The Demon of the Continent

The Demon of the Continent
Author: Joshua David Bellin
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2012-06-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0812201221
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In recent years, the study and teaching of Native American oral and written art have flourished. During the same period, there has been a growing recognition among historians, anthropologists, and ethnohistorians that Indians must be seen not as the voiceless, nameless, faceless Other but as people who had a powerful impact on the historical development of the United States. Literary critics, however, have continued to overlook Indians as determinants of American—rather than specifically Native American—literature. The notion that the presence of Indian peoples shaped American literature as a whole remains unexplored. In The Demon of the Continent, Joshua David Bellin probes the complex interrelationships among Native American and Euro-American cultures and literatures from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. He asserts that cultural contact is at the heart of American literature. For Bellin, previous studies of Indians in American literature have focused largely on the images Euro-American writers constructed of indigenous peoples, and have thereby only perpetuated those images. Unlike authors of those earlier studies, Bellin refuses to reduce Indians to static antagonists or fodder for a Euro-American imagination. Drawing on works such as Henry David Thoreau's Walden, William Apess' A Son of the Forest, and little known works such as colonial Indian conversion narratives, he explores the ways in which these texts reflect and shape the intercultural world from which they arose. In doing so, Bellin reaches surprising conclusions: that Walden addresses economic clashes and partnerships between Indians and whites; that William Bartram's Travels encodes competing and interpenetrating systems of Indian and white landholding; that Catherine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie enacts the antebellum drama of Indian conversion; that James Fenimore Cooper and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow struggled with Indian authors such as George Copway and David Cusick for physical, ideological, and literary control of the nation. The Demon of the Continent proves Indians to be actors in the dynamic processes in which America and its literature are inescapably embedded. Shifting the focus from textual images to the sites of material, ideological, linguistic, and aesthetic interaction between peoples, Bellin reenvisions American literature as the product of contact, conflict, accommodation, and interchange.

Ties That Bind

Ties That Bind
Author: Tiya Miles
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2015-06-23
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0520285638
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This beautifully written book, now in its second edition, tells the haunting saga of a quintessentially American family. In the late 1790s, Shoe Boots, a famed Cherokee warrior and successful farmer, acquired an African slave named Doll. Over the next thirty years, Shoe Boots and Doll lived together as master and slave and also as lifelong partners who, with their children and grandchildren, experienced key events in American history—including slavery, the Creek War, the founding of the Cherokee Nation and subsequent removal of Native Americans along the Trail of Tears, and the Civil War. This is the gripping story of their lives, in slavery and in freedom. Meticulously crafted from historical and literary sources, Ties That Bind vividly portrays the members of the Shoeboots family. Doll emerges as an especially poignant character, whose life is mostly known through the records of things done to her—her purchase, her marriage, the loss of her children—but also through her moving petition to the federal government for the pension owed to her as Shoe Boots's widow. A sensitive rendition of the hard realities of black slavery within Native American nations, the book provides the fullest picture we have of the myriad complexities, ironies, and tensions among African Americans, Native Americans, and whites in the first half of the nineteenth century. Updated with a new preface and an appendix of key primary sources, this remains an essential book for students of Native American history, African American history, and the history of race and ethnicity in the United States.

The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796–1810

The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796–1810
Author: Benjamin Hawkins
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Total Pages: 716
Release: 2003
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0817350403
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The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins provides a comprehensive collection of the most important sources on the late historic Creek Indians and their environment.

Splendid Land, Splendid People

Splendid Land, Splendid People
Author: James R. Atkinson
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Total Pages: 381
Release: 2004
Genre: History
ISBN: 0817350330
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A thorough examination of the Chickasaw Indians, tracing their history as far back as the documentation and archeological record will allow Before the Chickasaws were removed to lands in Oklahoma in the 1800s, the heart of the Chickasaw Nation was located east of the Mississippi River in the upper watershed of the Tombigbee River in what is today northeastern Mississippi. Their lands had been called "splendid and fertile" by French governor Bienville at the time they were being coveted by early European settlers. The people were also termed “splendid” and described by documents of the 1700s as “tall, well made, and of an unparalleled courage. . . . The men have regular features, well-shaped and neatly dressed; they are fierce, and have a high opinion of themselves.” The progenitors of the sociopolitical entity termed by European chroniclers progressively as Chicasa, Chicaca, Chicacha, Chicasaws, and finally Chickasaw may have migrated from west of the Mississippi River in prehistoric times. Or migrating people may have joined indigenous populations. Despite this longevity in their ancestral lands, the Chickasaw were the only one of the original "five civilized tribes" to leave no remnant community in the Southeast at the time of removal. Atkinson thoroughly researches the Chickasaw Indians, tracing their history as far back as the documentation and archaeological record will allow. He historicizes from a Native viewpoint and outlines political events leading to removal, while addressing important issues such as slave-holding among Chickasaws, involvement of Chickasaw and neighboring Indian tribes in the American Revolution, and the lives of Chickasaw women. Splendid Land, Splendid People will become a fundamental resource for current information and further research on the Chickasaw. A wide audience of librarians, anthropologists, historians, and general readers have long awaited publication of this important volume.

