US Imperialism Is an Indian War

This collection of essays examines the centrality of racial violence in US domestic and foreign policy. With impressive historical breadth, Singh shows that the United States’ political identity relies on declaring war against an imagined racial other. Ample evidence, starting with the Indian wars and enslavement of Africans and continuing into the global war on terror, shatters all images of the United States as a post-racial, international peacekeeper.US politicians have consciously generated such images since World War II, argues Singh in the book's substantial introduction. Laying the groundwork for the five essays that follow, “The Long War” provides numerous examples of US domestic politics informing its foreign wars and vice versa, continually invoking the language of racial inferiority used during the violent subjugation of Native Americans and enslaved Africans. Emphasizing race as the powerful, ideological link between the United States’ national and global exploits—even as its leaders eschew racist terminology and deny the existence of a US empire—is this book's greatest contribution to scholarship on race, ethnicity, and US political history.The five subsequent essays elaborate the ways US politicians have used racial language and ideology to perpetuate their belief in the country's manifest destiny. In “Race, War, Police,” Singh deftly explains that the war at home takes the form of policing black and brown bodies with the paternalistic rationalization that people of color are incapable of governing themselves and warrant protection from one another. This rationalization then extends to foreign others, leading to long wars ostensibly necessary to save less developed nations from themselves. One war reinforces another, while shoring up white American privilege without explicitly naming race.Capitalism depends on these wars, Singh argues in “From War Capitalism to Race War,” where he critiques Marxist thought for ignoring racialized slave labor as essential to the rise of global capitalism while enslaved Black people were still, as Marx was writing, violently forced to toil for US prosperity. Singh calls for expanding Marxist analysis to recognize those excluded, often racially, from traditional wage labor—“the slave, the migrant worker, the household worker, and the unemployed” (p. 92)—as they are the very reason wage labor can exist for those deemed employable by white American capitalism.Singh continues analyzing the ironies of US empire in “The Afterlife of Fascism,” explaining that through emphasizing American democratic liberalism as the opposite of Nazi fascism, the post–World War II United States actually advances its own fascism in the name of democratization. Such is the twisted logic of the global war on terror, which draws on the Orientalist language used to justify previous US wars in Asia, both to legitimate the war and to defend the torture of those imprisoned from Arab-Muslim countries. Singh is clear: imperial expansionism, not neoliberal exceptionalism, defines the United StatesSingh illuminates still another paradox of the neoliberal United States in “Racial Formation and Permanent War”—that is, the more it preaches racial inclusion, the more it practices racial exclusion through its ostensibly color-blind economic and criminal justice policies. Social analysis has not kept pace with this political manipulation of race, Singh maintains, while presenting Michael Omi and Howard Winant's Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1980s (Routledge, 1986) as the last definitive theoretical work on race. Extrapolating this work to the twenty-first century, Singh posits that race never exists before the political impetus to create socio-economic hierarchies, but, rather, race results from these hierarchies, changing its meaning and membership to accommodate new groups’ violent assertions of power.By the time Singh turns to the question of how President Trump rose to power, in “The Present Crisis,” readers already have the answer: Trump's victory was the culmination of centuries of racial violence made blatant. Singh is as concerned with how President Obama paved the way for Trump as he is with the political machinations of Trump's administration. For Singh, Obama proves that racial violence is so embedded in US neoliberalism that it can be operationalized regardless of the race of those in power. Rather than wondering at Trump's ascent, Singh advises, the Left should dismantle Trump's appeals to a “white working class” (p. 176) as today's working class are, in truth, multi-racial victims of US neoliberalism.Singh's brief epilogue ends with an appeal to terminate US race wars at home and abroad. Unfortunately, this appeal is unlikely to reach those politicians, activists, and policymakers most equipped to comply. Singh's dense, academic prose, coupled with his abstract analysis, renders this book inaccessible to many, including those new to the study of race, ethnicity, and US political history. Nevertheless, both the book's format and Singh's compelling rhetoric allow readers to limit themselves to any one essay and still walk away with a deep and lasting understanding of racial violence as the bedrock of US empire.

