Books & ideas

The driving forces behind a massacre

David El Kenz — 2025-04-01T05:30:00Z

The ritual massacre perpetrated by the Natchez against several hundred French settlers in Louisiana on 28 November 1729 was the starting point of a colonial violence against a tribe that lasted until its near disappearance.

Phantom Empire

Juliette Tran — 2021-09-22T06:30:00Z

At the crossroads of ethnohistory, imperial history and U.S. history, Hämäläinen's latest book sheds a new light on the Lakota people, arguing that they established a thriving nomadic empire in the heart of America, despite the growing presence of Europeans.

Contact and Dispossession

Juliette Tran — 2020-09-14T07:00:00Z

Interactions between Native Americans and Europeans in the Great Lakes Region have been the subject of groundbreaking works in American history. But there was more to the story than previously thought, as D. Nichols underlines Lakes Indians' effective forms of resistance and strategies of survival

A Different History of America

Sébastien Jahan — 2020-03-02T08:00:00Z

For four centuries before the west was won, trappers crisscrossed North America. These marginal figures, who often lived with Native Americans, remind us of a lost world that still haunts the continent.

The Lost World of Wood Runners

Paul Mapp — 2018-12-06T07:00:00Z

“Wood runners” is the name given to travelling fur traders in the age of pioneers. Focusing on two centuries of their risky adventures and on their relationship with Amerindian populations allows Gilles Havard to write a monumental multicultural history of the early North American West.

How the Indians Conquered the West

Thomas Grillot — 2014-01-20T08:00:00Z

The challenge of going beyond the national narrative has occupied historians for decades. When applied to North America, it has turned our understanding of historical events such as the “Conquest of the West” upside down. Through an examination of the history of the Comanches, a Finnish historian is pushing this reversal of perspectives as far as it can go, in order to highlight the power that was in the hands of the indigenous people when they came face-to-face with the Europeans.

Native Americans, America's Colonial Troops

Thomas Grillot — 2011-09-28T08:39:33Z

Native Americans have been touted as the quintessential American patriots. Their war record in the 20^th century certainly does not contradict this assessment. More fruitful, however, would be to look at their patriotism as one aspect of their colonial relation with the United States.