launched - and in places continue to wage - against the New World's original inhabitants. Advancing a thesis that is sure to create muchcontroversy, Stannard contends that the perpetrators of the American Holocaust drew on the same ideological wellspring as did the later architects of the Nazi Holocaust. It is an ideology that remains dangerously alive today, he adds, and one that in recent years has surfaced in American justifications for large-scale military intervention in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. At once sweeping in scope and meticulously detailed, American Holocaust is a work of impassioned scholarship that is certain to ignite intense historical and moral debate.

Western Union


Zane Grey - 1939
    Zane Grey is the greatest chronicler of the American West.

Butcher's Crossing


John Williams - 1960
    With Butcher’s Crossing, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully written western, Williams dismantles the myths of modern America.It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek “an original relation to nature,” drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher’s Crossing, a small Kansas town on the outskirts of nowhere. Butcher’s Crossing is full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with one of them, a man who regales Andrews with tales of immense herds of buffalo, ready for the taking, hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in the Colorado Rockies. He convinces Andrews to join in an expedition to track the animals down. The journey out is grueling, but at the end is a place of paradisal richness. Once there, however, the three men abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter, so caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Winter soon overtakes them: they are snowed in. Next spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger back to Butcher’s Crossing to find a world as irremediably changed as they have been.

Crazy Horse: A Life


Larry McMurtry - 1999
    This superb biography looks back across more than 120 years at the life and death of this great Sioux warrior who became a reluctant leader at the Battle of Little Bighorn. With his uncanny gift for understanding the human psyche, Larry McMurtry animates the character of this remarkable figure, whose betrayal by white representatives of the U.S. government was a tragic turning point in the history of the West. A mythic figure puzzled over by generations of historians, Crazy Horse emerges from McMurtry’s sensitive portrait as the poignant hero of a long-since-vanished epoch.

Mules and Men


Zora Neale Hurston - 1935
    AbrahamsMules and Men is the first great collection of black America's folk world. In the 1930's, Zora Neale Hurston returned to her "native village" of Eatonville, Florida to record the oral histories, sermons and songs, dating back to the time of slavery, which she remembered hearing as a child. In her quest, she found herself and her history throughout these highly metaphorical folk-tales, "big old lies," and the lyrical language of song. With this collection, Zora Neale Hurston has come to reveal'and preserve'a beautiful and important part of American culture.Zora Neale Hurston (1901-1960) was a novelist, folklorist, anthropologist and playwright whose fictional and factual accounts of black heritage are unparalleled. She is also the author of Tell My Horse, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Dust Tracks on a Road, and Mule Bone.Ruby Dee, a member of the Theatre Hall of Fame, starred on Broadway in the original productions of A Raisin in the Sun and Purlie Victorious, and was featured in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing. She is also an award-winning author and the producer of numerous television dramas.

Sucker's Portfolio


Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - 2012
    Short, sardonic, and dark, these six brief fiction stories and one non-fiction piece are consummate Vonnegut with piercing satire and an eye for life’s obscene inanity. Also available for the first time is an unfinished science-fiction short story, included in the appendix. These stories trace trivial human lives and mundane desires, which is precisely where Vonnegut’s inimitable perspective as a humanist shines, illuminating his alternating hopeful and dismal outlook, although undoubtedly focusing on the latter. Here as in his greatest novels, Vonnegut’s writing takes us to the darkest corners of the human soul and with wit and humor, manages to remind us of our potential to be something greater.

Myths and Legends of the Sioux


Marie L. McLaughlin - 1913
    McLaughlin, in writing Myths and Legends of the Sioux, aimed to create a written account of the many oral myths and legends that have been passed down by the Sioux people for hundreds of years, in order to guard against their loss to history.Containing nearly 40 tales, McLaughlin has assembled a robust collection of Sioux legends. Most of these stories are quite brief, with some chalking in at less than two pages. As with all good fables, the majority of these stories contain a fairly simple message. There is the story The Rabbit and the Elk, a brief tale about an elk tricking a rabbit into thinking it had been caught, which is a classic "don't count your chickens until they've hatched" story. There is also the tale The Artichoke and the Muskrat, a story which carries the message of respecting the differences between people. The legends included in this collection all proceed in a similar fashion and carry similarly simple yet important messages about how best to live life and treat others.The myths and legends included in this collection do not serve only to teach life lessons, but also offer valuable insight into the beliefs and priorities of the Sioux people. A profound respect for nature and its creatures is apparent throughout McLaughlin's book, and one cannot help but admire this aspect of the Sioux.Whether being read to children as bedtime stories, or being examined by a scholar for insight into the Sioux people, Myths and Legends of the Sioux is a valuable collection. McLaughlin's book is enjoyable on a number of levels, and is thus highly recommended to all fans of myths, legends and fairy tales.

Slave of the Sioux- The Fanny Kelly Captivity Narrative, 1864 (Annotated)


Fanny Kelly - 1871
     This is her own story in her own words, as she witnesses savagery after savagery, hoping only to stay alive to reunite with her beloved child and husband. A real-life abduction story that to our modern ears sounds almost manufactured, this edition, with illustrations & photographs never in any other edition, plus new chapters on other Sioux depravities of that time, like the macabre "Scalp Dance", will enlighten as well as horrify. If you only read one captivity narrative this is the one to read.

Daughters of Copper Woman


Anne Cameron - 1984
    Now comes a new edition that includes many pieces cut from the original as well as fresh material added by the author. Here finally, after twenty-two years of gathering dust, is the complete version of the groundbreaking bestseller.In this, her best-loved work, Anne Cameron has created a timeless retelling of northwest coast Native myths that together create a sublime image of the social and spiritual power of woman. Cameron weaves together the lives of legendary and imaginary characters, creating a work of fiction with an intensity of style matched by the power of its subject.