The history is much more complex than I even imaged, and of course I learned I knew nearly nothing before I started reading. Had to put it down several times because the actions of English, Spanish, and Americans was so atrocious I felt I was covered in blood. Includes Indian territory map before English & others arrived - an astonishing number and variety of tribes across what is now the US. Then has a current map of federal and state recognized Indians peoples. Fascinating book - glad I bought it so I could learn what really went down.

Thank you so much for the eArc .

This book was a very enlightening and incredibly important . I felt like the text as accessible as well .

I know that in this time and place in our culture that we are either opposed or very open to missing pieces of our history, This book helps fill in some of our missing history here in America. From Ned Blackhawk, this wonderful book tells missing pieces that I didn't even have a clue about. This richly told book was eye-opening and wonderful!

This book taught me so much about the history of Native Americans and the way their people and cultures were utterly devastated by the European colonizers. It is very detailed and extremely interesting. However, I found that listening to the audiobook felt overwhelming because it was difficult to process all the information. I found myself referring to the ebook regularly to reread parts. Another thing that made listening difficult was the narration. Repeatedly, especially during the first half, I could easily determine spots where the narration had been edited. It sounded really disjointed, and that became very distracting.
In sum, I highly recommend this book for the information it contains, but I suggest reading it yourself rather than listening.

Thank you NetGalley, Tantor Audio, and Take University Press for allowing me early access to the ARC audiobook and ebook editions of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.

The Rediscovery of America is a telling of US history, focused on including Native Americans in the narrative. The first part of the book, leading up to and including the Revolutionary War, does this in a way that's convincing (if a bit dry and scattered), and I learned a lot. The rest feels disjointed, jumping around in time, place, and theme, without a clear throughline to make things flow together. Big claims often feel unsubstantiated. Wish the entire book was a strong as part one.

Professor Blackhawk focuses on interactions between the indigenous people of North America and European settlers, over the last five centuries. He redresses the balance of past history books which have tended to focus on Europeans. He argues against North America being ‘discovered’, given that many different groups of people lived there before Europeans came. He covers a lot of ground in one volume. Worth reading if you’re studying North American history or if you’re interested in broadening your understanding of its history. Thanks to the publishers and Net Galley for a review copy.

History taught in school leaves out the role of the Native Americans - the part they played
as the country grew and the treatment they received from the government. Despite all that has
happened, they fight to maintain their languages, culture and traditions.
Great addition to any library.

Many, many thanks to NetGalley for this ARC of this incredible work. I absolutely loved this one. This should be on every high school or college required reading list. The author writes so well. Read this if you want to really learn American history. And buy 5 copies. for your family and friends to read. Share this widely. Highly recommended!

The Rediscovery of America, written by Ned Blackhawk, was the best non-fiction book I read in 2023. It works against the American cultural norm of writing Indigenous peoples out of the narrative. Blackhawk challenges many of the long-standing misconceptions and incorrect histories that have dominated the narrative and argues that Indigenous peoples were never at the periphery of American history, but are essential to understanding the United States today. In the author's words: "If history provides the common soil for a nation’s growth and a window into its future, it is time to reimagine U.S. history outside the tropes of discovery that have bred exclusion and misunderstanding. Finding answers to the the challenges of our time - racial strife, climate crisis, and domestic and global inequalities, among others - will require new concepts, approaches, and commitments. It is time to put down the interpretive tools of the previous century and take up new ones" (pp. 1-2). The Rediscovery of America does this through its examination of what are often labeled as the key moments in the American timeline, such as colonization, the American Revolution, and the Civil War and weaves those those well-known events with the Indigenous histories that are left out. By doing this, Blackhawk demonstrates crucial changes to the American understanding of the past happen when more pieces of the story are told. For example the book shows that the first shots of the American Revolution are tied to Indian affairs in the country's interior and that during the 20th century, reservation activists were instrumental in transforming American policies and laws. It was an amazing read that I would recommend to history students, museum professionals, teachers, and general history enthusiasts.

This book is a must read for anyone wanting a fuller understanding of U.S. history. The story we learned in school as kids centered on one group of people (the white ones) and left out the folks who were already on this land before Europeans arrived. This book goes a long way in helping to reshape our understanding of how these groups of people interacted over the years since those initial encounters.

Thank you to Yale University Press and NetGalley for the digital ARC. I already bought my own hard copy!

This is a great eye-opener to the things that are left out in general education. While I was aware of a few of topics mentioned, it included more context and information. The organization I think could have been a bit better, but it was overall easy to follow. If you are interested in indigenous history in the US, I think this is a good addition.

