The Lamar Series in Western History
2 total works
The first comprehensive history of the Lakota Indians and their profound role in shaping America's history
Named One of the New York Times Critics' Top Books of 2019 * Named One of the 10 Best History Books of 2019 by Smithsonian Magazine * Winner of the MPIBA Reading the West Book Award for narrative nonfiction
"All nations deserve to have their stories told with this degree of attentiveness."-Parul Sehgal, New York Times
"A briliant, bold, gripping history."-Simon Sebag Montefiore, London Evening Standard, Best Books of 2019
Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull are iconic figures in the American imagination, but in this groundbreaking book they emerge as something different: the architects of Lakota America, an expansive and enduring Indigenous regime that commanded human fates in the North American interior for generations. In this first complete account of the Lakota Indians Pekka Hamalainen traces their rich and often surprising history from the early sixteenth to the early twenty-first century. He explores the Lakotas' roots as marginal hunter-gatherers and reveals how they reinvented themselves twice: first as a river people who dominated the Missouri Valley, America's great commercial artery, and then-in what was America's first sweeping westward expansion-as a horse people who ruled supreme on the vast high plains.
Deeply researched and engagingly written, this history places the Lakotas at the center of American history, and the results are revelatory.
Named One of the New York Times Critics' Top Books of 2019 * Named One of the 10 Best History Books of 2019 by Smithsonian Magazine * Winner of the MPIBA Reading the West Book Award for narrative nonfiction
"All nations deserve to have their stories told with this degree of attentiveness."-Parul Sehgal, New York Times
"A briliant, bold, gripping history."-Simon Sebag Montefiore, London Evening Standard, Best Books of 2019
Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull are iconic figures in the American imagination, but in this groundbreaking book they emerge as something different: the architects of Lakota America, an expansive and enduring Indigenous regime that commanded human fates in the North American interior for generations. In this first complete account of the Lakota Indians Pekka Hamalainen traces their rich and often surprising history from the early sixteenth to the early twenty-first century. He explores the Lakotas' roots as marginal hunter-gatherers and reveals how they reinvented themselves twice: first as a river people who dominated the Missouri Valley, America's great commercial artery, and then-in what was America's first sweeping westward expansion-as a horse people who ruled supreme on the vast high plains.
Deeply researched and engagingly written, this history places the Lakotas at the center of American history, and the results are revelatory.
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, at the high tide of imperial struggles in North America, an indigenous empire rose to dominate the fiercely contested lands of the American Southwest, the southern Great Plains, and northern Mexico. This powerful empire, built by the Comanche Indians, eclipsed its various European rivals in military prowess, political prestige, economic power, commercial reach, and cultural influence. Yet, until now, the Comanche empire has gone unrecognized in historical accounts.This compelling and original book uncovers the lost story of the Comanches. It is a story that challenges the idea of indigenous peoples as victims of European expansion and offers a new model for the history of colonial expansion, colonial frontiers, and Indian-Euramerican relations in North America and elsewhere. Pekka Hamalainen shows in vivid detail how the Comanches built their unique empire and resisted European colonization, and why they fell to defeat in 1875. With extensive knowledge and deep insight, the author brings into clear relief the Comanches' remarkable impact on the trajectory of history.