In the July-August 2024 issue of the Smithsonian magazine, in an article on “Mapping the Mississippi,” Boyce Uphold writes of Thomas Jefferson:
“Jefferson had formed a vision for new territory west of the Appalachian Mountains. It would fuel the creation of an ‘empire for liberty.’…
There are new revelations on every page in Ned Blackhawk’s ambitious The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History. In putting Indians back into the history of the country, rather than treating the trials and tribulations of Indian peoples as a separate discipline, he changes the way we understand the past. Indians, he says, had “agency,” were party to the actions and decisions that shaped the country. His is a different understanding of early founders Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and especially George Washington.Read Rich’s Post →
I’m only 107 pages into Ned Blackhawks new book, The Rediscovery of America, and am already taken with an entirely new approach to American history. I’ve read Jill Lepore’s These Truths, and found it fact-filled, well written, and engaging, but, in the end, I found it limited, a kind of “Jeffersonian history.” In large part, Lepore takes the opening words of the Declaration, “We the people,” and sees the march of American history as the gradual expansion of “we.” It starts with male property owners, then embraces all (white) males, and gradually adds freed slaves, women, and, finally, in 1924, American Indians.Read Rich’s Post →
I’m half-way through Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, and while the writing is superb, and the argument that Caste is a more accurate description and useful tool than Race is in assessing American history, I am once again disappointed in a major historical text that does not directly address Indians in America.Read Rich’s Post →
Turning the page is a common metaphor for beginning a new year—often implying that we are leaving what was unpleasant in the last year behind. There was plenty of unpleasant in 2020, but some good things happened too, sometimes in spite of or even as a result of the Pandemic. Read Rich’s Post →