Ned Blackhawk, a professor at Yale and a renowned scholar of Indigenous history has rightfully placed Native Americans in the center of American history. The entire history of Native Americans is widely excluded from large segments of history, making momentary, episodic appearances rather that following the trajectory of history. Blackhawk's book allows the reader to examine the encounters with Indigenous people with Europeans rather than the tale of discovery and removal. Several truths of America's founding run into stark conflict with the rhetoric of American democracy. This is an important book to anyone studying American History. I highly recommend.

Author Ned Blackhawk gives us a well-researched history of an era in American history that most of us know nothing about. The America of the 1600s and 1700s was occupied by indigenous peoples that had rich cultures, spoke numerous languages, and were at least as intelligent as the French, Dutch, Spanish, and English that tried to colonize the "new world." Sometimes at peace and sometimes at war, the new world was a shifting mix of alliances that didn't hold. Everyone was out for themselves, their own interests, and survival. Yet mixing of the races was inevitable as captives were enslaved and children were stolen, These early centuries were more complex than anyone has ever written about, and if one were to attempt to write an integrated history of early America that included every aspect of life, it would take volumes. This book should be in every library in America and translated into the languages of every country mentioned in this amazing addition to history.

This book was an amazingly well researched history of Indigenous people of the Americas since the first contact with European settlers in the 1600s until nearly present day. Ned Blackhawk delivers this material in a frank and academic manner. It was an interesting and heartbreaking read, but an important part of history that is often not taught in depth in North American schools. While the majority of the book tells the history of Indigenous peoples of the United States, I love how it also covers some important aspects of Canadian and Central and South American Indigenous people as well.

I learned a lot from this book and there are certain incidences that I would love to read more of. While this book is thorough, it is a great starting point if you're interested in learning more about the mostly undiscussed history of the atrocities committed against the native peoples of the U.S.A.

The one thing that I should note is that this book is written more in an academic style, almost as if for use as a reference book or possibly a text book. The writing is meaningful and impactful, but it merely states important facts rather than telling "stories."

I have not read this author so didnt know what to expect, but once awards season started I realized I had to read. Was very impressed by his writing syle and will be recommending to friends and family, as well as my companies DEI committee to buy a copy for our offfice.

Ned Blackhawk's THE REDISCOVERY OF AMERICA provides a different perspective on American history than that typically presented in history classes. His presentation of how indigenous people lived and perceived the "settling" of the vast country is unique and gripping in how the single narrative can be expanded to include the views of others and their experiences and thoughts. I enjoyed learning facts and opinions I'd never encountered before -- while seeing so many parallels throughout all of history in who tells the narrative and shapes the way a particular place, people, and time period are seen and built upon. Best of all, his book goes beyond the memorization of facts to the personal, the unheard, and the ignored reality of a time and place. I received a copy of this book and these opinions are my own, unbiased thoughts.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Between my downloading this book from NetGalley and reading it, it won the National Book Award, so it's clear that I'm not the only one giving it a look these days.

I think with books like this it's important to understand what they are and are not. This is a map, a highlights version, hitting the high points. You can't do four hundred years of history of a large portion of a continent and the people who live on it and go into really satisfying analysis and detail about...really much of any of it. So if you aren't very familiar with Indigenous history in the US, this is a book that will have you making a list of what else is out there that you should find out about in more depth.

If you have taken the time to become familiar with Indigenous history in the US in some depth, you will probably only encounter one or two concepts and figures that are new to you. If your reading intention is to murmur, "I never knew that about the Mandan!" or similar phrases, you will likely come away from this large and magisterial work disappointed. Its purpose is relational, contextual. For the relatively informed reader, it is putting together pieces that you may previously have only had separately, the Ghost Dance and the arguments about citizenship in their temporal proximity.

It's easy to see why it won a National Book Award; it's a very useful sort of road map to have, to put this kind of information together and be able to have it all in one place, to be able to gesture clearly to the informed and the uninformed alike and say, look, these are the throughlines, these are the themes, this is what was happening all along. And Blackhawk does a very clear and briskly-written job of that.

This history book is a very well researched background of the indigenous peoples place in history that is not included in the history textbooks. It is a book that takes time to read and process.

An important book that examines American history though the Native American perspective. Very educational and enlightening.

Ned Blackhawk's The Rediscovery of America is an amazingly in-depth, meticulously curated history of the United States and how we have shaped that history by presenting it from a colonialist perspective.

I have read a few histories about indigenous peoples but never one written by those with firsthand perspectives on the matter. This is a criticism I've seen more and more in the past few years and I am so glad that Blackhawk's tome is here to provide that firsthand perspective and give agency to those peoples and remove the infantilism we bestow as European-settler-storytellers.

This history is easy to follow, and it's size should not discourage potential readers (though after seeing the hardback, it might give your wrists some pause). Anyone with a genuine interest in history of the United States will gain a lot from reading this title. I look forward to checking out other titles by Blackhawk.