The Seminole Baptist Churches of Oklahoma

The Seminole Baptist Churches of Oklahoma
Author: Jack Maurice Schultz
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 1999
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780806131177
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Observers often assume that American Indians identifying themselves as Christian have assimilated into the larger Anglo world. The Oklahoma Seminole Baptists have actively adapted non-native structures to accommodate their community needs. They gather several times weekly in steepled churches for prayers, hymn singing, and sermons based on biblical texts. But they conduct services primarily in the Mvskoke language and practice Native customs, such as fasting in the woods and constructing grave houses to shelter the spirit as it returns to visit the body. Schultz traces the history of the Seminoles to the present day. He then discusses Seminole Baptist beliefs and practices, leadership roles, and the church's organizational structure, illustrating his observations with a detailed account of the social life of a single congregation.

The 1619 Project

The 1619 Project
Author: Nikole Hannah-Jones
Publisher: One World
Total Pages: 625
Release: 2024-06-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0593230590
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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAACP IMAGE AWARD WINNER • A dramatic expansion of a groundbreaking work of journalism, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story offers a profoundly revealing vision of the American past and present. “[A] groundbreaking compendium . . . bracing and urgent . . . This collection is an extraordinary update to an ongoing project of vital truth-telling.”—Esquire NOW AN EMMY-NOMINATED HULU ORIGINAL DOCUSERIES • FINALIST FOR THE KIRKUS PRIZE • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, NPR, Esquire, Marie Claire, Electric Lit, Ms. magazine, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist In late August 1619, a ship arrived in the British colony of Virginia bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival led to the barbaric and unprecedented system of American chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin, but it is more than that: It is the source of so much that still defines the United States. The New York Times Magazine’s award-winning 1619 Project issue reframed our understanding of American history by placing slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative. This book substantially expands on that work, weaving together eighteen essays that explore the legacy of slavery in present-day America with thirty-six poems and works of fiction that illuminate key moments of oppression, struggle, and resistance. The essays show how the inheritance of 1619 reaches into every part of contemporary American society, from politics, music, diet, traffic, and citizenship to capitalism, religion, and our democracy itself. This book that speaks directly to our current moment, contextualizing the systems of race and caste within which we operate today. It reveals long-glossed-over truths around our nation’s founding and construction—and the way that the legacy of slavery did not end with emancipation, but continues to shape contemporary American life. Featuring contributions from: Leslie Alexander • Michelle Alexander • Carol Anderson • Joshua Bennett • Reginald Dwayne Betts • Jamelle Bouie • Anthea Butler • Matthew Desmond • Rita Dove • Camille T. Dungy • Cornelius Eady • Eve L. Ewing • Nikky Finney • Vievee Francis • Yaa Gyasi • Forrest Hamer • Terrance Hayes • Kimberly Annece Henderson • Jeneen Interlandi • Honorée Fanonne Jeffers • Barry Jenkins • Tyehimba Jess • Martha S. Jones • Robert Jones, Jr. • A. Van Jordan • Ibram X. Kendi • Eddie Kendricks • Yusef Komunyakaa • Kevin M. Kruse • Kiese Laymon • Trymaine Lee • Jasmine Mans • Terry McMillan • Tiya Miles • Wesley Morris • Khalil Gibran Muhammad • Lynn Nottage • ZZ Packer • Gregory Pardlo • Darryl Pinckney • Claudia Rankine • Jason Reynolds • Dorothy Roberts • Sonia Sanchez • Tim Seibles • Evie Shockley • Clint Smith • Danez Smith • Patricia Smith • Tracy K. Smith • Bryan Stevenson • Nafissa Thompson-Spires • Natasha Trethewey • Linda Villarosa • Jesmyn Ward

The 1619 Project: A Visual Experience

The 1619 Project: A Visual Experience
Author: Nikole Hannah-Jones
Publisher: Clarkson Potter
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2024-10-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0593232259
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An illustrated edition of The 1619 Project, with newly commissioned artwork and archival images, The New York Times Magazine’s award-winning reframing of the American founding and its contemporary echoes, placing slavery and resistance at the center of the American story. Here, in these pages, Black art provides refuge. The marriage of beautiful, haunting and profound words and imagery creates an experience for the reader, a wanting to reflect, to sit in both the discomfort and the joy, to contemplate what a nation owes a people who have contributed so much and yet received so little, and maybe even, to act.—Nikole Hannah-Jones, from the Preface Curated by the editors of The New York Times Magazine, led by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, this illustrated edition of The 1619 Project features seven chapters from the original book that lend themselves to beautiful, engaging visuals, deepening the experience of the content. The 1619 Project: A Visual Experience offers the same revolutionary idea as the original book, an argument for a new national origin story that begins in late August of 1619, when a cargo ship of people stolen from Africa arrived on the shores of Point Comfort, Virginia. Only by reckoning with this difficult history and understanding its powerful influence on our present can we prepare ourselves for a more just future. Filled with original art by thirteen Black artists like Carrie Mae Weems, Calida Rawles, Vitus Shell, Xaviera Simmons, on the themes of resistance and freedom, a brand-new photo essay about slave auction sites, vivid photos of Black Americans celebrating their own forms of patriotism, and a collection of archival images of Black families by Black photographers, this gorgeous volume offers readers a dynamic new way of experiencing the impact of The 1619 Project. Complete with many of the powerful essays and vignettes from the original edition, written by some of the most brilliant journalists, scholars, and thinkers of our time, The 1619 Project: A Visual Experience brings to life a fuller, more comprehensive understanding of American history and culture.