Presidential address: “These united colonies are …”

Reviewed by: Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire Elizabeth M. Covart (bio) Keywords American Revolution, Treaties, Diplomacy, Jay Treaty, Law of nations, Political history Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire. By Eliga H. Gould. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. Pp. 301. Cloth, $45.00.) In the Declaration of Independence, Americans articulated their desire to make the United States a sovereign nation “to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Law of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.” Borrowing the title for his latest work from this preamble, Eliga H. Gould argues that the United States’ drive for European acceptance as an equal nation “played a role in making the American republic at least as important as the liberal and republican ideologies that have framed scholarship on the American Revolution since the Second World War.” Gould asserts that “the revolutionaries’ emphasis on peace through treaty-worthiness explains why Americans ultimately opted for a national union that could represent the ‘one people’ in the Declaration of Independence over a looser association” (11) under the Articles of Confederation. [End Page 721] Gould defines the characteristics of a “treaty-worthy” nation and chronicles the long journey of the United States to achieve that status throughout his six chapters. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the law of nations represented a system of treaties whereby the secular leaders of Europe and the Roman Catholic Church agreed that the governments under their authority would recognize the rights and liberties of other European nations. To be “treaty-worthy,” a sovereign had to participate in treaties and be able to enforce the provisions of those it signed. Treaty-worthy nations had the right to expect that other nations would respect their borders and trade rights in times of peace and would treat their citizens humanely in times of war. In theory, the law of nations applied to the overseas possessions and citizens of treaty-worthy nations. In actuality, all of the American colonies stood barely within the reach of the law of nations. According to Gould, the American Revolution occurred in part because Great Britain tried to place its North American colonies firmly within the jurisdiction of the law of nations. London officials saw America as a lawless land, a place where smugglers and pirates ruled the Atlantic waves and where backcountry Indian traders incited rebellion. Britain sought to stabilize governance in North America by imposing “a series of sweeping reforms” (91) to rid the continent of its multiple legalities. Great Britain strengthened its naval forces, admiralty courts, and customs collectors to rid American waters of lawless sailors. Additionally, the empire stationed ten thousand regulars in the trans-Appalachian west to check the power of seditious Indian traders. Gould contends that while Americans “accepted the ends that Britain’s reforms were meant to serve” (6, 107), they rejected the imposition of Parliamentary taxes to pay for them. Rather than submit to taxation without direct Parliamentary representation, many American colonists opted to declare independence and try to “replicate the order that Britain was attempting to produce” (6–7) on their own terms. Gould takes a long view of the American Revolution. He begins his narrative near the onset of the French and Indian War (1755) and concludes it with the Monroe Doctrine (1823). Gould sees the Revolution as an intellectual movement and expands the interpretation by asserting that “the American Revolution was never just a struggle for the right of Americans to govern themselves . . . it was also a struggle for dominion over others” (4). He insists that the Americans’ right to self-government and their prerogative to assert dominion over others came from entanglement [End Page 722] with Europe, not independence. Only when European sovereigns saw the United States as an equal did the law of nations protect American affairs from European interference. Obtaining equality with Europe did not prove easy. European countries gave little consideration to forging long-term peace and trade alliances with the Americans until after 1793. Before 1793, Europeans believed as Lord...

This short paper analyzes American history from the modern “wars” on poverty, drugs, and terror from the perspective of American Indians and Indian tribes. These domestic “wars” are aptly named (it turns out), as the United States often blindly pursues broad policy goals without input from tribal interests, and without consideration to the impacts on Indians and tribes. With the possible exception of the “war on poverty,” these domestic wars sweep aside tribal rights, rights that are frequently in conflict with the overarching federal policy goals.This essay explores three declared domestic wars, and their impacts on American Indian tribes and individual Indians, in loose chronological order, starting with the war on poverty. As Part 1 demonstrates, the Johnson Administration’s Great Society programs helped to bring American Indian policy out of the dark ages of the era of termination, in which Congress had declared that national policy would be to terminate the trust relationship. Part 2 describes the war on drugs, declared by the Reagan Administration, which had unusually stark impacts on reservation communities both in terms of law enforcement, but also on American Indian religious freedom. Part 3 examines the ongoing war on terror, which Bush Administration officials opined has its legal justification grounded in part on the Indian wars of the 19th century. The war on terror marks America’s return to fighting a new Indian war, where the adversary is illusive and motivated, and where the rule of law is literally obliterated.

