Annie Heloise Abel describes the 1862 Battle of Pea Ridge, a bloody disaster for the Confederates but a glorious moment for Colonel Stand Watie and his Cherokee Mounted Rifles. The Indians were soon enough swept by the war into a vortex of confusion and chaos. Abel makes clear that their participation in the conflict brought only devastation to Indian Territory. Born in England and educated in Kansas, Annie Heloise Abel (1873?1947) was a historical editor and writer of books dealing mainly with the trans-Mississippi West. They include The American Indian as Slaveholder and Secessionist (1915), also reprinted as a Bison Book. Abel's distinguished career is noted in an introduction by Theda Perdue, the author of Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society (1979), and Michael D. Green, whose Politics of Indian Removal: Creek Government and Society in Crisis (1982) was published by the University of Nebraska Press.

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Perhaps no other symbol has more resonance in African American history than that of "40 acres and a mule"—the lost promise of Black reparations for slavery after the Civil War. In I've Been Here All the While, we meet the Black people who actually received this mythic 40 acres, the American settlers who coveted this land, and the Native Americans whose holdings it originated from. In nineteenth-century Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma), a story unfolds that ties African American and Native American history tightly together, revealing a western theatre of Civil War and Reconstruction, in which Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole Indians, their Black slaves, and African Americans and whites from the eastern United States fought military and rhetorical battles to lay claim to land that had been taken from others. Through chapters that chart cycles of dispossession, land seizure, and settlement in Indian Territory, Alaina E. Roberts draws on archival research and family history to upend the traditional story of Reconstruction. She connects debates about Black freedom and Native American citizenship to westward expansion onto Native land. As Black, white, and Native people constructed ideas of race, belonging, and national identity, this part of the West became, for a short time, the last place where Black people could escape Jim Crow, finding land and exercising political rights, until Oklahoma statehood in 1907.

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The masterful and poignant story of three African-American families who journeyed west after emancipation, by an award-winning scholar and descendant of the migrants Following the lead of her own ancestors, Kendra Field’s epic family history chronicles the westward migration of freedom’s first generation in the fifty years after emancipation. Drawing on decades of archival research and family lore within and beyond the United States, Field traces their journey out of the South to Indian Territory, where they participated in the development of black and black Indian towns and settlements. When statehood, oil speculation, and Jim Crow segregation imperiled their lives and livelihoods, these formerly enslaved men and women again chose emigration. Some migrants launched a powerful back-to-Africa movement, while others moved on to Canada and Mexico. Their lives and choices deepen and widen the roots of the Great Migration. Interweaving black, white, and Indian histories, Field’s beautifully wrought narrative explores how ideas about race and color powerfully shaped the pursuit of freedom.