American Indian Wars - Historiography

Historiography

In American history books, the Indian Wars have often been treated as a relatively minor part of the military history of the United States and were long treated from the point of view of European Americans. Only in the last few decades of the 20th century did a significant number of historians begin to include the American Indian point of view in their writings about the wars, dealing more objectively with the US government's failures and emphasizing the impact of the wars on native peoples and their cultures.

A well-known and influential book in popular history was Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970). In academic history, Francis Jennings's The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (New York: Norton, 1975) was notable for challenging traditional portrayal of the wars between the indigenous peoples and colonists, and the later American pioneers in the West. Many more histories have been written since then that reflect new thinking about the conflicts.