Native American History

The history of Native Americans in the United States began in the Pre-Columbian era with the settlement of the Americas by the Paleo-Indians. Anthropologists have identified and studied a wide variety of cultures that existed during this era. Their subsequent contact with Europeans had a profound impact on their history.

Most Read This Week Tagged "Native American History"

The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History

The Last Campaign: Sherman, Geronimo and the War for America

Blood Memory: The Tragic Decline and Improbable Resurrection of the American Buffalo

Native Nations: A Millennium in North America

The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West

Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America

The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South

Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America

The Earth Is All That Lasts: Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and the Last Stand of the Great Sioux Nation

Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory

A Brutal Reckoning: Andrew Jackson, the Creek Indians, and the Epic War for the American South

Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America

Beneath the Backbone of the World: Blackfoot People and the North American Borderlands, 1720–1877

Tecumseh and the Prophet: The Shawnee Brothers Who Defied a Nation

Native American History Books

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West

Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (ReVisioning American History, #3)

Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation

The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West

Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West

Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux

The Journey of Crazy Horse: A Lakota History

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present

The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650 - 1815

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse: The Story of Leonard Peltier and the FBI's War on the American Indian Movement

More native american history books...

Lists

The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

Ugly Prey by Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi, PhD

Chicago History (nonfiction)

214 books — 15 voters

Native American Sprituality

1 book — 1 voter

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown

The Legendary Life of Bee Ho Gray by Clark Gray

Great nonfiction books about the settlement of the Great Plains

12 books — 9 voters

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

The Rediscovery of America by Ned Blackhawk

The Elusive Conquest of Queen Califa by Alan Ehrgott

History Beyond the Conquerors: Books That Challenge the Official Story

15 books — 3 voters

Harlem's Rattlers and the Great War by Jeffrey T. Sammons

Race in the Military

38 books — 6 voters

Last Train to Paradise by Les Standiford

Florida History

193 books — 28 voters

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Quotes Tagged “Native American History”

“ You see, Ralph Turner and Victor Irish grew up in the 1920s and 1930s, listening to radio shows and watching Westerns in the theater. Growing up, they often played Cowboys and Indians in the fields and forests surrounding their homes. Like most people at the time, they had a Hollywood notion of Native American culture, which they used to try and visualize some kind of indigenous society that would produce copper tools and jewelry. They imagined the technical skill, the mines, and the workers tha ...more ”
― David Pompeani, Great Water: The Lost Mines of Lake Superior

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“ Imagine two incidents of theft. In the first case, a bandit takes something valuable from someone else. Deprived of this important source of wealth, the victim and his family live a life of relative destitution, even as the thief and his family flourish, with nary a thought about the crime that served as the basis of their wealth, nor the fate of those they stole from. Eventually the perpetrator and his family forget about the theft altogether and come to view their wealth as legitimate. In the Imagine two incidents of theft. In the first case, a bandit takes something valuable from someone else. Deprived of this important source of wealth, the victim and his family live a life of relative destitution, even as the thief and his family flourish, with nary a thought about the crime that served as the basis of their wealth, nor the fate of those they stole from. Eventually the perpetrator and his family forget about the theft altogether and come to view their wealth as legitimate. In the second case, a bandit also takes something precious from someone else, likewise leaving the victim and his family in a state of relative destitution, even as the robber and his family prosper. But in the second case, the bandit constantly acknowledges that his own prosperity was achieved at the victim’s expense. He explicitly and repeatedly recognizes the state of privation that the victim and his family live in as a result of the crime. He publicly praises the victim at every turn. Yet he nonetheless declines to return the stolen resources. Instead, he continues to actively leverage the seized assets in order to build his own wealth, but incessantly laments the poor state of the victim and his family, and the horror of the crime that was done to them, and insists that someone really ought to do something to help “those people” out. The second scenario describes the practice of land acknowledgments, which have grown increasingly popular in symbolic capitalist spaces in recent years (while the first scenario depicts how the people who do make land acknowledgments describe those who don’t; I’ll leave it to the reader to decide which is worse). One stated purpose of land acknowledgments is to show respect to those who have been dispossessed. But of course, precisely as a function of that very dispossession, there are almost never people from the affected tribes “in the room” to receive these acknowledgments—particularly in symbolic capitalist spaces (where this practice is most pronounced). Instead, these acknowledgments typically consist of non-Indigenous people virtue signaling exclusively to other non-Indigenous people, who nod along approvingly, leading all in attendance to feel good about how enlightened they are … and then everyone gets on with business as usual. ...more ”
― Musa al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite

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