Title: Well-Trodden Paths and Fresh Byways: Recent Writing on Native American History
Abstract:Books on Native American history are still being sought by publishers, but the excitement of the late 1960s and the early 1970s has died down. The battle between those attacking and those defending wh...Books on Native American history are still being sought by publishers, but the excitement of the late 1960s and the early 1970s has died down. The battle between those attacking and those defending white policies is less often seen in simplistic form, and solid monographs are now more common than impassioned pleas. There has generally been an improvement in the quality of writing on the American Indian, and though most books are still written from a white perspective a sensitivity to the Native American point of view is gradually percolating from the scholarly monographs through the general texts. Even nonspecialists now realize that Indians have to be viewed as more than savage, noble, or doomed obstacles to progress on the North American continent. Yet, while there is a new sensitivity and more solid contributions, traditional areas of interest and traditional methodology still loom large in Native American historiography. In spite of the frequent requests for new approaches and new themes, much effort has been devoted in recent years to reworking familiar topics. The most influential historical trends of the past ten years have largely bypassed Native American history. Only a minority of books have attempted to take Indian history out of its traditional framework by introducing new themes and new approaches. In the essays on contemporary historical writing in the recent The Past Before Us there is a striking lack of influential works on Native American history.' The new social history has helped transform writing on black history, but Native American history too often remains parochial. There are vigorous controversies among its practitioners, but these arguments have little impact on historians in other fields. Much of the writing on the American Indian is still concerned with white perceptions of and policies toward Native Americans. The white image of the Indian has a perennial fascination for historians, and for the most part recent books in this area have been cast in a familiar mold. The most ambitious of these works, at least in chronological scope, is Robert F. Berkhofer's The White Man's Indian, which surveys white views of the Indian from first contact to the present. While this study touches perceptively on most aspects ofRead More
Publication Year: 1982
Publication Date: 1982-12-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 1
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