You'll never look at a twenty dollar bill the same way
5 stars
This is one of those books that should replace whatever sanitized history text is promulgated in public schools these days (I'm extrapolating from my school days). Even now, for me this was an eye opener, I hadn't realized the Trail of Tears was not a singular event but a decades long campaign of ethnic cleansing in an unholy alliance of slave owners, wannabe slave owners, real estate speculators, a president with genocidal tendencies (how is he still on the twenty dollar bill?), and New York bankers (what else is new).
Even for those in the genocide-is-bad camp, there's plenty of stereotype-confounding nuance to be learned, like how many Native Americans had thriving farms (including some with slaves, although they tended to be treated better, relatively, sometimes given their own farms like feudal serfs), many applied for citizenship and titles to their land (turns out that "come assimilate with us" was …
This is one of those books that should replace whatever sanitized history text is promulgated in public schools these days (I'm extrapolating from my school days). Even now, for me this was an eye opener, I hadn't realized the Trail of Tears was not a singular event but a decades long campaign of ethnic cleansing in an unholy alliance of slave owners, wannabe slave owners, real estate speculators, a president with genocidal tendencies (how is he still on the twenty dollar bill?), and New York bankers (what else is new).
Even for those in the genocide-is-bad camp, there's plenty of stereotype-confounding nuance to be learned, like how many Native Americans had thriving farms (including some with slaves, although they tended to be treated better, relatively, sometimes given their own farms like feudal serfs), many applied for citizenship and titles to their land (turns out that "come assimilate with us" was a bluff), and race was not such a notion within Native American society, there were tribes including African Americans and mixed race families. Also, the accounts of how cholera decimated populations in their forced cramp conditions (some on their journey west refused to be packed into steamboats) should turn you into a pro-masker.