Daniel F. Littlefield Jr. – författare

Littlefield unravels the complex history of the demise of the Cherokee nation. In overwhelming detail he reconstructs the nation's 40 year struggle to define the social, political, and legal status of the freed blacks among them. The freedmen issue led to federal intervention on behalf of the blacks, which eroded the nation's autonomy; it exhausted the nation's resources; it bred division among the Cherokees; and it persuaded white Americans that the Cherokees had no special claim to Indian land or governmental favors.

This work is a comprehensive encyclopedia of Indian removal that accurately presents the removal process as a political, economic, and tribally complicit affair.In 1830, Andrew Jackson became the first U.S. president to implement removal of Native Americans with the passage of the Indian Removal Act. Less than a decade later, tens of thousands of Native Americans—Cherokee, Chickasaw, Muscogee-Creek, Seminole, and others—were forcibly moved from their tribal lands to enable settlement by Caucasians of European origin. Encyclopedia of American Indian Removal presents a realistic depiction of removal as a complicated process that was deeply affected by political, economic, and tribal factors, rather than the popular romanticized concept of American Indians being herded west by military troops through a trackless wilderness. This work is presented in two volumes. Volume One contains essays on subjects and people that are general in scope and arranged alphabetically by subject; Volume Two is dedicated to primary documents regarding Indian removal and examines specific information about political debates, Indian responses to removal policy, and removals of individual tribes.