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Showing posts with the label native americans

BASS REEVES: TALES of the TALENTED TENTH, no. 1 by Joel Christian Gill

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 Published by Fulcrum Publishing in 2014. Artist and author Joel Christian Gill is writing and illustrating a series of graphic novels that look into the lives of lesser known, exceptional African Americans. His inspiration is this quote from W.E.B. DuBois: "The Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that are worth saving up to their vantage ground." In other words, some will rise up and inspire/lead the rest. This is Gill's way of providing inspiration. Bass Reeves was a legendary lawman in the Old West. He was a Deputy U.S. Marshal that chased down bad guys who would flee into Indian Territory (Oklahoma and Kansas) to hide from law enforcement in the neighboring states. If you've seen either of the two versions of the movie True Grit, that is the exact situation. The character Rooster Cogburn would have been real-life Bass Reeves' co-worker if Cogburn were a real person. The graphic novel tells about Reeves' childhood as a slave in Arkansas, how he escaped durin

TRACKERS (Trackers, Book 1) (audiobook) by Nicholas Sansbury Smith

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  Published in 2017 by Blackstone Audio, Inc. Read by Bronson Pinchot Duration: 8 hours, 28 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: A Colorado police chief named Colton has organized a search for a young girl he suspects has been abducted. He reaches out to the best tracker he knows, Sam "Raven" Spears, for help. Raven is part Sioux and part Cherokee - an important fact because he soon suspects that the abductor is acting out a Cherokee legend featuring cannibals.  While Colton and Raven are on the hunt, there is a North Korean EMP attack on the United States. For those not aware, EMP stands for Electromagnetic Pulse. Nuclear weapons emit a pulse that absolutely fries most electronics. If you bomb a city normally, the pulse is limited by hills, buildings, and lots of other things. But, if you blow a nuclear bomb up high up in the air, the bomb doesn't do a lot of damage but the EMP kills all exposed modern cars (older cars have no computer systems, electrical systems, power plants

MY NAME IS SALLY LITTLE SONG (audiobook) by Brenda Woods

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  Book edition originally published in 2006. Audiobook published in 2019 by Listening Library. Read by Asmeret Ghebremichael. Duration: 3 hours, 0 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: This short piece of historical fiction focuses on a slave family in Georgia in the 1790s. The main character is Sally. She has a brother, a mother and a father. The one thing that this family has going for them is that their owners have a policy of not breaking apart families. That is the policy until relatives of the owners find themselves struggling financially. In a couple of days, Sally and her brother and 3 other slaves are going to be sent to the other plantation to help it get back on its feet again.  The family decides to run away together rather than be split apart. After some discussion with a friendly house slave who has done some traveling with the family, they decide not to head north. They haven't seen a map but they know that the trip across northern Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, a

PONTIAC'S WAR: A HISTORY from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History

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  Published by Hourly History in 2021. Hourly History  publishes histories and biographies that you can read in about an hour. That can be a tough job for larger topics in history like "The Industrial Revolution" or "The Roman Empire" but it works out about right for this short war (1763-1766.) The war arose directly from unaddressed issues as a consequence of the French and Indian War (1754-1763.) In the French and Indian War, the American frontier became a battlefield. American settlements were wiped out, Native American villages were destroyed. French and English soldiers participated and ultimately agreed to a settlement that ignored the realities of the vast borderlands between the colonies and the Native Americans. The biggest issue was constant push westward from European (American) settlers into areas that were already inhabited by Native Americans. The colonies were all for this westward push, even if the British government was ambivalent or even against t

WHEN WE'RE HOME in AFRICA (audiobook) by Themba Umbalisi

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Published in 2021 by Next Chapter Audio LTD. Read by Crawford B. Bunkley III. Duration: 4 hours, 34 minutes. Unabridged. I have no idea where I found this book. I think it was a freebie on Audible through Amazon's Prime Reading program. I know that I got it because I am a big reader of Civil War histories and fiction and this sounded like it was right up my alley. Synopsis: The description of this book is accurate, to a point. It is about a freed slave who joins the Union Army and then goes from job to job and place to place with a goal of settling in Africa. My Review: This book is basically a Forrest Gump type of story - one man goes on an epic journey and ends up going through a lot of the historical movements of the era. Warning: Lots of *********SPOILERS********all the way to the end of this review. This audiobook comes in at almost exactly 50% of the run time for FORREST GUMP   and covers maybe even more territory. Our hero (his name changes multiple times) begins as a slave

