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Wilson explains that the popular history of America before and after 1492 is largely inaccurate. Through investigations of the complex, often misunderstood histories of hundreds of peoples, the author poses a new and revised history of the North American continent.

The author describes eleven rival regional "nations" in the United States (Yankeedom, New Netherland, the Midlands, Tidewater, Greater Appalachia, the Deep South, New France, El Norte, the Left Coast, the Far West, and First Nation), and how these deep roots continue to influence our politics today.

The received idea of Native American history--as promulgated by books like Dee Brown's mega-bestselling 1970 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee--has been that American Indian history essentially ended with the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. Not only did one hundred fifty Sioux die at the hands of the U. S. Cavalry, the sense was, but Native civilization did as well. Growing up Ojibwe on a reservation in Minnesota, training as an anthropologist, and researching...

"This nation's history and self-understanding have long depended on the notion of a "colonial America," an epoch that supposedly laid the foundation for the modern United States. In Indigenous Continent, Pekka Hämäläinen overturns the traditional, Eurocentric narrative, demonstrating that, far from being weak and helpless "victims" of European colonialism, Indigenous peoples controlled North America well into the 19th century. From the Iroquois...

On a hot June morning in 1975, a fatal shoot-out took place between FBI agents and American Indians on a remote property near Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Four members of the American Indian Movement were indicted on murder charges for the deaths of two federal agents killed that day. Leonard Peltier, the only one to be convicted, is now serving consecutive life sentences in a federal penitentiary. Behind this violent chain of events lie issues of...

"Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at the jewel bearing plant, the first factory located near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a Chippewa Council member who is trying to understand the consequences of a new emancipation bill on its way to the floor of the United States Congress. It is 1953 and he and the other council members know the bill isn’t about freedom; Congress is fed up with Indians. The bill is a termination...

From the moment that Europeans landed on America's shores, they engaged in bloody conflict with the natives they encountered. Tensions and hostilities bred in the colonial wars with the Spanish, English, French, and Dutch would lead inevitably to the later wars of the removal period, skirmishes on the western Plains, and, ultimately, the confrontation at Wounded Knee. Now, captured here in the words of those who lived it, is the epic, violent history...

Angie Debo (1890–1988) was a writer, lecturer, and historian whose many books include Geronimo: The Man, His Time, His Place; The Road to Disappearance: A History of the Creek Indians; and The Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic. Amanda Cobb-Greetham is professor of Native American studies and founding director of the Native Nations Center at the University of Oklahoma. The classic book that exposed the scandal of the dispossession of native...