Book Reviews 131 Alexian Brothers' Novitiate in Gresham, just outside the boundaries of the Menominee reservation. Although they were independent of the tribal government, theWarriors were acting inwhat they believed were the best interests of theMenominee people, and for more than amonth they engaged in an armed standoff with local residents, local law enforcement, and the National Guard. Although Beck does include a brief narrative of the Gresham takeover in early 1975, the extent to which the self-invented "Menominee Warrior Society" action divided the tribe is an important piece of the post-termination story. And he should have more fully described how the 1975 takeover and its aftermath continue to define an adversarial relationship between the Menominee and whites in and around Shawano County today. The takeover should be more closely linked to the historic issue of defining an Indian place rather than to matters such as termination and restoration or tribal or federal politics. But this criticism isminor and more than anything reflects the dearth of scholarship on the 1975 takeover. On the whole, this is a well-researched, clearly documented, and expertly written piece of scholarship on an underappreciated and litde-known case study in the history of Indian activism in the United States. The maps and illustrations serve to round out this exemplary study ofWisconsin's Menonimees. If anything, Beck's tide, The Struggle for Self Determination, is something of an understatement. The Menominees survived the treaty period, protected the best resources for themselves, avoided allotment, reorganized in the 1930s, endured termination, successfully petitioned for restoration, and restructured their tribal government in the 1970s and 1980s. The tribe remains an economic and political force in Wisconsin and the United States. Here is a case study in active agency? a work that successfully moves beyond the study of Indian history as one of victimization and violence. Anthony G. Gulig University ofWisconsin-Whitewater Walter R. Borneman. The French <&Indian War: Dedding theFate of North America. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. Pp. 384. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Maps. Notes. Cloth, $27.95. The Seven Years' War, the pivotal eighteenth-century imperial conflict for North America, has been the subject of a flurry of scholarship in recent decades. Walter Borneman has added to this body 132 Michigan Historical Review of work with an artfully written volume that will appeal to general readers, students, and scholars alike. Though the Seven Years' War was a global conflict, Borneman chooses to focus on its North American component?the same focus, he argues, that British Prime Minister William Pitt had in conducting the war. Thus, he traces the familiar blunders and missed opportunities of British military leaders in early encounters, such as Edward Braddock's rout at the Monongahela, the "massacre" at Fort William Henry, and James Abercromby's unwise frontal assault on Fort Carillon (Ticonderoga). With the eventual selection of more capable leaders, such as James Wolfe and Jeffery Amherst, Pitt's desire to drive the French from North America became a reality with the capture of Louisburg in 1758 and Quebec in 1759 and then the capitulation of Montreal in 1760. Intercolonial squabbles and competition, as well as incipient colonial cooperation, are mentioned here as well. Borneman rightfully includes the erroneously named Pontiac's Rebellion as a continuance of the war, and concludes with an all-too-brief summary of the war's consequences. Borneman's narrative is a fine read, but it is a bit parochial in focus, thus reinforcing the American tendency to view colonial history from a North American viewpoint rather than as part of a larger global process. He attempts to rectify this with brief forays into military actions in the Caribbean and European politics as well as what amounts to an honorable mention of the Indian theater of war. However, The French <& Indian War, as indicated by its tide, dwells on the struggle for North America, as opposed to the more global Seven Years' War. For the broader context, readers should turn to Fred Anderson's The Crudhle of War or Lawrence Gipson's multivolume The British Empire before the American Revolution. Of course, it is easy to criticize a book for what it does not do. What Borneman does accomplish, and very successfully, is to mold the complex scholarship and history of this great conflict into a colorful narrative, flush with biographies and graphic batde accounts, that brings the subject matter alive and thus will appeal to a wide audience. Those left wanting more can peruse Borneman's bibliography, which lists the best scholarship on the subject, and browse to their hearts' content. David M. Corlett The College ofWilliam and Mary ...

For the political historian the period in North American history between the end of the Seven Years War, or ‘French and Indian War’, and the outbreak of the wars of the French Revolution is divided into two parts by the successful establishment of a new nation—the United States of America. The constitutional historian may concern himself rather less with this break in continuity. The constitutional problem before the American Revolution was that of providing an acceptable framework of common institutions within which the individual colonies could continue to exercise their characteristic inheritance of internal self-government; after it, it became a question of whether the several states into which the colonies had been transmuted could supply themselves with such organs for common action as their new situation in the world seemed to require. The new national government had to find solutions that had eluded the advisers of George III. From this admittedly limited point of view, the story has an underlying unity which it is the object of this chapter to present. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the thirteen British colonies that were to form the nucleus of the new United States all enjoyed some form of representative institutions, as did indeed eight other island colonies in the western Atlantic and Caribbean sea. Despite the important differences in situation and in the economic and social make-up of the colonies, their institutions had a family likeness. They were indeed the product of two features that distinguished British colonisation in North America from the comparable activity of rival European powers.

