Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Native Americans
In 1693 the people of New York had more to worry about than a fiscal crisis, as the newly revealed documents on these pages attest.
The granite was tough—but so was Gutzon Borglum
In late August, 1970, a band of Sioux Indians entered the sacred precincts of a National Memorial in South Dakota and bivouacked on a mountaintop there for several weeks.
In recent years many voices—both Native-American and white—have questioned whether Indians did in fact invent scalping. What is the evidence?
Why have Americans perceived nature as something to be conquered?
Most people who have reflected at all upon the known history of the Americas, particularly North America, have been impressed one way or another with its dominant quality of fierceness.
A decade ago a serious recognition of American Indian painters was rare indeed, for the simple reason that few art critics considered that there was anything about Indian painting worth knowing.
How the Generals Viewed the Indians
The white man’s peace at Appomattox in 1865 meant war for the Plains Indians.
No event in the history of Western man provided so profound a shock as the discovery of America
Chr
The discoverer of the New World was responsible for the annihilation of the peaceful Arawak Indians
Paul Kane'
In the snarled disputes in 1790 over the Yazoo land claims (now large parts of Alabama and Mississippi), George Washington and an educated Creek chieftain turned out to be the diplomatic kingpins
Shortly past noon on April 30, 1789, a tall, somber man, dressed in a simple brown suit, was inaugurated as the first President of the United States at Federal Hall in New York City.
One of the most exciting stories in American history is that of how the Indian got the horse and what this astonishing innovation did to change the culture of the red men of the Plains [see “How the Indian Got the Horse,” AMERICAN HER
THUS SPAKE THE GREAT INDIAN CHIEF TECUMSEH, PREDICTING— SOME BELIEVED—THE SERIES OF VIOLENT EARTHQUAKES THAT STRUCK THE MIDWEST IN THE WINTER OF 1811–12
The town of New Madrid in southeastern Missouri looks out over a treacherous stretch of the Mississippi River, studded with bars and laced with stumpy shores—a graveyard of rivercraft, and haunted. Some of the ghosts are dead dreams.
The dignified portrait, opposite, of Bear’s Belly, an Arikara Indian warrior of the eastern plains, wrapped in a bearskin, the symbol of his personal medicine—and the photographs of the other native Americans on the following pages—are a sampling of a wondrou
Caught between two cultures, a young Sioux sought to make himself a hero—by killing an army officer
On January 8, 1891, newspapers throughout the United States headlined a tragic event in the Indian troubles rocking the Sioux reservations of South Dakota.
At the time World War I was nearing its end, I was stationed at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, as an officer-instructor in light field artillery (horse-drawn three-inch cannon known as French 75’s).
Isolation ends for “the People of Peace”
Perched on the edge of a rocky mesa six hundred feet above the desert of northeastern Arizona is the Hopi Indian village of Hotevilla.
A FAMOUS HISTORIAN RECALLS THE COUNTRY WHERE HE GREW UP
First there was the ice; two miles high, hundreds of miles wide, and many centuries deep. It came down from the darkness at the top of the world, and it hung down over the eaves, and our Michigan country lay along the line of the overhang.
The tragedy of Black Hawk, who became the eponym of a war he tried to avoid
On July 4, 1838, the people of Fort Madison, in the Iowa Territory, invited an old Sauk war chief named Black Hawk to be guest of honor at their Independence Day celebration.
No battle in American history has won more attention than the relatively insignificant defeat at the Little Bighorn River in 1876.
With the current wave of interest in black history, authentic Negro heroes have been eagerly sought in the American past.
In the first years of the eighteenth century Peter Schuyler, mayor of Albany, was friend and protector of the Mohawk Indians. They camped familiarly in his parlor, dined at his table, and called him “Quider,” the Mohawk pronunciation of Peter.
THE EARNEST QUAKER JOHN WOOLMAN PREACHED AND ACTUALLY PRACTICED THE BROTHERHOOD OF MAN
On October 19, 1720, was born one of the few saints and prophets this country has produced.
Between the ages of fifteen and twenty, young Peter Rindisbacher captured on canvas the lives of Indians and white pioneers on the Manitoba—Minnesota frontier
On August 12, 1834, a twenty-eight-year-old Swiss-born youth named Peter Rindisbacher, who was just beginning to attract international attention with his colorful and realistic drawings of Indian life along the mid-western United States and central Canadian frontiers, died in S
Supporters of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School believed that complete absorption of the Indian into American society was best for everyone
Brevet Major General G. A. Custer and about 215 soldiers of the 7th Cavalry had been massacred at the Little Big Horn only a little more than three years before. Geronimo and his Apaches would not surrender for another seven years.
In words and pictures, George Catlin recorded the secret ceremony, a blend of mysticism and horrific cruelty, by which the Mandans initiated their braves and conjured the life-sustaining buffalo.
One innovation profoundly changed—and prolonged—the culture of the Plains Indians
Minnesota’s Sioux uprising began with senseless murder on a peaceful Sunday afternoon. Before it ended, the smell of death was everywhere
The Middle West has put its stamp on many artists’ work
It is a big country, sprawling all the way from the Alleghenies to the Rockies, and it puts its mark on the people who live in it. Its climate tends to be uncompromising— baking heat in the summer, hostile cold in the winter—and it has never done anything by halves. Where it had forests, they rolled for hundreds of miles, great stands of hardwood, green twilight under their branches; its open prairies were like the sea itself, rolling west in an unbroken treeless groundswell.
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