Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory [Paperback]

Winner of the 2021 Bancroft Prize and the 2021 Ridenhour Book Prize A study in power.& The parallels with the present are eerie. Claudio Saunt sets a bold, new, and urgently needed standard for the way we should understand the history of Indian Removal.& Sweeping and astute. Claudio Saunt has written the definitive history of this widely remembered but seldom understood central episode in American history. In his subtle and exceedingly well documented account, Saunt shows how planters eager for land, southern politicians consolidating their power, and New York bankers launched one of the largest mass deportations in U.S. history. They encountered resourceful Native Americans who deployed all means at their disposal to retain their land. This harrowing account of theft, dispossession, novel bureaucratic capacities, and unimaginable violence drew me in in ways that few history books do. Claudio Saunt& offers a damning synthesis of the federal betrayals, mass deportations, and exterminatory violence that defined the 1830s.& Lining up his own calculations alongside recent studies of slavery, Saunt casts indigenous expulsion and the domestic slave trade as twinned trails of tears, economic successes rooted in profound moral failures. A major achievement.& [Saunt] manages to do something truly rare: destroy the illusion that historys course is inevitable and recover the reality of the multiple possibilities that confronted contemporaries. There has been insufficient reckoning with the conquest of the continent, Claudio Saunt relays in this excellent new book. In many accounts of U.S. history, the discussion of the mass deportation of Native nations during the 1830s remains far too brief. Deportations legacies in law, culture, and community continue to this day and find powerful exploration in this important addition to the field. A much-needed rendering of a disgraceful episode in American history that has been too long misunderstood. Thoroughly researched andló