In the latest edition of Humanitas, a column focused on the arts and humanities at Yale, a book that centers Native Americans in the country’s history earns national acclaim; a boundary-smashing artist brings a “sensory circuit workout” to campus; a Yale historian reflects on why his 1988 book about the rise and fall of global powers became one of the decade’s most influential books; and a Yale Ph.D. student (who also happens to be a bestselling novelist) earns a spot on a list of society’s future leaders.
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‘Rediscovery of America’ a National Book Award finalist
The exclusion of Indigenous peoples from American historical analysis has “a long tradition,” says Yale historian Ned Blackhawk. In his latest book, “The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History,” Blackhawk aimed to correct that absence, exploring the centrality of Native Americans in the country’s political and cultural history.
The book, which was published by Yale University Press, was recently named a finalist for the National Book Award in the nonfiction category.
Building on decades of new scholarship in Native American and Indigenous studies, “The Rediscovery of America” has continued the work of creating “a different view of the past, a reorientation of U.S. history,” Blackhawk, the Howard R. Lamar Professor of History and American studies in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone Indians in Nevada, writes in the book’s introduction.
In announcing the finalists for the 2023 National Book Awards, the National Book Foundation noted: “Historian Ned Blackhawk recontextualizes five centuries of U.S., Native, and non-native histories to argue that in the face of extreme violence, land dispossession, and catastrophic epidemics, Indigenous peoples played, and continue to play, an essential role in the…
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