Violence Over the Land, Ned Blackhawk
Violence Over the Land, Ned Blackhawk
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Violence Over the Land
Indians and Empires in the Early American West

Author: Ned Blackhawk

Narrator: Curtis Michael Holland

Unabridged: 12 hr 19 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 07/09/2024


Synopsis

American Indians remain familiar as icons, yet poorly understood as historical agents. In this ambitious book that ranges across Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, and eastern California (a region known as the Great Basin), Ned Blackhawk places Native peoples squarely at the center of a dynamic and complex story as he chronicles two centuries of Indian and imperial history that profoundly shaped the American West.

On the distant margins of empire, Great Basin Indians increasingly found themselves engulfed in the chaotic storms of European expansion and responded in ways that refashioned themselves and those around them. Focusing on Ute, Paiute, and Shoshone Indians, Blackhawk illuminates this history through a lens of violence, excavating the myriad impacts of colonial expansion. Brutal networks of trade and slavery forged the Spanish borderlands, and the use of violence became for many Indians a necessary survival strategy, particularly after Mexican Independence when many became raiders and slave traffickers. Throughout such violent processes, these Native communities struggled to adapt to their changing environments, sometimes scoring remarkable political ends while suffering immense reprisals. Violence over the Land is a passionate reminder of the high costs that the making of American history occasioned for many indigenous peoples.

About Ned Blackhawk

Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone) is the Howard R. Lamar Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University, where he is the faculty coordinator for the Yale Group for the Study of Native America. He is the author of Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Joseph on October 16, 2014

Ned Blackhawk’s Violence over the Land presents the history of the Great Basin Indians and their interactions with the Spanish, British, and American empires. Blackhawk responds in this book to many harmful myths about the conquest of the American West. Most importantly, he undermines the idea of pr......more

Goodreads review by Andrew on November 29, 2009

There's a lot to say about this book, not least of which is that it's a great survey of American Indians in the Great Basin at the time of colonization. Blackhawk does a solid job of detailing the complex interactions between Indian tribes and colonizers, whether Spanish, Mexican, American, or Mormo......more

Goodreads review by Dave on December 06, 2016

Here is a story from Native American history that you probably aren't familiar with. Historian Ned Blackhawk studies the American Indians who lived in the Great Basin, from New Mexico to Montana, in the period from the Spanish conquest to the early 20th century. He especially focuses on the Utes and......more

Goodreads review by Colleen on November 18, 2020

This is an excellent book. Professor Blackhawk presents a clear, no holds barred, picture of Native Americans in the Great Basin with emphasis on the Utes. The book tells the real story of the violence and tumult throughout the 19th Century.......more

Goodreads review by Neil on September 21, 2020

I read this book for an online history course I am currently taking; otherwise, I would not have known of its existence. I greatly enjoyed reading it; it brought to light various aspects of North American history about which I was extremely ignorant. It focuses on the Great Basin region of the North......more