Unworthy Republic foregoes an oft-repeated history of inevitable erasure, recounting instead how Native resistance and refusal shaped the aggressions and animosity of proponents of removal.Īnnabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. At the crux of pro-removalists troubles were the many forms of resistance Indigenous peoples, communities, and nations used to refuse whatever fate was conjured for them. APPLE BOOKS REVIEW The Native American Trail of Tears is rarely portrayed in history books as a human rights atrocity similar to the concentration camps of Nazi Germany.

Saunt shows how controversial the Indian Removal Act was among American politicians, and how a wide-ranging coalition of pro-removalists consistently struggled to force Indigenous communities from their homes. Hailed for its searing insight, Unworthy Republic transforms our understanding of this pivotal period in American history. Starting with Jeffersonian policies towards Indigenous lands and communities, Saunt traces the evolution of federal policy through the now infamous Jacksonian removal policy. Norton, 2020), historian Claudio Saunt shows how coalitions between southern slaveholders, social and religious reformers, financiers and speculators, and politicians produced what Saunt argues to be an unprecedently massive deportation initiative aimed at eliminating all Indigenous peoples living east of the Mississippi River. In his latest book Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory (W. Nor was it not the only manifestation of the federal government’s hotly debated Indian Removal policy of the 1830s. Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory 24.99 14.99 44.99 26.99. The Trail of Tears, during which the United States violently expelled thousands of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral homelands in the southeast, was anything but inevitable.

Unworthy republic review