Books like The Great Contradiction

With deep research and moral clarity, Saunt vividly narrates the American efforts to force Native peoples to forsake their homelands and accept reservations beyond the Mississippi River. He uncovers the eloquence of Native leaders exposing the hypocrisy of Americans who broke the promises of repeated treaties. And Saunt offers a chilling accounting of the thousands of dead produced by violent dislocation from hearth and home. 

What Calloway does for Washington, Wallace does for Jefferson. Even more than Washington, Jefferson talked one game and played another. He could be splendidly eloquent on how much he wanted the Indian nations to become Americans, yet that could only happen, in Jefferson’s mind, if they surrendered their identity as Indians. If anything, the situation was even worse than Wallace suggests, as I point out in detail in my book on William Wells. While there is much to admire about Jefferson, his Indian policy shows how idealism can serve as a front for blatant exploitation and near genocide.  

Neither Muir nor Sellars pay much attention to Indigenous communities living in or near national parks—Dispossessing the Wilderness puts the lie to the claim that Native peoples were afraid of or have vanished from these places. Spence examines the Indigenous histories of Yellowstone, Glacier, and Yosemite, and concludes that while white federal officials expended a tremendous amount of energy promoting the myth that the nation’s national parks are “uninhabited wildernesses,” Indigenous communities have continued to claim them in various ways. Compelling and wide-ranging in its analysis, this is a must-read for fans of the national park system.

This is a very powerful book that takes the city of St. Louis as a case study to illustrate the amount of violence, discrimination, and inequities that have happened across a 300-year period, particularly with respect to race. 

Johnson develops the idea of racial capitalism throughout the book, and notes that “the red thread that runs through this entire book is the historical relationship between imperialism and anti-Blackness.” At the same time, the city has also been home to both communist and Black radical organizing into the 20th century. 

A highly interesting and important case study of American inequality and exploitation.

As much as the current attacks on DEI may feel new or recent, the use of education and schooling to colonize and assimilate goes all the way back to the founding myths of this country and the aims of stealing land from Indigenous peoples and labor from enslaved Black communities.

This book highlights those histories across time as motivated not by personal malice or differences in cultural beliefs but by settler-colonial economic gain. Those moves were rationalized by the notion of European “civilization” as superior and enforced through violence to erase Native people, cultures, and sovereignty.

The final chapter reminds us that “the past is present” in the fights over who gets to tell the histories and what narratives get valorized or erased; the grab for land, resources, and economic power that underlies the current attacks; and in the ongoing resistance and creativity of Indigenous nations and other minoritized communities… show more.

Often forgotten in the study of the U.S. civil rights movement is the even longer, and less successful, effort by Native Americans to regain the sovereignty that they once enjoyed in North America. In 1976 when I was transferred by the Associated Press from Connecticut to South Dakota as a correspondent, I found the state bleeding from its history. The year before, two FBI agents had been murdered on the Pine Ridge Reservation, remnant violence of the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee. Drive-by shootings were common, discrimination and poverty were rampant, and I felt as if I had walked into an earlier century.

As I came to learn, from this book and its author, Indian tribes were beginning to challenge America’s betrayal of treaties signed in the 1800s – and winning back rights guaranteed in writing. Wilkinson, a friend, attorney, and emeritus history professor at the University of Colorado,… show more.

This title caught my attention because we usually associate slavery with the American south. But the Puritans brought many indentured laborers from England to help build their settlements and operate their farms and businesses. When these white men worked their way to freedom, the settlers turned to indenturing Native Americans, and enslaving captives of warfare, selling some of them for goods and African slaves from the Caribbean. (I found a reference in this book that my ancestor, Dr. Mathew Fuller, participated in this trade during King Philip’s War.) Newell’s book, full of primary sources, gives excellent background on, and understanding of, the founding of New England’s culture, economy, and legal framework. Those alien ideas didn’t go so well for the original inhabitants as white settlers pushed westward. 

Sally is the moving account of the true story of a captive Indian girl who lived in the house of Brigham Young as a servant and cook, a “wild” woman who had been “tamed” by her civilized captors. When she had almost forgotten her own language Sally was sent off to a Mormon village as the wife of a Pahvant Ute chief in order to “civilize” the local surrounding Indians. Sally’s story asks us what these seemingly simple words “wild” and “tame” really mean, and to think about what they can hide.

This slim volume packs a mean punch. Following the secession of the seven Deep Southern states in 1860-61, commissioners were sent out to the remaining uncommitted slaveholding states to convince their leaders of the necessity of joining the new Confederate States of America. While the arguments of these secession commissioners included constitutional arguments in favor of secession, they relied even more so on emotional pleas that framed the election of the nation’s first Republican president as a direct threat to the institution of slavery and white supremacy. Their speeches were laced with horrific images of emancipation and a region plunged into racial violence. Charles Dew offers a compelling argument that highlights the importance of slavery and race in the outbreak of war.

Slavery and its legacy is a northern problem too. Detroiters were slaveholders, but that is a fact that we’ve collectively spent decades, if not centuries, denying and neglecting. Tiya Miles’ gripping history of slavery and freedom reveals the stories of the enslaved Native and African American people who were present in Detroit since the city’s initial decades of European colonization. Her historical narratives, crafted from meticulous archival research, reintroduce readers to the long-forgotten people whose coerced labor laid the foundation for the city’s physical infrastructure and scaffolded the livelihoods of its free residents. The Dawn of Detroit is a stark reminder of how the roots of contemporary inequities run deep through the city’s history.