Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Native Americans
My grandparents were murdered during the Osage Reign of Terror. It took my family generations to recover.
Bison are returning to tribal lands under a conservation program launched by Deb Haaland, the first Native American Secretary of the Interior.
It’s important to remember the contributions of Native Americans, as well as their mistreatment.
Considered by many to have been the world’s greatest athlete, Thorpe persevered through triumphs and tragedy.
It's one of the oldest folk ballads in our national songbook, but where did it come from? The answer is complex, multi-layered, American.
A century and a half after his death, the Native American leader's vision of finding peace and prosperity in a divided country is more compelling than ever.
While his brother Tecumseh was assembling the greatest Indian confederation the U.S. would ever confront, the “Prophet” launched a fateful preemptive attack in Indiana Territory.
Editor’s Note: One of the most respected historians of the Civil War and Indian conflicts, Peter Cozzens has written 17 books and is now at work on the third volume of a trilogy about the Indian wars in the American West, the Old Northwest (America’s Heartland), and the Old S
The “Long House,” characteristic lodging of the Iroquois, also described their political union in which each Iroquois nation remained sovereignty under a common roof which sheltered them all.
New York Indians Discover Dutchmen
AFTER CENTURIES OF CONFLICT OVER THEIR RIGHTS AND POWERS, Indian tribes now increasingly make and enforce their own laws, often answerable to no one in the United States government. Is this the rebirth of their ancient independence or a new kind of legalized segregation?
MICKI’S CAFE IS, IN ITS MODEST WAY, A bulwark against the encroachment of modern history and a symbol, amid the declining fortunes of prairie America, of the kind of gritty (and perhaps foolhardy) determination that in more self-confident times used to be ca
A journey through a wide and spellbinding land, and a look at the civilization along its edges.
The synthetic colors of the motel in Albuquerque, all orange, purple, and blatant red, shouting the triumph of American civilization over the surrounding harshness, quickly fade from mind as we head out for Santa Fe.
From Fort Ticonderoga to the Plaza Hotel, from Appomattox Courthouse to Bugsy Siegel’s weird rose garden in Las Vegas, the present-day scene is enriched by knowledge of the American past
Did the Indians have a special, almost noble, affinity with the American environment—or were they despoilers of it? Two historians of the environment explain the profound clash of cultures between Indians and whites that has made each group almost incomprehensible to the other.
When the historian Richard White wrote his first scholarly article about Indian environmental history in the mid-1970s, he knew he was taking a new approach to an old field, but he did not realize just how new it was.
Did the Indians have a special, almost noble, affinity with the American environment—or were they despoilers of it? Two historians of the environment explain the profound clash of cultures between Indians and whites that has made each group almost incomprehensible to the other.
When the historian Richard White wrote his first scholarly article about Indian environmental history in the mid-1970s, he knew he was taking a new approach to an old field, but he did not realize just how new it was.
New Orleans cuisine—with its French roux, African okra, Indian filé, and Spanish peppers—is literally a gastronomic melting pot. Here’s how it all came together.
Across most of America nowadays the term Creole when applied to food variably conjures up images of charred, blackened fish and meat, overbearing, fiery seasonings, and a ubiquitous red sauce not unlike the kind you buy in a ca
This is not a test. It’s the real thing.
How precise is the educated American’s understanding of the history of our country? I don’t mean exact knowledge of minor dates, or small details about the terms of laws, or questions like “Who was secretary of war in 1851?” ( Answer: Charles M.
Fort Adobe
The building shown below may look like a low-rise adobe condominium, and in a sense, that is what it is today—someone’s house.
America’s First Native Cookbook
Cranberry sauce. Johnnycake. Pumpkin pie. Indian pudding.
A photographic portrait of Lake Placid, New York, in the pre-Olympic Age
The Algonquin Indians, legend has it, called the natives who inhabited the mountains of upstate New York ” Adirondacks,” or “Those Who Eat Bark.” And so the mountains got their name—although by the end of the nineteenth century not many of those who came to t
A trooper’s firsthand account of an adventure with the
Indian-fighting army in the American Southwest
In the early summer of 1872, Kiowa or Comanche Indians killed and scalped two white ranchers to steal their sixteen-shot Henry rifles.
The Winnebago Indians called him 0Ke-wah-gah-kah (“Man Who Takes the Pictures”) and he certainly did that, over a career that spanned more than four decades.
The Plains Acrossi The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-60
by John D. Unruh, Jr. University of Illinois Press Illustrations, tables, maps 565 pages, $20.00
One hundred years ago, Congress created two agencies—the U.S. Geological Survey and the Bureau of Ethnology. Both, according to the author, have since “given direction, form, and stimulation to the science of earth and the science of man, and in so doing have touched millions of lives.”
Henry Morion Stanley, who later found Dr. Livingstone, reports the Treaty of Medicine Lodge, Kansas, October, 1867
In the summer of 1867, after more than a year of relative peace between Indians and whites, the southern Plains were in a shambles. It was an old story of blood and blunder by then.
The mysterious diseases that nearly wiped out the Indians of New England were the work of the Christian God — or so both Pilgrims and Indians believed.
In December of 1620, a group of English dissenters who “knew they were pilgrimes,” in the words of William Bradford, stepped ashore on the southern coast of Massachusetts at the site of the Wampanoag Indian village of Pawtuxet.
The hands of Pueblo potter Maria Martinez have reached back across more than seven hundred years of history to create pottery that is now proudly displayed in museums and private collections all over the world.
Thousands of Native American pictographs and petroglyphs are at risk from vandalism amd theft.
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.
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