CALIFORNIA GOLD RUSH (kindle) by Hourly History

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  Published in 2022 by Hourly History. The short histories produced by Hourly History are designed to read in about an hour. In some cases the size limit makes for a very incomplete history. In this case, I thought that topic and the size limit matched up pretty well. This e-book details from the beginning (spoiler alert: John Sutter of Sutter's Mill fame was clearly not a good guy) and details the good as well as the bad of the Gold Rush. Turns out there was a lot of bad, such as environmental destruction on an unprecedented level (they used mining techniques that were outlawed just a few years later. How obviously bad were they if people who let children into mines said that these techniques are clearly out of bounds?!??)  The white miners also used genocidal techniques to wipe out the local Native American populations, killed Chinese immigrants that came across the Pacific to find gold and, of course, jumped the claims of other white miners and killed them. All of the gold and

GERONIMO: A LIFE from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History

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  Published by Hourly History in 2020. Geronimo (1829-1909) is the Apache leader that is famous for having fought just about everybody that encroached on his people's land. Later on, when he had surrendered he was shipped all over the place to different reservations. That was pretty much the facts that I knew about Geronimo and I thought that I really needed to add more to that. After all, he is one of the few Native Americans that everyone has heard of.  Hourly History  publishes histories and biographies that you can read in about an hour. That can be a tough job for big topics in history like "The Industrial Revolution" or "The Roman Empire" but it is just about right for a short biography.  Geronimo may have fought with the United States and was eventually captured by the U.S. Army (many, many times) but he was really angry with Mexicans. Mexico was his primary enemy because Mexican soldiers killed his family and friends while he was on a trip to a Mexican t

HOW to HIDE an EMPIRE: A HISTORY of the GREATER UNITED STATES (audiobook) by Daniel Immerwahr

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  Published in 2019 by Recorded Books. Read by Luis Moreno. Duration: 17 hours, 25 minutes. Unabridged. If I asked you to think of a map of the United States you would almost certainly imagine the contiguous 48 states and maybe imagine the little inset maps of Alaska and Hawaii.  But, you probably would not imagine other areas like American Samoa being a part of that map. How about Guam or the U.S. Virgin Islands even though the people who live there are American citizens? How about Puerto Rico? Puerto Ricans are citizens and Puerto Rico has a population bigger than at least 15 states. This book is about how America has maintained an empire of sorts from the very beginning. At first, it was by continually moving out of the official states into Indian territory, Mexico, Spanish territory and English territory. The United States took several strategic "guano" islands that were not claimed by anyone in the late 1800s. The United States has held a traditional empire since the Spa

THE DAWN of EVERYTHING: A NEW HISTORY of HUMANITY (audiobook) by David Graeber and David Wengrow

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  Published by Macmillan Audio in 2021. Read by Mark Williams. Duration: 24 hours, 2 minutes. Unabridged . In my professional life I am a high school teacher. I don't teach it now, but in the past when I taught world history I taught that the origins of civilization in the traditional way and it always goes something like this: -At first there were wandering groups of people, probably based around 1 or 2 families. Things were fairly democratic because these groups had to talk things out to make decisions. -Somebody along the way figured out how to domesticate a few animals. -Somebody along the way figured out how to domesticate plants. Some small fields were started and left mostly on their own while the wandering continued with scheduled returns to the fields. -Eventually, the fields were so productive that it made no sense to leave them. -Populations grew, towns were developed and simple authoritarian government led by almost always by a man who served as an all-powerful king of

WEST from APPOMATTOX: THE RECONSTRUCTION of AMERICA after the CIVIL WAR (kindle) by Heather Cox Richardson

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  Published in 2007. Heather Cox Richardson is a historian I have only recently discovered because of her prolific social media presence that she developed while under Covid lockdown. She writes a daily news summary of a few paragraphs with a view towards how these events match up with historical events or trends. Plus, she takes questions from people and develops a one hour daily online lecture. They are interesting, sometimes rambling little presentations and this book shares a lot of the same features.  Teddy Roosevelt (center with glasses) and the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War Richardson is looking at the time right after the Civil War in American History.  In the history books, Reconstruction, the Old West, the Gilded Age and the Spanish-American War are all treated a separate things. Combining all of these typical divisions of American history into one book makes for a more comprehensive study of the time period.  Traditionally, they are studied separately - in a typic

