The Comanche Empire, Pekka Hamalainen
The Comanche Empire, Pekka Hamalainen
List: $22.49 | Sale: $15.74
Club: $11.24

The Comanche Empire

Author: Pekka Hamalainen

Narrator: Carla Mercer-Meyer

Unabridged: 19 hr 51 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 10/25/2016


Synopsis

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a Native American 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 American history.

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 Native-European relations in North America and elsewhere. Pekka Hämäläinen 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.

About Pekka Hamalainen

Pekka Hamalainen is Rhodes Professor of American History at Oxford University and the author of The Comanche Empire, winner of the Bancroft Prize, and Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power. He lives in Oxford, England.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Terence on June 22, 2009

When I was growing up in eastern Missouri it was de rigueur that the man-children of the clan become Boy Scouts. Thus, despite little aptitude or interest, I was duly enrolled in the Cub Scouts and spent summer weekends attending den meetings and going on the occasional camping trip. (Don’t fear tha......more

Goodreads review by Craig on July 22, 2012

Okay, I'll get this out of my system first: skip chapter 6. There, that's better. It's not often that I read a book that fundamentally changes my sense of a major part of American history, especially not in one of the areas I read a lot in. PH's reconsideration of the history of the southern plains a......more

Goodreads review by David on March 30, 2022

There used to be a certain idealistic narrative popular in histories of Native Americans, which went something like this: once upon a time, indigenous peoples lived in pastoral splendor, in harmony with nature, stewards of the Earth, in peaceful extended kinship groups that maybe every once in a whi......more

Goodreads review by Richard on May 20, 2014

This is described as part of the Lamar Series in Western History, which includes scholarly works of interest to the general reader for the purpose of understanding human affairs in the American West and adding a wider understanding of the West's significance to America's existence. This is certainly......more

Goodreads review by Kate on January 22, 2011

I became interested in the Comanches after reading Empire of the Summer Moon, a bestseller last year about Comanche chief Quanah Parker and the last few decades of the tribe's nomadic life on the Southwestern grasslands. Unlike Summer Moon, which was written by a journalist, Comanche Empire begins a......more