Border History is Indigenous History Ryan Hall (bio) Benjamin Hoy, A Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada-United States Border across Indigenous Lands. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Notes and index. xv + 322pp. $35.00. In the desperate final months of 1862, some two thousand Dakota Sioux people trekked north through the cold Minnesota winter in search of safety. To these survivors, British lands north of the 49th parallel represented their last possible refuge, their last hope. Over the previous summer, the Dakota had launched a doomed resistance campaign against American settlers and government authorities, citing broken treaty promises that had left them on the brink of starvation. In the war's aftermath, soldiers quickly rounded up and arrested Dakota survivors. Those who remained unfettered were forced to flee, and danger stalked their every step. Some went west to the lands of their Lakota kin, but punitive U.S. Army expeditions followed them to the plains to hunt them down. Those who instead went north had to avoid packs of vigilantes who roamed the border hoping to capture stragglers for rewards. Even after they crossed, the Dakota refugees still had to evade illegal kidnapping parties; keep peace with Indigenous nations like the Crees and Métis, who resented their presence on fast-shrinking hunting grounds; mollify British officials who saw them as dangerous nuisances; and find ways to subsist and survive in the harsh northern prairies. Despite all this, they persevered. By the 1870s, the Dakota refugees secured a handful of small reserves in what is now central Manitoba and Saskatchewan, where descendants remain today. The border saved them. The Dakota were the first of many Indigenous peoples to cross the U.S.-Canadian border to escape violent death during the era of continental expansion. In January 1870, many Blackfoot people in Montana fled north after escalating violence with settlers culminated in the U.S. Army massacring nearly two hundred peaceful Blackfoot people encamped along the Marias River. Many of the Blackfoot survivors never returned to the southern portions of their homelands that lay in the United States. In 1877, the renowned Lakota chief Sitting Bull led three thousand of his people north into Saskatchewan to avoid certain retribution following victory over U.S. troops in the Battle of Little Big [End Page 160] Horn. Later that year, Nez Percé people in Idaho lashed out against an invasion of their homelands, then led the U.S. Cavalry on an epic, thousand-mile chase that ended with a frantic final dash towards the Canadian border. The Nez Percé leader Chief Joseph and most of his followers were ambushed and forced to surrender within sight of their destination, but several hundred still managed to slip away and join Lakota refugees in Canada. The border worked in both directions, and Indigenous people in Canada sometimes fled to the United States for the same reasons as their American counterparts. Following an 1870 resistance campaign against the Canadian government in Manitoba, the spiritual and political leader of the Métis people, Louis Riel, absconded to Montana to avoid prosecution. After he returned to Canada to wage another failed campaign in 1885, Riel was executed, but many of his fellow Métis resistors fled across the American border, as did several bands of Cree allies who had risen up alongside them. To Indigenous people in the North American West, the international border in the late nineteenth century meant something very different than it means today. To them, the border meant safety; it meant refuge; for many, it represented the only possible option for avoiding the marauding violence of what Americans called the "Indian wars" era. The experience of Indigenous people during the bloody decades of the late nineteenth century has inspired generations of public interest and often predictable strains of historical writing. Writers have used the Indian wars to tell moralistic stories of American avarice and doomed Indian heroism, the perils of industrialization, and the clash of irreconcilable worldviews. In Canada, a parallel tradition has belatedly unfolded around their (more limited) conflicts with Métis and Cree people. Like America's Indian wars, Canada's prairie conflicts have turned an uncomfortable mirror onto...

