The most enduring feature of U.S. history is the presence of Native Americans, yet most histories focus on Europeans and their descendants. A 2018 study by Reclaiming Native Truth found that nearly half of Americans believed what they were taught in schools about Native Americans was inaccurate; and 72 percent thought it was necessary to make significant changes to curriculum on Native American history.
Now, this long practice of ignoring Indigenous history is changing. Awarded the 2023 National Book Award in Nonfiction, Blackhawk’s The Rediscovery of America expertly interweaves five centuries of Native and non-Native histories, and is part of the next generation of scholarship that we have all been waiting for.
Blackhawk is an enrolled member of the Te-Moak tribe of the Western Shoshone and the Howard R. Lamar Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Prior to this, he spent 10 years at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. A graduate of McGill University, he holds graduate degrees in History from UCLA and the University of Washington and is the author of Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Harvard, 2006).
Join the City Club as we hear from Ned Blackhawk, the 2024 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Winner in Nonfiction, on the critical importance of Native history not only to U.S. history, but also, and urgently, to Native Americans themselves.