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Lakota America

Lakota America won the MPIBA Reading the West Book Award for narrative nonfiction, was named one of the New York Times Critics' Top Books of 2019, and was named one of the 10 Best History Books of 2019 by Smithsonian Magazine. This first complete account of the Lakota Indians traces their rich and often surprising history from the early sixteenth to the early twenty-first century. Pekka Hämäläinen explores the Lakotas' roots as marginal hunter-gatherers and reveals how they reinvented themselves twice: first as a river people who dominated the Missouri Valley, America's great commercial artery, and then--in what was America's first sweeping westward expansion--as a horse people who ruled supreme on the vast high plains. The Lakotas are imprinted in American historical memory. Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull are iconic figures in the American imagination, but in this groundbreaking book they emerge as something different: the architects of Lakota America, an expansive and enduring Indigenous regime that commanded human fates in the North American interior for generations. Hämäläinen's deeply researched and engagingly written history places the Lakotas at the center of American history, and the results are revelatory.

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Publisher
Yale University Press
Year
2019
ISBN-13
9780300215953
Genre
History
Topics
Lakota IndiansNative American historyWestward expansion

Awards

Other awarded books from Pekka Hämäläinen

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