Book cover of We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity, and Power by Caleb Gayle
Americas

We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity, and Power

A landmark work of untold American history that reshapes our understanding of identity, race, and belonging

In We Refuse to Forget, award-winning journalist Caleb Gayle tells the extraordinary story of the Creek Nation, a Native tribe that two centuries ago both owned slaves and accepted Black people as full citizens. Thanks to the efforts of Creek leaders like Cow Tom, a Black Creek citizen who rose to become chief, the U.S. government recognized Creek citizenship in 1866 for its Black members. […Learn More]

Book cover of Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West by Hampton Sides
History

Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West

In the summer of 1846, the Army of the West marched through Santa Fe, en route to invade and occupy the Western territories claimed by Mexico. Fueled by the new ideology of “Manifest Destiny,” this land grab would lead to a decades-long battle between the United States and the Navajos, the fiercely resistant rulers of a huge swath of mountainous desert wilderness. […Learn More]

Book cover of A Sacred People: Indigenous Governance, Traditional Leadership, and the Warriors of the Cheyenne Nation by Leo K. Killsback
Americas

A Sacred People: Indigenous Governance, Traditional Leadership, and the Warriors of the Cheyenne Nation

Killsback, a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Nation, reconstructs and rekindles an ancient Cheyenne world–ways of living and thinking that became casualties of colonization and forced assimilation. Spanning more than a millennium of antiquity and recovering stories and ideas interpreted from a Cheyenne worldview, the works’ joint purpose is rooted as much in a decolonization roadmap as it is in preservation of culture and identity for the next generations of Cheyenne people. […Learn More]

Book cover of Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana by Sophie White
History

Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana

In eighteenth-century New Orleans, the legal testimony of some 150 enslaved women and men–like the testimony of free colonists–was meticulously recorded and preserved. Questioned in criminal trials as defendants, victims, and witnesses about attacks, murders, robberies, and escapes, they answered with stories about themselves, stories that rebutted the premise on which slavery was founded.
[…Learn More]

Book cover of Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country by Fay Yarbrough
Americas

Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country

When the Choctaw Nation was forcibly resettled in Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma in the 1830s, it was joined by enslaved Black people—the tribe had owned enslaved Blacks since the 1720s. By the eve of the Civil War, 14 percent of the Choctaw Nation consisted of enslaved Blacks. Avid supporters of the Confederate States of America, the Nation passed a measure requiring all whites living in its territory to swear allegiance to the Confederacy and deemed any criticism of it or its army treasonous and punishable by death. Choctaws also raised an infantry force and a cavalry to fight alongside Confederate forces. […Learn More]

Book cover of The Cause: The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773-1783 by Joseph Ellis
History

The Cause: The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773-1783

A culminating work on the American Founding by one of its leading historians, The Cause rethinks the American Revolution as we have known it.

In one of the most “exciting and engaging” (Gordon S. Wood) histories of the American founding in decades, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Joseph J. Ellis offers an epic account of the origins and clashing ideologies of America’s revolutionary era, recovering a war more brutal, and more disorienting, than any in our history, save perhaps the Civil War. […Learn More]

Book cover of An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 by Benjamin Madley
Americas

An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873

Between 1846 and 1873, California’s Indian population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000. Benjamin Madley is the first historian to uncover the full extent of the slaughter, the involvement of state and federal officials, the taxpayer dollars that supported the violence, indigenous resistance, who did the killing, and why the killings ended. This deeply researched book is a comprehensive and chilling history of an American genocide. […Learn More]

Book cover of The Taking of Jemima Boone: Colonial Settlers, Tribal Nations, and the Kidnap That Shaped America by Matthew Pearl
Americas

The Taking of Jemima Boone: Colonial Settlers, Tribal Nations, and the Kidnap That Shaped America

In his first work of narrative nonfiction, Matthew Pearl, bestselling author of acclaimed novel The Dante Club, explores the little-known true story of the kidnapping of legendary pioneer Daniel Boone’s daughter and the dramatic aftermath that rippled across the nation. 

On a quiet midsummer day in 1776, weeks after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, thirteen-year-old Jemima Boone and her friends Betsy and Fanny Callaway disappear near the Kentucky settlement of Boonesboro, the echoes of their faraway screams lingering on the air […Learn More]