I can speak five tongues--three Indian tongues, English and Spanish. I can read and write, and am a school teacher. Now I do not say this to boast, but simply to show you what can be done. --Sarah Winnemucca (qtd. in We have referred) Sarah Winnemucca, the nineteenth-century Northern Paiute translator, educator, author, and activist, lived within five languages. (1) To her, multilingualism was a source of power. (2) Nonetheless, throughout her life, the English language was brandished as a weapon by the US government and some reformers against American Indians. In response, she wielded English education and translation as twin tools of resistance, though her role as translator was perilous at times. Her Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883) contains some of the most detailed representations of translation by an American Indian in the nineteenth century. Yet the book is only part of her legacy. Hundreds of newspaper articles by or about Winnemucca from her first public appearance in 1864 to her death in 1891 provide evidence regarding her use of the English language and representations of translation. They indicate how some non-Native members of the media responded to Winnemucca's English-language skills and represented her role as a translator, thereby allowing us to better assess Winnemucca's interaction with her audiences. This essay furthers critical appreciation of the complexity of Winnemucca's representational strategies in the context of those audiences, allowing us to identify her as participating in what Lawrence Venuti refers to as an alternative genealogy of resistant translators (Translator's 40). (3) Drawing on Venuti's terminology, Winnemucca's representations of translation can be understood as foreignizing and subversive, though her representations of subversive translation differ substantially from those described by Venuti, particularly regarding assertions of untranslatability. To resist colonialism, Winnemucca created foreignizing representations of translation while also insisting on communicability across languages. Analyzing Winnemucca's representational strategies regarding translation is important in its own right; (4) however, it also prompts a reconsideration of recent literary critical interest in globalization and transnationalism, because to understand better the complexity of Winnemucca's resistance and her unsettling effect on audiences, one needs to consider her representations within the late-nineteenth-century contexts of nationalisms, US colonialism, and US imperialism. Doing so partially redresses the lack of attention given to Native American literature by many scholars of transnationalism and US imperialism. Shari M. Huhndorf notes that even major innovators in the field focus on either transnationalism and imperialism outside of North America or US-Chicano frontier relations (Mapping 17). Similarly, Philip J. Deloria argues that critical attention to globalization often focuses on a particular version of 'the transnational' that overlooks US-Indian relations. He challenges us to consider the implications of dependent nations--literally internal trans-nations--within the boundaries of (and willing to transcend the boundaries of) the United States (From Nation 371). Considering representations of Winnemucca and translation within an imperial as well as colonial context is more than a corrective gesture; it allows us to better understand the connections among nationalisms (US and American Indian), colonialism (often understood as domestic or continental), and US imperialism (typically conceptualized as outside of North America). At first glance, there appears to be little relationship between Winnemucca and US imperial efforts beyond what would become the contiguous forty-eight United States. A Northern Paiute woman born circa 1844, Winnemucca experienced one of the fastest contact histories in North America (Knack and Stewart 45). …

When the British lost their American colonial territories in 1781 at the end of the American Revolutionary War, it was the culmination of events that began during the conclusion of the American Theater of the Seven Years' War (the French and Indian War, 1763). Examples include changing dynamics in British Parliamentary charters, the involvement of American international allies (primarily France, Spain, and the Dutch Republic) seeking retribution for the French and Indian War, shortages of supplies and munitions, misjudgments regarding Loyalist support, and independent British generals failing to coordinate their military offensives. However, one less-discussed example is the disconnection in leadership styles among the three British Commanders-in-Chief of the American Colonies from 1775 to 1783: Thomas Gage, William Howe, and Henry Clinton. This paper assesses their leadership failures as they navigated their varying styles during the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783).

This essay charts the emergence of a biopolitical militarism during the "Indian Wars," demonstrating the centrality of colonialism to the forms of conflict we now label "counterinsurgency." Most critical work on counterinsurgency and the biopolitics of warfare focuses on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. However, if we turn our attention to the violence that accompanied US continental expansion, colonialism emerges as a key site for the development of biopower, which manifested in what I call "euthanasia politics." Euthanasia politics names a specific moment in the history of US colonialism when a growing imperative to manage Native life was combined with an increasingly indiscriminate approach to military violence. To these overlapping forms of state power was added the colonial nostalgia of the "vanishing Indian," the presumption that Native people's extinction was inevitable. The US Army during the nineteenth century was preoccupied with Native people as populations to be manipulated, confined, governed, and in many cases, destroyed. In this essay I chart the emergence of this euthanasia politics through the public debate over what was known as the "Indian Question," and I demonstrate how it manifested in the policies and strategies of the US Army.

Provides a critical re-evaluation of US territorial expansionism and imperialism from 1783 to the present The United States has been described by many of its foreign and domestic critics as an “empire”. Providing a wide-ranging analysis of the United States as a territorial, imperial power from its foundation to the present day, this book explores the United States’ acquisition or long-term occupation of territories through a chronological perspective. It begins by exploring early continental expansion, such as the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon Bonaparte in 1803, and traces US imperialism through to the controversial ongoing presence of US forces at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The book provides fresh insights into the history of US territorial expansion and imperialism, bringing together more well-known instances (such as the purchase of Alaska) with those less-frequently discussed (such as the acquisition of the Guano Islands after 1856). The volume considers key historical debates, controversies and turning points, providing a historiographically-grounded re-evaluation of US expansion from 1783 to the present day. Key Features Provides case studies of different examples of US territorial expansion/imperialism, and adds much-needed context to ongoing debates over US imperialism for students of both History and Politics Analyses many of the better known instances of US imperialism (for example, Cuba and the Philippines), while also considering often-overlooked examples such as the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa and Guam Explores American imperialism from a “territorial acquisition/long-term occupation” viewpoint which differentiates it from many other books that instead focus on informal and economic imperialism Discusses the presence of the US in key places such as Guantanamo Bay, the Panama Canal Zone and the Arctic

