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

A sweeping and overdue retelling of U.S. history that recognizes that Native Americans are essential to understanding the evolution of modern America

The most enduring feature of U.S. history is the presence of Native Americans, yet most histories focus on Europeans and their descendants. This long practice of ignoring Indigenous history is changing, however, as a new generation of scholars insists that any full American history address the struggle, survival, and resurgence of American Indian nations. Indigenous history is essential to understanding the evolution of modern America.

Ned Blackhawk interweaves five centuries of Native and non-Native histories, from Spanish colonial exploration to the rise of Native American self-determination in the late twentieth century. In this transformative synthesis he shows that
• European colonization in the 1600s was never a predetermined success;
• Native nations helped shape England’s crisis of empire;
• the first shots of the American Revolution were prompted by Indian affairs in the interior;
• California Indians targeted by federally funded militias were among the first casualties of the Civil War;
• the Union victory forever recalibrated Native communities across the West;
• twentieth-century reservation activists refashioned American law and policy.

Blackhawk’s retelling of U.S. history acknowledges the enduring power, agency, and survival of Indigenous peoples, yielding a truer account of the United States and revealing anew the varied meanings of America.

Review

"Eloquent and comprehensive. . . . By presenting post-1492 history as a series of encounters between the various peoples of the Americas and the peoples from Europe, Africa, and Asia--rather than as an account of Europe's discovery of a new world--Blackhawk provides a view of that past from multiple perspectives. . . . In the book's sweeping synthesis, standard flashpoints of U.S. history take on new meaning."--Kathleen DuVal, Wall Street Journal

Selected by New York Times Book Review as a Best Book Since 2000

"Even as the telling of American history has become more complex and nuanced, Native Americans tend to be absent. Blackhawk, a professor at Yale, confronts that absence in this sweeping account of how Native Americans shaped the country legally, politically, and culturally."--Washington Post, "50 Notable Works of Nonfiction" (2023)

"A sweeping, important, revisionist work of American history that places Native Americans front and center."--New York Times Book Review (cover review)

"[A] monumental reappraisal of the United States' history. . . . Blackhawk . . . foregrounds the endurance of Native Americans' autonomy and traditions in the face of their near-eradication."--New Yorker, "The Best Books of 2023"

"An ambitious retelling of the American story . . . placing Indigenous populations at the center, a shift in perspective that yields fresh insights and thought-provoking questions."--Greg Cowles, New York Times Book Review, "Editors' Choice"

"In accounts of American history, Indigenous peoples are often treated as largely incidental--either obstacles to be overcome or part of a narrative separate from the arc of nation-building. Blackhawk . . . challenges those minimalizations and exclusions, showing that Native communities have, instead, been inseparable from the American story all along."--Washington Post Book World, "Books to Read in 2023"

"This ambitious retelling of the American story, by a historian who is also a Native American, places Indigenous populations at the center, a shift in perspective that yields fresh insights and thought-provoking questions."--New York Times, "100 Notable Books of 2023"

"[Blackhawk's] book will become an indispensable text for a generation of researchers, educators and students."--Caroline Dodds Pennock, BBC History Magazine

About the Author

Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone) is the Howard R. Lamar Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University, where he is the faculty coordinator for the Yale Group for the Study of Native America. He is the author of Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West. He lives in New Haven, CT.2023 Nati