Florida Explored: The Philadelphia Connection in Bartram's Tracks Florida Explored: The Philadelphia Connection in Bartram's Tracks. By Thomas Peter Bennett. (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2019. xxii, 398 pp. $40.00.) Bruce E Johansen Bruce E Johansen Emeritus University of Nebraska Omaha, Omaha, Nebraska Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 107, Issue 4, March 2021, Page 992, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaaa484 Published: 01 March 2021

In 1952, scholar and activist Felix Cohen asserted that Native Americans had contributed importantly to the majority culture of the United States and, through that nation's colonizing efforts, the world. Within the ensuing decades, an increasing number of scholars have come to support Cohen's interpretation, and to expand upon it, crediting Native Americans with an important intellectual claim on modern social development. A case has been made for how Native consensual democracy helped shape the thoughts of some of the United States' founders, most prominently Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Decades later, the founding mothers of American feminism learned from native matrilineal cultures. Today, Indigenous acceptance of gender fluidity is reflected in mainstream American culture as well. Environmental points of view also have entered mainstream thought, but only after the perils of advanced industrial pollution and climate change have become manifest. This chapter re-perspectivizes sources and scholarship on early-modern nation-founding projects to demonstrate the presence of Indigenous thought and worldviews in that period as well as its influence today, staking an Indigenous claim on those institutions.

Smaller American Indian tribes, including the Washoe, are only now receiving professional historical attention, yet all have instructive historical stories to tell. The Washoe, for example, used the legal system, including the Dawes Act (1887), to protect eighty thousand acres of their land. Like the Osage, who used the law to protect their oil, the Washoe utilized their treaties as lockboxes to protect their rights and cultures—and their language—a process that Matthew S. Makley describes as continuing to this day. Other small tribes, such as the Muckleshoots of western Washington (with about 2,500 people) have done the same. Their histories, of which Makley's is an outstanding example, are now emerging to complement the better-known histories of larger peoples. For several thousand years, the Washoes have occupied lands surrounding Lake Tahoe near the Sierra Nevada in a homeland extending along the eastern Sierra Nevada and the western Great Basin, the waters of which they hold sacred, and that have also become known around the world as a tourist destination.

President Donald Trump's admiration of President Andrew Jackson evokes a discussion of parallels between their ideologies, including a reluctance to repudiate white supremacy and a disregard for the rule of law. These attitudes are reflected both in Jackson's authorship of the Indian Removal Act (1830) and his refusal to acknowledge a judgment by the US Supreme Court in favor of the Cherokee Nation that might have averted the Trail of Tears. Jackson's advocacy of American exceptionalism (“America first” to Trump) also provokes an analysis of what later was cast in popular discourse as Manifest Destiny. United States history--its “race law” in particular--is described here through the admiring eyes of Adolph Hitler, who likened Germany's expansion before and during World War II to United States “westward movement” during the nineteenth century.

This book is a retelling and, in the mind of the author, a corrective of well-trod ground: the history of the “Indian wars” in the middle of North America during the last half of the nineteenth century. The work being corrected, writes Peter Cozzens, is Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), which “has remained the standard popular work on the era” (p. 8). Brown made “no attempt at historical balance,” having openly admitted to his bias in authoring an account of “the conquest of the American West as the victims experienced it” (ibid.). Cozzens's self-defined mission is to “bring historical balance to the story of the Indian Wars” (ibid.). He is especially irritated at Brown's failure to describe the motives of Shoshones, Crows, and Pawnees, among others, who sided with the United States against their traditional enemies, among them the Lakota and the Cheyenne. Cozzens believes that Brown dismissed all of the U.S. allies as mercenaries. Also absent in Brown's history is “a thorough and nuanced understanding of the white perspective as well as that of the Indians” (ibid.). Cozzens thus advertises his book as the complete, nuanced history of the subject, which achieves a deeper understanding of all parties to the conflict and tells “the story equally” (ibid.).

An important thinker, fiery orator, and activist in the “Red Power” movement, Clyde Merton Warrior (31 August 1939–7 July 1968) blazed an intellectual trail through Indian Country during the 1960s ...

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