Reviewed by: Coast-to-Coast Empire: Manifest Destiny and the New Mexico Borderlands by William S. Kiser Ariel Kelley Coast-to-Coast Empire: Manifest Destiny and the New Mexico Borderlands. By William S. Kiser. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018. Pp. 228. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) During the nineteenth century, exasperated soldiers and statesmen contended that the cost and effort required to garrison the New Mexico territory was more trouble than it was worth, so they suggested that the United States return it to Mexico. The region’s arid climate, isolated settlements, hostile indigenous tribes, and mixed-race inhabitants who resisted Americanization contrasted sharply with what was regarded as the obvious potential of California and the cotton fields of Texas. Why then did the federal government spend millions of dollars to acquire and develop it? In Coast-to-Coast Empire, William S. Kiser argues that New Mexico was a vital part of American expansionism, Manifest Destiny, and the sectionalism of the 1850s. As a conduit between Texas and California, New Mexico’s location was strategic and key to accessing the boon of Pacific trade and asserting dominance over the Southwest. Northerners and southerners alike, therefore, set their sights on controlling the territory and impressing their political and ideological views on the region’s inhabitants in a contest that eventually devolved into bloody warfare during the Civil War. Kiser opens by documenting how the Santa Fe Trail reoriented New Mexico’s economy toward the United States and paved the way for the territory’s conquest during the U.S. war with Mexico. In a series of thematic chapters, he delves into the military takeover of New Mexico and its later Indian Wars. Consistent with arguments made by Robert Wooster and other scholars who identify the U.S. Army as the most visible agent of empire, Kiser stresses that the federal government used substantial numbers of regulars to secure the territory, despite astronomical costs, because Americans believed that New Mexico was the most accessible path to the Pacific and achieving continental supremacy. In the 1840s, the military occupied Santa Fe and crushed the Taos Rebellion to establish a foothold. The territory’s military leadership then initiated various measures designed to ensure the area’s success as a migration route to California, including surveying potential railroad routes and pursuing hostile Navajos, Apaches, and Utes. Thus, the bluecoats stood as a testament to United States commitment to Manifest Destiny and New Mexico’s part in it. Symbolism was also important as North and South battled to impose hegemony over New Mexico. In a refreshing take on the well-trod topic of sectionalism, Kiser analyzes how New Mexico presented a thorny paradox for popular sovereignty because it nominally disavowed the peculiar institution, elsewhere even as it clung to coerced labor in the forms of debt peonage and Indian slavery. Free-soilers found little joy in New Mexico’s “anti-slavery” stance when it relied on unfree labor. On the other hand, southerners argued that laws sustaining the region’s traditional labor system [End Page 122] implicitly protected black chattel slavery. After disunion, the Confederacy attempted to replicate Major General Stephen W. Kearny’s success during the war with Mexico by promising freedom and protection, but alienated New Mexicans resisted and dashed Confederate dreams of taking California. People resistant to joining the Union just fifteen years earlier had become citizens vested in the United States. Coast-to-Coast Empire is an excellent example of how combining multiple historical approaches and reexamining well-known events reshapes our understanding. What emerges from Kiser’s exhaustive research and skillful intertwining of the U.S. war with Mexico, the Indian Wars, popular sovereignty, and other topics is a nuanced argument that concretely establishes the significance of New Mexico within the discourse on Manifest Destiny, expansion, and sectional loyalty. This well-written and thought-provoking volume is sure to appeal to specialists interested in military, borderlands, western, and Civil War studies. Ariel Kelley University of North Texas Copyright © 2019 The Texas State Historical Association

