This book resituates some familiar nineteenth-century texts within the context of public debates about the place of American Indians in the civil and cultural institutions of the new American nation. Rereading texts by Melville, Hawthorne, Child, Sedgwick, Thoreau, Fuller, and Parkman, Maddox demonstrates the pervasiveness of the anxieties produced by discussion of "the Indian question" and shows how extensively they influenced the production and reception of writing in the first half of the century.