A VOYAGE LONG and STRANGE: REDISCOVERING the NEW WORLD (audiobook) by Tony Horwitz

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  Published in 2008 by Random House Audio. Read by John H. Mayer. Duration: 17 hours, 16 minutes. Unabridged. A reconstruction of what the Viking village in Newfoundland may have looked like Tony Horwitz set out to fill in a big gap in his understanding of American history. He vaguely knew that the Vikings arrived in the New World and did something or other and he knew about Columbus' voyage in 1492 and he knew about the Pilgrims and Plymouth Rock and the First Thanksgiving in 1621, but what happened in between? Also, what about the people that were already here? Horwitz decided to find out what he didn't know and this book is a combined travelogue and history lesson. He starts with the small failed Viking settlement in Newfoundland, Canada, moves on to the Dominican Republic to learn about Columbus and comes to the United States to look at the first Spanish explorers and settlements in New Mexico and Florida. He also looks at the epic and eventually tragic expeditions of explo

CUSTER'S LAST STAND (Landmark Books #20) by Quentin Reynolds

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  Published in 1951 by Random House. I n the 1950's and 1960's Random House created an extraordinary history series for children called Landmark Books. There were 122 books in the American history series and 63 in the World Landmark series. A very solid description of the series can be found here:  link . When I was a kid my little hometown library had what seemed like an endless shelf of these books (I even remember where it was in the library nearly 40 years later). Undoubtedly, these books are part of the reason I am a history teacher. I have started a collection of these books. When I run across them at library sales and thrift sales I pick them up. Some of the texts have aged well, some have not. This book is aimed at students from 3rd to 8th grade. It is a simple read with line drawings. It could use a few more maps.   The history is basically accurate in the broad strokes, but it is full of "quotes" and scenes that never happened in order to make the story move

GUNSLINGER: THE DRAGON of YELLOWSTONE (Mythic West Series)(kindle) by Edward Knight

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  Published in April of 2021 by WordFire Press. Gunslinger: The Dragon of Yellowstone is part of a series of books set in post-Civil War years, but with a major twist - the giants from Norse mythology crossed through a thin spot between their reality and Earth in an attempt to conquer Earth.  The fighting began in Andersonville, Georgia. It interrupted the Civil War but everything East of the Mississippi was basically lost. As the army of the giants pushed west, they were finally stopped in an epic battle featuring a number of names that were big names in the normal timeline of the Old West and an uneasy truce is in place, mostly because both sides have exhausted themselves. This book features a threat to end that uneasy truce that is investigated by a minor character from other books in the series, a teenaged gunslinger named Beth who was trained by none other than Wild Bill Hickock himself.  I really appreciate the world building that went into this series. This reminds me of the ki

NEWS of the WORLD (audiobook) by Paulette Jiles

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  Book originally published in 2016. Audiobook published by Harper Audio. Read by Grover Gardner. Duration: 6 hours, 17 minutes. Unabridged. News of the World is a pretty simple book - on the surface. Set in 1870 Texas, a 70+ year-old veteran of the War of 1812 and the Mexican War is asked to travel more than 300 miles to deliver a 10-year old girl to her extended family near San Antonio, Texas. When she was 6, she was adopted by the Kiowa after they killed immediate family in a frontier attack. Their journey starts in Wichita Falls (near the Oklahoma-Texas border) and faces a lot of difficulties.  The author Jefferson Kyle Kidd goes by the name Captain Kidd because that was his rank in the Mexican War, where he served as a messenger. That is appropriate since his true love is bringing news to others. He worked on newspapers, he owned newspapers, he edited newspapers and now he is out of the newspaper business completely due to post-Civil War Reconstruction rules.  Kidd can't stay

ON FASCISM: 12 LESSONS from AMERICAN HISTORY (audiobook) by Matthew CC MacWilliams

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  Published in September of 2020 by Macmillan Audio. Read by Kevin Stillwell. Duration: 4 hours, 18 minutes. Unabridged. MacWilliams is a sociologist who studies authoritarianism. He has done a number of surveys over American attitudes towards the Constitution and the freedoms of their fellow citizens and there are areas of concern. For example, "31% of Americans agree that having a strong leader who does not have to bother with Congress and elections is a good way of governing the United States" and "30% of Americans agree with the statement 'I often find myself fearful of other people of other races.'" Other stats of concern are: "44% of Americans agree that increasing racial, religious and ethnic diversity represents a threat to the security of the United States" When you break down the numbers about "18 percent of Americans are highly disposed to authoritarianism. Another 23 percent or so are attitudinally just one step below them on the a