 Reviews Significantly, few studies exist of camp life during the Civilian Public Service period. Kovac’s work helps fill this gap by documenting the leisure,work,and community-oriented activities of the conscientious objectors assigned to this remote corner of the World War II home front as well as the deeply held moral and religious convictions that put them on the margins of American society.(A regrettable editing error in the book’s documentation , however, is the omission of all endnote citations for chapter 5.) The Cascade Locks setting, though mostly out of the public eye, drew unusual press attention for several reasons, and Kovac tells these stories well. In 1942, for example, the Hollywood film star Lew Ayres (well-known for his roles in All Quiet on the Western Front and other movies) came to Cascade Locks as a conscientious objector before transferring and becoming an army medic. Also early in the camp’s history, George Yamada, a young Japanese-American conscientious objector, arrived at Cascade Locks prior to receiving an order for transfer to an internment camp under the War Relocation Authority. The Cascade Locks men’s protestations about the pending forced removal of Yamada from their midst demonstrated their concern for justice and willingnesstoconfrontgovernmentalauthority in extraordinary times. The author, Jeffrey Kovac — who himself took a conscientious objector position during the Vietnam War — writes from a strongly sympathetic perspective. His purpose is to “tell the story of those who chose peace, to honor their memory and to inspire future generations to make that same choice” (p. 22). This highly readable book will appeal to an audience of scholars and students interested in peace and religious history, in World War II home front history, in the history of Oregon and the Northwest,and inAmerican social and political thought. Rachel Waltner Goossen Washburn University, Topeka, Kansas The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story by Elliott West Oxford University Press, New York, 2009. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. 432 pages. $27.95 cloth. College students occasionally ask why the second half of the introductory U.S. history course generally starts in 1877. What is so magical about that date that it dictates how historians structure their textbooks and classes? The conventional answer highlights the end of Reconstruction in the South — certainly a major watershed — but 1877 was significant in other ways as well, including the dramatic events Elliott West recounts in The Last Indian War. Many readers will already know the basic outlines of the story, for the Nez Perce War is perhaps the most thoroughly chronicled subject in Native American history after the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Some scholars may even wonder (as I did initially) why we need another book on the non-treaty Nez Perces and their heroic running battle against the U.S. Army. West has an answer for them, too. Placing the war in the context of broader changes sweeping the nation, he presents it as “a chance to rethink how America was remade in the middle of the nineteenth century” (p. xviii). Between 1845 and 1877, West argues, the United States underwent a “Greater Reconstruction ”during whichAmericans confronted fundamental questions about the nature of the union, the extent of federal power, and the boundaries of national citizenship (p.xx).The Trans-Mississippi West and its Native peoples, as much as the South and its slave society,were drawn into these debates and transformed by their violent resolution. If the Nez Perce conflict was not technically the “Last Indian War,” it nevertheless heralded a new national order and thus “has much to say about its time and about how that time helped make the America we know” (p. xxiii). West divides his narrative into three parts. The first sketches the aboriginal homeland  OHQ vol. 111, no. 2 and culture of the Nimiipuu (‘Real People’); their early encounters with Euro-American explorers, fur traders, and missionaries; and the treaties of 1855 and 1863 that left the nontreaty bands outside reservation boundaries . Despite many provocations during this period, even those groups remained peaceful until Euro-American settlers and the government demanded their removal in 1877. Part 2 describes the outbreak of the war and the Nez Perces...

SUSAN KALTER "Chickamauga" as an Indian-Wars Narrative: The Relevance of Ambrose Bierce for a First-Nations-Centered Study of the Nineteenth Century The child moved his little hands, making wild, uncettain gestures. He uttered a series of inarticulate and indesctibable cries—something between the chatteting of an ape and the gobbling of a turkey—a startling, soulless, unholy sound, the language of a devil. The child was a deaf mute. Then he stood motionless, with quivering lips, looking down upon the wteck. For over one hundred years, these last lines of Ambrose Bierce's stunning short story "Chickamauga" have been taken as an ironic commentary on the ineffable carnage produced by the U.S. Civil War. This argument is wholly convincing and indisputably prominent in terms of the context of the story's composition, but it is not the only compelling argument. While Bierce was witness to the slaughter at the Battle of Chickamauga Creek in September 1 863 that left 40,000 dead and wounded (Davidson 555), and while the narrative constitutes just one of dozens of Civil War stories executed by him, not one piece of internal evidence from the text securely situates its events as occupying the 1860s period at the border of Georgia and Tennessee. Not one piece, that is, connects the story to the Civil War, except for the title Arizona Quarterly Volume 56, Number 4, Winter 2000 Copyright © 2000 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 58Susan Kalter itself. This impossibility of locating such historically specific textual evidence is highly unusual in comparison to Bierce's other war stories. It is therefore highly significant. Underneath the powerful Civil War resonance of the text lurks a second network of gruesomely haunting associations that resound with intensity against the collective memory and imagination of the United States populace of 1889. "Chickamauga" 's melange of images—images that refuse ultimate certainty of referent—refers to Indian wars: to Indian wars at large as practiced during the long eras of squatter aggression , removal, and genocide (ca. 1540-1890); to the wars in particular with the Chickamaugan Cherokee, Creek and other nearby Indians, occurring in the same region as the Civil War battle during the colonial , revolutionary war and early national era; and to the post-Civil War conflict with the Sioux-Cheyenne-Arapaho (1865-90) which set the stage for the Ghost Dance movement that was contemporary with the story's publication. By making audible echoes of the Indian wars, we are better able to discern the richness of affect that the story carries in the long aftermath of the U.S. Civil War.1 We will see, too, why the Civil War interpretation that has prevailed in Bierce scholarship is necessary to comprehending this second level of associations. HISTORICIZING THE TERRAIN OF "CHICKAM AUG a" In "Chickamauga," Bierce's tropes exhibit a characteristic impact which that final thirty years of massive offensive against Indian nations had on the writing of the period.2 Here he blends together images of domesticity with apparitions of war in a manner that both radiates and critiques the confusion of public and private sphere effected by these late Indian wars. He then melds these tropes with characters whose relation to language rehearses the enunciation of Native American languages and signals their withdrawal and retreat out of the earshot of Americans. His is one of a series of texts that reveal the intense awareness and preoccupation of European America with Indian matters of all kinds despite the fact that its contemporary audience no longer possesses the skills to perceive that quotidian anxiety: its intensity and its contradictory terrain.5 Examining the traces of this contradictory terrain in "Chickamauga" and other writings by Bierce will allow us to consider his relationship to savagism, anti-savagism and ante-savagism: "Chickamauga" as an Indian-Wars Narrative59 the major ideologies respecting U.S.-Indian relations in the nineteenth century.4 While the Civil War must be considered a major allusion of "Chickamauga ," perhaps the major allusion, Bierce detaches the story from definite reference to the specific Civil War battle in naming it. Rather than calling it "Chickamauga Creek" or "The Battle of Chickamauga Creek," he...

