As a result, the reader gains fresh and surprising insights into Euro/Native American relations and the formation of U.S. national identity pertaining to culture. At the same time, the book enlarges the domain of American Romanticism and sheds new light on the ideological use of gothic fiction. Focusing on New York State and the Iroquois, The Crimsoned Hills of Onondaga includes studies of De Witt Clinton’s A Memoir on the Antiquities of the Western Part of the State of New York (1818); Josiah Priest’s American Antiquities, And Discoveries in the West (1833); Joshua V.H. Clark’s Onondaga (1849); and E. G. Squier’s Aboriginal Monuments of the State of New York (1849). The Cardiff Giant hoax is re-examined along with other 19th century archaeological frauds associated with antiquarians."--pub. desc.

This book recounts the amazing life story of a 16-year-old American Revolutionary-era soldier, including his captivity, adoption, and eventual flight to freedom from the Iroquois Six-Nation Indian tribes. The story is retold with historical accuracy and an even-handed treatment of the conflicting interests of the loyalists, Iroquois, and Patriots. David Ogden was born into an unusually tumultuous time in America—the colonials were struggling to throw off the yoke of British rule while also battling the Iroquois tribes for control of their ancestral lands. The bibliography of anyone who survived a life in the late 1700s frontier days of New York would be a great tale, but David Ogden's story stands alone, even within historical context of his times. Captive! The Story of David Ogden and the Iroquois is a compelling true adventure story of one young colonial soldier's bravery, choosing a daunting 126-mile race to freedom fraught with the risk of death over being assimilated into an alien society. This story is told with all the factual historical information that was missing from all the original captivity narratives, but accurately retains the flavor of the period and the voice of the 18th-century protagonist.

Most histories of the Cherokee nation focus on its encounters with Europeans, its conflicts with the U. S. government, and its expulsion from its lands during the Trail of Tears. This work, however, traces the origins of the Cherokee people to the third century B.C.E. and follows their migrations through the Americas to their homeland in the lower Appalachian Mountains. Using a combination of DNA analysis, historical research, and classical philology, it uncovers the Jewish and Eastern Mediterranean ancestry of the Cherokee and reveals that they originally spoke Greek before adopting the Iroquoian language of their Haudenosaunee allies while the two nations dwelt together in the Ohio Valley.

A groundbreaking interpretation of earliest Mormonism that frames this distinctive religious movement in terms of founder Joseph Smith's struggle to conquer death.

Relic Hunters is a study of the complex relationship between the people of 19th century America with the material antiquities of North America's indigenous past. As scholars struggled to explain their existence, farmers in Ohio were plowing up arrowheads, building their houses atop burial mounds, and developing their own ideas about antiquity. They experienced the new country as a "place with history" reflected in material traces that became important touch points for scientific knowledge, but for American cultural identity as well. Relic Hunters traces the encounter with American antiquities from 1812 to 1879. This encompasses the period when archaeology took root in the United States: it also spans the "deep settlement" of the Midwest and sectional strife both before and after the Civil War. At the center of the story is the first iconic find of American archaeology, known as "the Kentucky Mummy." Discovered deep in a cavern, this dessicated burial became the subject of scholarly competition, traveling exhibitions, and even poetry. The book uses the theme of the Kentucky Mummy to structure the broader story of the public and American antiquities, a tour that leads through rural museums, mound excavations, lecture tours, shady deals, and ultimately into the famous attic of the Smithsonian Institution. Ultimately, Relic Hunters is a story of the American landscape, and of the role of archaeology in shaping that place. Derived from letters, memoranda, and reports found in more than a dozen archives, this is a unique account of a critical encounter that shaped local and national identity in ways that are only now being explored.

This book examines British scientific and antiquarian travels in the "North," circa 1790–1830. British perceptions, representations and imaginings of the North are considered part of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century processes of British self-fashioning as a Northern nation, and key in unifying the expanding North Atlantic empire.

This book examines the widespread use of postapocalyptic fantasies in American literary texts in the early nineteenth century.

Excavating Exodus analyzes adaptations of Exodus in novels, newspapers, and speeches from the antebellum period to the Civil Rights era. Although Exodus has perennially served to mobilize resistance to oppression, Black writers have radically reinterpreted its meaning over the past two centuries. Changing interpretations of Moses’ story reflect evolving conceptions of racial identity, religious authority, gender norms, political activism, and literary form. Black writers transformed Moses from a paragon of race loyalty into an avatar of authoritarianism. Excavating Exodus identifies a rhetorical tradition initiated by David Walker and carried on by Martin Delany and Frances Harper that treats Moses’ loyalty to his fellow Hebrews as his defining characteristic. By the twentieth century, however, a more skeptical group of writers, including Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and William Melvin Kelley, associated Moses with overbearing charismatic authority. This book traces the transition from Walker, who treated Moses as the epitome of self-sacrifice, to Kelley, who considered Moses a flawed model of leadership and a threat to individual self-reliance. By asking how Moses became a touchstone for notions of racial belonging, Excavating Exodus illuminates how Black intellectuals reinvented the Mosaic model of charismatic male leadership.

This is the untold story of Dr. J. D. Harris (1833-1884), an African American physician whose life and career straddled enormous changes for Black professionals and the practice of medicine. Born in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Harris served as a contract surgeon to the Union army and transitioned to a similar post under the Freedmen's Bureau, treating Black troops and freedpeople in Virginia. Margaret Humphreys not only narrates what we know about Harris but offers context to his remarkable journey, including how incredible it was that a young man born into freedom in a slave state learned to read when literacy for Black people was illegal. He was one of very few African Americans to become a doctor before Howard Medical School opened in the 1870s, a fact that both reveals the structural barriers to medical education for Black Americans and highlights how those structures weakened in the 1860s. Drawing on census records, court records, Civil War and Reconstruction documents from the National Archives, African American newspapers, and more, this book is a revealing look at the history not only of medicine in the southern United States but also of race and citizenship during one of the nation's most tumultuous eras.

Political Economy, Race, and the Image of Nature in the United States, 1825–1878 is an interdisciplinary work analyzing the historical origins of a dominant concept of Nature in the culture of the United States during the period of its expansion across the continent. Chapters analyze the ways in which “Nature” became a discursive site where theories of race and belonging, adaptation and environment, and the uses of literary and pictorial representation were being renegotiated, forming the basis for an ideal of the human and the nonhuman world that is still with us. Through an interdisciplinary approach involving the fields of visual culture, political economy, histories of racial identity, and ecocritical studies, the book examines the work of seminal figures in a variety of literary and artistic disciplines and puts the visual culture of the United States at the center of intellectual trends that have enormous implications for contemporary cultural practice. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, American studies, environmental studies/ecocriticism, critical race theory, and semiotics.