Pekka Hamalainen - Böcker

From the author of Lakota America, an award-winning history of the rise and decline of the vast and imposing Comanche empire  “Cutting-edge revisionist western history.”—Larry McMurtry, New York Review of Books  “A landmark study that will make readers see the history of southwestern America in an entirely new way.”—David J. Weber, author of Bárbaros  In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a Native American empire rose to dominate the fiercely contested lands of the American Southwest, the southern Great Plains, and northern Mexico. This powerful empire, built by the Comanche Indians, eclipsed its various European rivals in military prowess, political prestige, economic power, commercial reach, and cultural influence. Yet until now the Comanche empire has gone unrecognized in American history.  This compelling and original book uncovers the lost story of the Comanches. It is a story that challenges the idea of Indigenous peoples as victims of European expansion and offers a new model for the history of colonial expansion, colonial frontiers, and Native-European relations in North America and elsewhere. Pekka Hämäläinen shows in vivid detail how the Comanches built their unique empire and resisted European colonization, and why they fell to defeat in 1875. With extensive knowledge and deep insight, the author brings into clear relief the Comanches’ remarkable impact on the trajectory of history.

The first comprehensive history of the Lakota Indians and their profound role in shaping America’s history  Named One of the New York Times Critics’ Top Books of 2019 • Named One of the 10 Best History Books of 2019 by Smithsonian Magazine • Winner of the MPIBA Reading the West Book Award for Narrative Nonfiction  “All nations deserve to have their stories told with this degree of attentiveness.”—Parul Sehgal, New York Times  “A brilliant, bold, gripping history.”—Simon Sebag Montefiore, London Evening Standard, Best Books of 2019  Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull are iconic figures in the American imagination, but in this groundbreaking book they emerge as something different: the architects of Lakota America, an expansive and enduring Indigenous regime that commanded human fates in the North American interior for generations. In this first complete account of the Lakota Indians, Pekka Hämäläinen traces their rich and often surprising history from the early sixteenth to the early twenty‑first century. He explores the Lakotas’ roots as marginal hunter‑gatherers and reveals how they reinvented themselves twice: first as a river people who dominated the Missouri Valley, America’s great commercial artery, and then—in what was America’s first sweeping westward expansion—as a horse people who ruled supreme on the vast high plains.  Deeply researched and engagingly written, this history places the Lakotas at the center of American history, and the results are revelatory.

Designed to encourage critical thinking about history, the MAJOR PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY series introduces readers to both primary sources and analytical essays on important topics in American history. The collection of essays and documents in MAJOR PROBLEMS IN NORTH AMERICAN BORDERLANDS surveys the North American past from the point of view of its borderlands. The essays and documents discuss people and events readers may find familiar, such as the founding of early European colonies, U.S. independence, the War of 1812, the U.S.-Mexican War, and Prohibition, but less widely-known events and actors--expanding native peoples, the Bourbon reforms of the Spanish Empire, fleeing slaves and servants, border surveyors, the Mexican Revolution, and key U.S. immigration legislation--also take center stage. In one sense this volume is clearly a work of U.S. history, but it is also Canadian and Mexican and native history with an overriding theme that we must take into account the meetings of different peoples and nations if we are to understand our past and present. This text presents a carefully selected group of readings organized to allow readers to evaluate primary sources, test the interpretations of distinguished historians, and draw their own conclusions. Each chapter includes introductions, source notes, and suggested readings.