Search results for ""Author Theda Perdue""

Late in April 1861, President Lincoln ordered Federal troops to evacuate forts in Indian Territory. That left the Five Civilized Tribes—Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles—essentially under Confederate jurisdiction and control. The American Indian and the End of the Confederacy, 1863–1866, spans the closing years of the Civil War, when Southern fortunes were waning, and the immediate postwar period. Annie Heloise Abel shows the extreme vulnerability of the Indians caught between two warring sides. "The failure of the United States government to afford to the southern Indians the protection solemnly guaranteed by treaty stipulations had been the great cause of their entering into an alliance with The Confederacy, "she writes. Her classic book, originally published in 1925 as the third volume of The Slaveholding Indians, makes clear how the Indians became the victims of uprootedness and privation, pillaging, government mismanagement, and, finally, a deceptive treaty for reconstruction.

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"[Abel's] story is a tragic one, but leaving it untold would be a greater tragedy. Native American southerners shared the experience of the Civil War with other Americans, and their involvement in that upheaval had as profound an effect on their subsequent history. Abel's was the first serious telling of that story."--Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green. The secession of southern states in the winter and spring of 1861-62 brought about a crisis for the Five Civilzed Tribes living in present-day Oklahoma, or Indian Territory. Forced out of the South thirty years earlier and relocated there, the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles had maintained a relationship with the United States through treaties and resident agents. Now the civil war that threatened the Union also called into question its relationship with the southern Indians, an influential minority of whom owned black slaves. In this volume, originally published in 1915 as the first of a trilogy on slaveholding Indians, Annie Heloise Abel explores the diplomatic manuevers of the Confederacy to secure alliances with these five Indian nations.The negotiations were an important chapter in American diplomatic history, as Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, professors of history at Dartmouth College, point out in their introduction to this Bison Book. They profile the English-born, Kansas-educated Annie Heloise Abel (1873-1947), a distinguished historical editor and writer whose works include The American Indian in the Civil War, 1862-1865, also a Bison Book.

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When Europeans first arrived in North America, between five and eight million indigenous people were already living there. But how did they come to be here? What were their agricultural, spiritual, and hunting practices? How did their societies evolve and what challenges do they face today? Eminent historians Theda Perdue and Michael Green begin by describing how nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers followed the bison and woolly mammoth over the Bering land mass between Asia and what is now Alaska between 25,000 and 15,000 years ago, settling throughout North America. They describe hunting practices among different tribes, how some made the gradual transition to more settled, agricultural ways of life, the role of kinship and cooperation in Native societies, their varied burial rites and spiritual practices, and many other features of Native American life. Throughout the book, Perdue and Green stress the great diversity of indigenous peoples in America, who spoke more than 400 different languages before the arrival of Europeans and whose ways of life varied according to the environments they settled in and adapted to so successfully. Most importantly, the authors stress how Native Americans have struggled to maintain their sovereignty--first with European powers and then with the United States--in order to retain their lands, govern themselves, support their people, and pursue practices that have made their lives meaningful. Going beyond the stereotypes that so often distort our views of Native Americans, this Very Short Introduction offers an historically accurate, deeply engaging, and often inspiring account of the wide array of Native peoples in America. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

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Annie Heloise Abel describes the 1862 Battle of Pea Ridge, a bloody disaster for the Confederates but a glorious moment for Colonel Stand Watie and his Cherokee Mounted Rifles. The Indians were soon enough swept by the war into a vortex of confusion and chaos. Abel makes clear that their participation in the conflict brought only devastation to Indian Territory. Born in England and educated in Kansas, Annie Heloise Abel (1873–1947) was a historical editor and writer of books dealing mainly with the trans-Mississippi West. They include The American Indian as Slaveholder and Secessionist (1915), also reprinted as a Bison Book. Abel's distinguished career is noted in an introduction by Theda Perdue, the author of Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society (1979), and Michael D. Green, whose Politics of Indian Removal: Creek Government and Society in Crisis (1982) was published by the University of Nebraska Press.

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