Menu
Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory
Next in the queue
70
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
77/100Critics
35/100Scholars
97/100Author:
Claudio Saunt
Publisher:
W. W. Norton & Company
Date:
March 24, 2020
A history of 'Indian Removal,' the forced migration of Native Americans across the Mississippi River in the 1830s and the state-sponsored theft of their lands.
What The Reviewers Say
Saunt’s book is a major achievement, commendable for his candor about the horrors of expulsion and his illumination of the crucial role that Southern slaveholders—eyeing Indian lands to take over for themselves—played in shaping early 19th-century American Indian policy. This alone would make for an important study, but he also manages to do something truly rare: destroy the illusion that history’s course is inevitable and recover the reality of the multiple possibilities that confronted contemporaries.
... a powerful and lucid account, weaving together events with the people who experienced them up close.
... a damning synthesis of the federal betrayals, mass deportations, and exterminatory violence that defined the 1830s.
...Mr. Saunt presents a passionate and provocative account of what he calls “one of the first state-sponsored mass expulsions in the modern world”; the 'U.S. counterpart of Europe’s ‘Jewish question.' ” He convincingly argues that the root cause of the expulsion of the Indian inhabitants of the South was a vile mix of racial antipathy, unbounded greed and the naive idealism of self-styled Indian experts.
