History's Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century

Conn, Steven

ISBN 10: 0226114945 / ISBN 13: 9780226114941

Published by University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2004

About this Item

Chicago: University Press, 2004. 1st edition, F/F. Book and dust jacket have very little wear. Many b & w illustrations. How the field and study of history and historical consciousness developed in the United States with the constant conflicts and contacts with the indigenous peoples that occurred throughout the land during the course of the 19th century. And has influenced us ever since. Nice copy.

Seller Inventory # 002319

Bibliographic Details

• Title: History's Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press, Chicago
• Publication Date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226114945
• ISBN 13: 9780226114941
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine

About this title

Synopsis

Who were the Native Americans? Where did they come from and how long ago? Did they have a history, and would they have a future? Questions such as these dominated intellectual life in the United States during the nineteenth century. And for many Americans, such questions about the original inhabitants of their homeland inspired a flurry of historical investigation, scientific inquiry, and heated political debate.

History's Shadow traces the struggle of Americans trying to understand the people who originally occupied the continent claimed as their own. Steven Conn considers how the question of the Indian compelled Americans to abandon older explanatory frameworks for sovereignty like the Bible and classical literature and instead develop new ones. Through their engagement with Native American language and culture, American intellectuals helped shape and define the emerging fields of archaeology, ethnology, linguistics, and art. But more important, the questions posed by the presence of the Indian in the United States forced Americans to confront the meaning of history itself, both that of Native Americans and their own: how it should be studied, what drove its processes, and where it might ultimately lead. The encounter with Native Americans, Conn argues, helped give rise to a distinctly American historical consciousness.

A work of enormous scope and intellect, History's Shadow will speak to anyone interested in Native Americans and their profound influence on our cultural imagination.


“History’s Shadow is an intelligent and comprehensive look at the place of Native Americans in Euro-American’s intellectual history. . . . Examining literature, painting, photography, ethnology, and anthropology, Conn mines the written record to discover how non-Native Americans thought about Indians.” —Joy S. Kasson, Los Angeles Times

About the Author

Steven Conn is the W. E. Smith Professor of History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is the author of many books, most recently Nothing Succeeds Like Failure: The Sad History of American Business Schools.