Reviewed by: Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution by Michael D. Hattem Aaron Noble (bio) Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution By Michael D. Hattem. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020. 320 pages, 5 halftones, 6" x 9". $40.00 cloth, $40.00 ebook. Michael D. Hattem's Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution offers a valuable new resource for scholars of the Revolutionary era. In the book, Hattem seeks to answer the question: How did Americans come to see themselves not as British subjects but, rather, as American citizens in the eighteenth century? The book explores the way that the very concepts of American history itself were constructed in the throes of the Revolution and the impact that this new identity had on politics in the American colonies. These cultural nationalists, according to Hattem, defined the terms of American history and established enduring spatial and temporal boundaries for this new national past. Interestingly, he asserts that the development of American history did not come about after independence but actually emerged prior to the Revolution during the imperial crisis in the 1760s and was a "driving force" behind the Revolution. Hattem seeks to reexamine the premise espoused in seminal works such as Michael Kammen's Mystic Chords of Memory that Americans were "liberated from the past" by the [End Page 424] Revolution (2). Instead, the book explores the explosion in historical works that sought to construct a shared American identity and history that redefined the colonial past. The author draws from several works and theories within memory studies in order to make the case for the importance of history culture as an analytical tool. He defines this term as encompassing "all references to and use of the past in a given society." This view of history culture includes not just published works, but also institutions and networks that "fostered 'historical cultural production'" and "includes 'all the layers and processes of social historical consciousness" (5). Through a close examination of history culture in print—newspapers, poetry, theater, and historical works—as well as the establishment of early historical societies and museums in Massachusetts, New York, and Philadelphia, Hattem has identified cultural processes and structures that engendered the transformation in American identity. The author argues that examining the transformation and construction of American history and identity through the lens of history culture affords one a fuller understanding of the relationship between the society and its history and the role that the past plays in culture and politics. The book includes six thematic chapters with a prologue and a brief epilogue. The first three chapters examine how Americans began to reconsider their relationship to the British past in light of the worsening imperial crisis following the end of the French and Indian War and how they began to construct a sense of a shared colonial American past. This constructed past, for the first time, seeks to incorporate the history of all thirteen American colonies into a single cohesive narrative. As the imperial crisis deepened, Hattem demonstrates how Americans reconsidered their understanding of the meanings of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The assertion of Parliamentary Supremacy in the eighteenth century and the lack of any recourse for redress caused many in the American colonies to decry Parliament's arbitrary authority and its usurpation of their historical liberties as British subjects. The second half of the book explores the mechanisms by which American cultural nationalists sought to construct and disseminate knowledge about this American history and to create a deep past that transcended the new nation's British origins. Hattem identifies three processes by which Americans created this shared past: first, the adoption of Christopher Columbus as the "discoverer of America," as marked by tercentennial celebrations in 1792; second, the adaptation of classical and biblical styles in historical and epic poetry about a reconceived national past to draw connections between the newly independent nation and the ancient republics in Greece and Rome; and third, coopting Indigenous histories and the nationalization of the natural history and the history of the land in order to create a deep past of "time immemorial" in order...