HISTORY PAPER

History paper



History paper

Introduction

A “Historiography” is not the study of history. Instead, it is the study of the writing of history. The way in which an individual, a people, or a nation writes its history reveals much about those who wrote it. The past itself does not change, but the way that people interpret it does. The elements of history that are emphasized or downplayed, and the value judgments assigned to them, all change—reflecting the writer's own personal and cultural biases.

Of course, Native American history is subject to these historiographical shifts. In fact, it can be argued that no character in the pantheon of American historical figures has been cast and recast, interpreted, reinterpreted, and misinterpreted more frequently than the American Indian. For example, popular depictions of Native American history from the nineteenth century have an Anglocentric perspective. Writers narrated the country's history from a White American perspective, often celebrating America's “winning of the West” with the national self-confidence characteristic of the era. It was deemed a “good” thing that American civilization overspread the continent and supplanted the less developed, “savage” native inhabitants (Edmunds, 2001).

The shortage of histories from an Indian viewpoint has been slowly but steadily remedied as time has progressed. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries native peoples either created texts of their own or allowed their testimonies to be transcribed by others. And, in the last several decades, greater numbers of historians of Indian descent have written their own histories, and are enriching the field of Indian history by adding long-absent native voices. When studying any area of history, first-hand accounts provide the reader a level of understanding and a certain “feel” that is sometimes absent from synthetic accounts. Native American history is no exception, and those studying it will benefit from reading these first-hand native accounts.

References, Textbooks, and General Overviews

Perhaps the most comprehensive and authoritative reference for Native American history is the Handbook of North American Indian series published by the Smithsonian Institution under the general editorship of William C. Sturtevant. This twenty-volume series describes the history, culture, and language of the different Indian tribes of North America. Each volume focuses on the tribes of a particular region, and there are separate volumes on Indian-White relations and

Indian languages. Frank W. Porter III edits a fifty-volume series from Chelsea House Publishers entitled The Indians of North America. Each book is authored by an established scholar, is about one hundred pages in length, and includes photographs, drawings, and maps. Most volumes are tribal histories, but there are volumes on thematic topics, too. These books are written for secondary school students and are informative, easy-to-read introductions to Indian histories (Clark, 1994).

Useful survey textbooks include Roger Nichols, American Indians in U.S. History, (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 2004); Colin G. Calloway, First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999); and R. David Edmunds, Frederick E. Hoxie, and Neal Salisbury, The People: A History of Native America (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, ...