Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone) is the Howard R. Lamar Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University, where he is the faculty coordinator for the Yale Group for the Study of Native America. He is the author of Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West. He lives in New Haven, CT.
“In accounts of American history, Indigenous peoples are often treated as largely incidental—either obstacles to be overcome or part of a narrative separate from the arc of nation-building. Blackhawk . . . challenges those minimalizations and exclusions, showing that Native communities have, instead, been inseparable from the American story all along.”—Washington Post Book World, “Books to Read in 2023” “The Rediscovery of America is a testimony to the transformation of the field of American Indian history over the past several decades, and Blackhawk has abandoned the ‘interpretive tools’ of generations of American historians.”—Brenda J. Child, University of Minnesota “Ned Blackhawk’s elegant and sweeping account of American history illuminates five centuries of Native American history. He upends familiar narratives to reveal the enduring centrality and vitality of Native peoples in American political life.”—Barbara Krauthamer, University of Massachusetts “Ned Blackhawk not only restores Native Americans to the core of the continent’s story but also offers a running analysis spanning immense times and climes.”—Andrés Reséndez, author of Conquering the Pacific “On his search to rediscover America, Blackhawk brilliantly rewrites U.S. history, illustrating that it cannot be told absent American Indians. This is the history text we have been waiting for.”—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States “Richly told and deeply informed, The Rediscovery of America demonstrates the centrality of Indigenous Americans to U.S. history. Blackhawk shows that at every turn the enduring relations between natives and newcomers have shaped the course of the American republic.”—Claudio Saunt, author of the National Book Award finalist Unworthy Republic “Ranging across the continent and across the centuries, Ned Blackhawk skillfully interweaves American history and Native American history, demonstrating conclusively that we cannot properly understand one without the other.”—Colin G. Calloway, Dartmouth College “Refusing to tell simple stories of subordination or resistance, Ned Blackhawk shows how American politics, law, diplomacy, the economy, and popular culture become incomprehensible without a Native presence.”—Richard White, Stanford University