PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Christina Snyder's Great Crossings enhances the historiography of the Native South by opening a window into a fascinating world where Indian, white, and black social intimacies took shape, sometimes freely and productively, sometimes violently and with terrible consequences, especially for the enslaved. Through her detailed account, Snyder seeks to narrate as well as complicate a period in U.S. history associated with Indian removal rather than Indian initiative. In so doing, she presents a cast of Native actors whose interwoven biographies come alive in a study that simultaneously presents broader political and cultural developments in Indian nations (especially, but not solely, the Choctaw Nation) as well as in the United States. * Tiya Miles, American Historical Review * A well-researched, engagingly written, and remarkable work of scholarship. * Publishers Weekly (starred review) * Some stories are too incredible not to be true. The tale of Richard Mentor Johnson and his Choctaw Academy would tax the imagination of a novelist... The Indian academy becomes a triracial mixing ground and finally a cauldron, where all of Jacksonian America's complexities and contradictions of race, class, and gender play out in public view. The story is true, and Christina Snyder's Great Crossings tells it exquisitely. Snyder relates this fascinating tale with sensitivity and insight, in a narrative alive with personality and vignette. She wisely resists the temptation to typecast heroes and villains, or to frame the story in simple declensionist terms. * Daniel Feller, H-AmIndian, H-Net Reviews * What Snyder has found in the story of a modest school... is the perfect confluence of the ethnic cleansing of Native America, the absolute manacling of black America, and the consequent creation of white America's modern United States. This historiographically rich, meticulously researched, and accessibly written book makes an important contribution. Yet Great Crossings also attests to the triumph of the racial thinking whose rise it narrates and subjects to such intricate criticism. * James Taylor Carson, Journal of American History *
