The Comanche Empire

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

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

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

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

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