Greg O'Brien – författare

This evocative story of the Choctaws is told through the lives of two remarkable leaders, Taboca and Franchimastabé, during a period of revolutionary change, 1750-1830. Both men achieved recognition as warriors in the eighteenth century but then followed very different paths of leadership. Taboca was a traditional Choctaw leader, a "prophet-chief" whose authority was deeply rooted in the spiritual realm. The foundation of Franchimastabé's power was more externally driven, resting on trade with Europeans and American colonists and the acquisition of manufactured goods. Franchimastabé responded to shifting circumstances outside the Choctaw nation by pushing the source of authority in novel directions, straddling spiritual and economic power in a way unfathomable to Taboca. The careers of these leaders signal a watershed moment in Choctaw history – the receding of a traditional mystically oriented world and the dawning of a new market-oriented one. At once engaging and informative, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 1750–1830 highlights the efforts of a nation to preserve its integrity and reform its strength in an increasingly complicated, multicultural world.

In The Native South, Tim Alan Garrison and Greg O’Brien assemble contributions from leading ethnohistorians of the American South in a state-of-the-field volume on southern Native American history from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. Spanning such subjects as Seminole–African American kinship systems, Cherokee notions of guilt and innocence in evolving tribal jurisprudence, Indian captives and American empire, and second-wave feminist activism among Cherokee women in the 1970s, The Native South offers a dynamic examination of ethnohistorical methodology and evolving research in southern Native American history.  Theda Perdue and Michael Green, pioneers who developed the modern historiography of the Native South into a major field of scholarly inquiry, speak in interviews with the editors about how that field evolved in the late twentieth century after the foundational work of James Mooney, John Swanton, Angie Debo, and Charles Hudson.For scholars, graduate students, and undergraduates in this field of American history, this collection offers original essays by MikaËla Adams, James Taylor Carson, Tim Alan Garrison, Izumi Ishii, Malinda Maynor Lowery, Rowena McClinton, David A. Nichols, Greg O’Brien, Meg Devlin O’Sullivan, Julie L. Reed, Christina Snyder, and Rose Stremlau.

In the past two decades, new research and thinking have dramatically reshaped our understanding of Choctaw history before removal. Greg O'Brien brings together in a single volume ten groundbreaking essays that reveal where Choctaw history has been and where it is going.Distinguished scholars James Taylor Carson, Patricia Galloway, and Clara Sue Kidwell join editor Greg O'Brien to present today's most important research, while Choctaw writer and filmmaker LeAnne Howe offers a vital counterpoint to conventional scholarly views. In a chronological survey of topics spanning the precontact era to the 1830s, essayists take stock of the great achievements in recent Choctaw ethnohistory.Galloway explains the Choctaw civil war as an interethnic conflict. Carson reassesses the role of Chief Greenwood LeFlore. Kidwell explores the interaction of Choctaws and Christian missionaries. A new essay by O'Brien explores the role of Choctaws during the American Revolution as they decided whom to support and why. The previously unpublished proceedings of the 1786 Hopewell treaty reveal what that agreement meant to the Choctaws.Taken together, these and other essays show how ethnohistorical approaches and the ""new Indian history"" have influenced modern Choctaw scholarship. No other recent collection focuses exclusively on the Choctaws, making Pre-removal Choctaw History an indispensable resource for scholars and students of American Indian history, ethnohistory, and anthropology.