ANCIENT CIVILIZATIONS of NORTH AMERICA (The Great Courses) by Edwin Barnhart

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  Published in 2018 by The Great Courses. Lectures by Edwin Barnhart. Duration: 12 hours, 19 minutes. Unabridged. The idea behind The Great Courses is a simple one - take a college lecture course given by an expert that knows how to give an interesting lecture and package it up as an audiobook that anyone can listen to. Edwin Barnhart is an archaeologist working out of University of Texas - Austin. This course is the completion of a trilogy of courses on Native American civilizations (South America, Mesoamerica, North America). Barnhart's area of true expertise is Mesoamerica, but he has a wealth of practical experience on digs throughout the Southwest. He also clear has a love for the various mound builder civilizations that arose in North America.  Barnhart takes both chronological and regional approach to this history. The early history section generally is chronological because it is the most unclear. It is also the most technical section of the book, with long discussions of t

THE COLD DISH (Longmire #1)(audiobook) by Craig Johnson

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  Originally published in 2004. Published by Recorded Books in 2007. Read by George Guidall. Duration: 13 hours, 17 minutes. Unabridged. The Longmire book series is the definition of a successful franchise with 16 novels and a six season television series. I watched the series and I enjoyed it immensely, so I decided to give the books a go. There are obvious differences in characters (The Ferg is a massive change, for example), but they are not deal-breakers. I prefer to look at them as another interpretation of the characters.  The main mystery in this novel was highly adapted for the TV series, so much so that it was basically a whole new mystery. A few years earlier 4 white high school boys sexually assaulted a fellow student. She was Native American who suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome and didn't really understand what had happened. The trial that followed was rough on the local white and Native American communities and ended with minimal punishments for the boys.  Now, the

CIVIL WAR in the INDIAN TERRITORY by Steve Cottrell

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  Originally published in 1995. Published in 1998 by Pelican Publishing Company. The answer to one of the more popular Civil War trivia questions is: Stand Watie. The question is: Who was the last Confederate General to surrender at the end of the Civil War? Stand Watie (1806-1871) Stand Watie is unique because he is the only Native American to become a general during the Civil War. The Cherokee and other Indian Nations living in Oklahoma were drawn into the Civil War and fought in more than 30 engagements - some relatively small and some quite large.  Slavery was a factor (Watie had slaves and a plantation), but there were also local political issues that were probably more influential.  Like most of the fighting in the West, the battles were not large by Civil War standards, but the fighting was usually pretty personal. Villages were burned out, refugees fled by the thousands and it was not uncommon for soldiers to know the people they were fighting personally. Also, this front was o

THE STORY of the CHEROKEE PEOPLE by Tom B. Underwood

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Originally published in 1961. According to the price tag on this book, I picked it up at a souvenir store in The Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I couldn't tell you when for sure, but my best guess is that it was about 45 years ago. This is a small book, almost like a large children's book, so it just moved along with me wherever I went and I never read it until now. The cover of the book is deceiving. The cover looks like it was written for small children (that is most certainly how I acquired it) but the pictures in the book are much more detailed and complicated, much more like those found in an old-fashioned encyclopedia or an old-style museum. The text is certainly not written for small children, although it does have a slightly paternalistic tone. It feels dated. The one really strong feature to this book is a seven page testimony about the Trail of Tears from Private John Burnett. Burnett was ordered to accompany the Cherokee because he could speak their language

THE MARROW THIEVES (audiobook) by Cherie Dimaline

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Published by Kobo Originals in 2018. Read by Meegwun Fairweather. Duration: 7 hours, 11 minutes. Unabridged. It is the latter half of the 21st century and the world has had a series of literal upheavals. Earthquakes sheared off California, global warming has changed the weather. Droughts occur in former wet spaces and dry places have become swamps. Sea levels have risen and drowned out many cities. Many animal species have died off and others are in severe decline. On top of that, the nations of the world have gone to war and most cities were destroyed, people have fled to the remaining cities. The entire world map has been re-drawn. In the future there is also another problem. Almost everyone in the world has The author, Cherie Dimaline. lost the ability to dream. Everybody except the indigenous population of the Americas - Native Americans. However, their bone marrow can be harvested for a substance that lets other people dream. The government and the Catholic Church have joine