aimiller's Reviews (689)

This book, while perhaps theoretically lacking in some ways (Thrush could have been more rigorous in his use of settler colonialism as a lens,) was very, very readable, and really did a great job of exploring London as a site of spectacle for both English people and Indigenous people. Single chapters would work really, really well in an undergraduate course, and the stories that Thrush tells in his book are really a gift. I really enjoyed this book a lot as a reader, though obviously there are critiques to be made, and I really recommend it to people who are looking for easy-to-read good Indigenous history.

Clearly a classic in the world of food studies, and in some ways, definitely worthy of that title. I struggled to get through this book at first--his rapid global history of sugar production bounced rapidly through time and was difficult to slog through to get to his arguments about the English working class. Once I did get there, his argument really came together, but before then, it was hard to see the point of where he was going. It should be noted that Mintz is really not all that interested in production but rather in the consumption of sugar among the English, and really among the English working class. It did its job, certainly, and I recognize how important it is as a work, but it didn't necessarily 'wow' me or make me rethink very much about how I saw the history of sugar.

An incredible book that weaves notions of space and time together to explore how Kanaka Maoli have understood their world, and the changes that settler colonialism sought to impose on notions of space. The book is so, so careful to find space to highlight agency and resistance, and is a masterful example of that.

An incredible look at how labor functioned within Round Valley communities. Bauer's dedication to seeing migrant work as complicated--as simultaneously a function of settler colonialism but also of agency--plays out beautifully in his work, and the oral histories that he has taken serve here not just as window-dressing or evidence. Those oral histories really are (deliberately) the heart and structure of the book, an incredible accomplishment that other historians and historians-in-training could definitely look to as a model.

A really important book that maps and remaps Native New England space through writings by Native people from the area. I was impressed by the ways that Brooks was able to disrupt colonial geographies, and still render the land legible--a testament to her commitment to using place names and inscribing the world with indigenous knowledge systems. The chapter about Samson Occom's preaching and fight for Mohegan land was particularly instructive in the ways that Native people negotiated territory claims through language. A really great book, even if all of the literary analysis was not 100% my cup of tea.

So I used this textbook (or a previous edition of it) for AP US History in high school, and I keep it around as a reference point for things I learned (incorrectly) in high school--basically to get a sense, as a scholar and future professor (hopefully,) of what students are learning and what the dominant narratives being spread are. I was told in high school that the textbook was chosen because it was the cheapest option with color photographs, though that was in 2010, so lord only knows what the market looks like now. I will say that even at the time, the text was riddled with typos, with some pages making almost no sense at all because sentences repeated themselves or words were missing. There were also images that were misidentified--a picture of the Constitution was labeled as the Declaration of Independence (or vice versa). Adam Jortner has also written about this textbook in his essay in Why You Can't Teach US History Without American Indians and the way maps are used to eliminate indigenous presence (an essay I strongly recommend in a book I strongly recommend!) so that is also something to consider. It did prepare me to be able to spit back the dominant narrative on a standardized test, so I guess it did its job, but I'm sure there are at last marginally better books out there.

This book might matter more to people who understand what its intervention is in the first place- that the Mississippi Choctaw "Miracle" is not in fact a miracle at all, but rather was in line directly with Choctaw political resistance over the course of over a century. To someone completely unfamiliar with the primary narrative in the first place, it was interesting but maybe not as groundbreaking as it could have been? I also thought that her explorations and theorizing of these situations could be much more useful than it stands, but it wasn't a terrible book.