Tragic Encounters: A People's History of Native Americans - Softcover

Smith, Page

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1619028247 ISBN 13: 9781619028241

Publisher: Counterpoint, 2016

Synopsis

Page Smith was one of America’s greatest historians. After studying with Samuel Eliot Morison at Harvard, Smith went on to a distinguished academic career that culminated with him being the founding Provost of Cowell College, the first college of the new campus of the University of California at Santa Cruz. But he made his mark with a history of the United States published in eight volumes, each volume carrying the subtitle A People’s History of the United States. These were ground-braking histories, composed as a long continuous narrative loosely organized around the themes present in each age or period. There were sourced almost entirely in contemporaneous accounts of the events covered, and they set the ground for a whole new approach to history, that perhaps culminated in the work of Howard Zinn.

During the last years of his life, Smith concentrated on composing a history of Native Americans after the first European contact. This manuscript was discovered unpublished after his death. Using his wonderful technique of narrative, discovering in the events of each period the thematic overview of that period, he again turns to contemporaneous documents to provide the structure and substance of his story. From Jamestown to Wounded Knee, the story of these Native peoples from coast to coast is explored, granting these oppressed and nearly destroyed people a chance to tell their own broad story. We know of no other similar attempt, and this book will surely caution and intrigue readers as they are offered a new slant on a very old subject.

About this title

About the Author:

Charles Page Smith (best known by his middle name,) was a United States historian, author, professor and community activist. A veteran of World War II, he was awarded a Purple Heart for his service. He was the author of over twenty books, including the eight-volume A People’s History of the United States (the title of which served as inspiration for Howard Zinn) and John Adams, which was awarded the Bancroft Prize in 1963 and was a finalist for the National Book Award. As a professor, he taught at UCLA and later was the founding provost of Cowell College at the University of California, Santa Cruz. As an activist, he was a lifelong advocate for the homeless, community organization and improving the prison system. Page Smith died in August 1995, one day after the death of his beloved wife, Eloise.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

In a striking, and to me somewhat mysterious manner, those aboriginal or tribal people, whom we have chosen, rather misleadingly, to call Indians, have emerged in the last two decades from the obscurity into which they fell at the end of the Indian Wars, circa 1880, to become once more a major preoccupation of white Americans. Their champions have claimed a new name for them, Native Americans, on the grounds that they were here long before the white man invaded their” continent. The white invaders are now often called Euro-Americans, presumably to emphasize that they (we) were the intruders and conquerors of the original, real Americans. Seen in this light, the latecomers appear as false claimants, bogus Americans.

The reasons for the sudden prominence of Indians are undoubtedly related in part to a re-awakened environmental ethic,” to admonitions to love and preserve the land. The Indians, we are told, are a model for us. They had an intimate relationship to the natural world that we should try to emulate. Contributing to the elevation of the Indian is, doubtless, a kind of modern primitivism, a weariness with a world of technological wonders; a desire to return to a womb of innocence, to recapture the instinctual life of the natural” man and woman.

About this edition

• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1619028247
• ISBN 13: 9781619028241
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 420