Unworthy Republic, Claudio Saunt
Unworthy Republic, Claudio Saunt
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Unworthy Republic
The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory

Author: Claudio Saunt

Narrator: Stephen Bowlby

Unabridged: 11 hr 36 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/31/2020


Synopsis

In May 1830, the United States formally launched a policy to expel Native Americans from the East to territories west of the Mississippi River. Justified as a humanitarian enterprise, the undertaking was to be systematic and rational, overseen by Washington’s small but growing bureaucracy. But as the policy unfolded over the next decade, thousands of Native Americans died under the federal government’s auspices, and thousands of others lost their possessions and homelands in an orgy of fraud, intimidation, and violence.

Drawing on firsthand accounts and the voluminous records produced by the federal government, Saunt’s deeply researched book argues that Indian Removal, as advocates of the policy called it, was not an inevitable chapter in US expansion across the continent. Rather, it was a fiercely contested political act designed to secure new lands for the expansion of slavery and to consolidate the power of the southern states. Indigenous peoples fought relentlessly against the policy, while many US citizens insisted that it was a betrayal of the nation’s values. When Congress passed the act by a razor-thin margin, it authorized one of the first state-sponsored mass deportations in the modern era, marking a turning point for native peoples and for the United States.

About Claudio Saunt

Claudio Saunt is the Richard B. Russell Professor in American History at the University of Georgia. He is the author of award-winning books, including A New Order of Things; Black, White, and Indian; and West of the Revolution. He lives in Athens, Georgia.


Reviews

Goodreads review by William2 on January 01, 2023

This book is appropriately enraging. If you’ve read Killers of the Flower Moon then you might like this book. Flower Moon is about the shakedown by white grifters of Osage Indians in the early 20th century who held the rights to vast oil reserves. The canvas of Unworthy Republic is much broader. It......more

Goodreads review by Zade on March 13, 2021

As many other reviewers have noted, this is an exhaustive, well-written, and emotionally draining history. This is the kind of history we should be teaching in our schools, rather than the sanitized adoration heaped on the founders and builders of the American nation. Saunt draws very clearly the co......more

Goodreads review by Scott on July 28, 2020

We always talk of slavery as the "original sin" of America, but dispossession of the Native Americans was also an original sin. The Decade of Deportation (1830s) isn't something we learn much about in American History. Yet is it an important chapter and this book will do much to correct that error.......more