Who were the Native Americans? Where did they come from and how long
ago? Did they have a history, and would they have a future? Questions
such as these dominated intellectual life in the United States during
the nineteenth century. And for many Americans, such questions about the
original inhabitants of their homeland inspired a flurry of historical
investigation, scientific inquiry, and heated political debate.
History's Shadow traces the struggle of Americans trying to understand
the people who originally occupied the continent claimed as their own.
Steven Conn considers how the question of the Indian compelled Americans
to abandon older explanatory frameworks for sovereignty like the Bible
and classical literature and instead develop new ones. Through their
engagement with Native American language and culture, American
intellectuals helped shape and define the emerging fields of
archaeology, ethnology, linguistics, and art. But more important, the
questions posed by the presence of the Indian in the United States
forced Americans to confront the meaning of history itself, both that of
Native Americans and their own: how it should be studied, what drove its
processes, and where it might ultimately lead. The encounter with Native
Americans, Conn argues, helped give rise to a distinctly American
historical consciousness.
A work of enormous scope and intellect, History's Shadow will speak to
anyone interested in Native Americans and their profound influence on
our cultural imagination.
"History's Shadow is an intelligent and comprehensive look at the
place of Native Americans in Euro-American's intellectual history. . . .
Examining literature, painting, photography, ethnology, and
anthropology, Conn mines the written record to discover how non-Native
Americans thought about Indians." --Joy S. Kasson, Los Angeles Times
