The Rediscovery of America

The Rediscovery of America is a retelling of five centuries of American history with Native nations restored to the center, and its argument is structural, not additive: you cannot explain colonial America, the Revolution, the Constitution, the Civil War, or the modern federal state, Ned Blackhawk contends, without Indians as protagonists, because Native power, diplomacy, land, and resistance shaped every one of them. Blackhawk, a Western Shoshone historian at Yale, moves from the Spanish borderlands and the French and English encounters, where Indigenous confederacies held the balance among empires for two hundred years, through the Revolution, fought in large part over Indian land and launched by a crown attempt to restrain colonial expansion, to the making of the constitutional order, in which the management of Indian affairs helped define the reach of federal power itself. The nineteenth century chapters narrate dispossession, removal, and the reservation system as deliberate policy carried out against continuing Native statecraft, and the twentieth century ones follow the boarding schools, the Indian New Deal, termination, and the Red Power movement to the self determination era, in which tribal sovereignty, the book's throughline, reemerges as living law. It is a synthesis of two generations of scholarship in Native American history, a field Blackhawk helped build, delivered as narrative for general readers, and the National Book Award judges called it enlightening, transformative, and enduring in giving it the 2023 prize for nonfiction. It has become the one volume answer to the oldest gap in the national story, the book to read first and argue with after.