Alvin M. Josephy

"Impassioned participant in and acute observer of the life of his times, Alvin Josephy takes us from the New York of the teens and twenties to the 1990s on the Oregon ranch where he has found his heart's home. His "walk" leads him to Harvard during the hopeful days of the New Deal; to scriptwriting for MGM in Hollywood and menial work on Wall Street in the Depression; through a job with the Herald Tribune (for which he interviewed Leon Trotsky); to the wartime landings on Iwo Jima and Guam, which he covered as a Marine Corps combat correspondent; to an antiwar march with Martin Luther King, Jr.; to his profound involvement in Native American and environmental causes.". "Josephy tells how it was that he found his true calling - becoming an advocate for American Indians and the land they once called their own. He gives witness to two Americas: He renders the excitement of the go-go industrial expansionist nation that came into being in the first half of the century and burst onto the world after the war. At the same time he chronicles our growing awareness of another America - the land and people who had no voice as the country around them grew."--BOOK JACKET.

This is the stirring, crowded, epic story - laden with courageous deeds and dreams fulfilled and betrayed - of the hundreds of Indian nations that have inhabited our continent for more than 15,000 years and their centuries-long struggle with the Europeans who arrived in ever-increasing hordes after 1492. Here is American history from the Native American point of view - a long saga of friendship, treachery, war, and ultimately the loss of homeland that began when Columbus disembarked at Hispaniola among the Arawaks, and came to a climax when the last groups of Sioux moved onto a reservation following the battle of Wounded Knee in 1890. 500 Nations is a story of leaders, customs, political systems, and ways of life - of men and women whom we meet through their own words, and others whose achievements have been resurrected from memory, memoir, and ancient documents.

As most Americans of the 1860s fixed their attention on the battlefields of Shiloh and Manassas, another war raged on the largely unsettled Western frontier. This splendid work by the author of The Patriot Chiefs restores this "other" Civil War to its true, epic proportions. With formidable scholarship and irresistible narrative ease, Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., tells of the Yankee armada that foundered in the Louisiana bayous; of the bloody fighting on the ridges and prairies of the border states. where a Cherokee guerrilla leader was the last Confederate general to surrender -- two months after Appomattox: and of the U.S. Army's brutal campaigns against the Plains Indians in theaters as far apart as Minnesota and Colorado. - Publisher. This definitive history, the first comprehensive examination of the Civil War as it was fought west of the Mississippi, is also a fine account of the 1861-1865 Indian wars that drew thousands of Union troops away from the main Eastern theaters. Josephy ( The Patriot Chiefs ) describes the Confederate defeat at Pea Ridge, Ark., in 1862, the Union victory in '63 over Texas troops at Glorieta, N.M. (the ``Gettysburg of the West''), the '63 raid on Lawrence, Kans., led by Confederate William Quantrill, and the unsuccessful Union expedition up the Red River in '64. As Federal forces gained the upper hand, the conflict turned into an aggressive war against the Indians. Josephy describes how President Lincoln sent Gen. John Pope to suppress the Sioux Uprising in Minnesota and the Dakotas, and such various ensuing massacres as the slaughter of Cheyenne and Arapaho men, women and children at Sand Creek, Colo., in 1865. - Publishers Weekly.

Traces the tribe's relations with the white man, from Lewis and Clark to its dispossession by the U.S. Army in 1877.

Told through the life stories of nine Indian chiefs, this narrative depicts the American Indian effort to preserve a heritage and resist the changes brought by the white man. Hiawatha, King Philip, Pope, Pontiac, Tecumseh, Osceola, Black Hawk, Crazy Horse, and Chief Joseph each represent different tribal backgrounds, different times, and places, and different aspects of Indian leadership. Soldiers, philosophers, orators, and statesmen, these leaders were the patriots of their people.

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Examines the cultural, political, and social history of Africa illustrating the nation's transformation from a tribal society to a modern civilization.

"Alvin Josephy Jr.'s groundbreaking, popular books and essays advocated for a fair and true historical assessment of Native Americans, and set the course for modern Native American studies. This collection, which includes magazine articles, speeches, a white paper, and introductions and chapters of books, gives a generous and reasoned view of five hundred years of Indian history in North America from first settlements in the East to the long trek of the Nez Perce Indians in the Northwest. The essays deal with the origins of still unresolved troubles with treaties and territories to fishing and land rights, and who should own archaeological finds, as well as the ideologies that underpin our Indian policy. Taken together the pieces give a revelatory introduction to American Indian history, a history that continues both to fascinate and inform." -- Publisher's description

For the first time in the two hundred years since Lewis and Clark led their expedition from St. Louis to the Pacific, we hear the other side of the story--as we listen to nine descendants of the Indians whose homelands were traversed. Among those who speak: Newspaper editor Mark Trahant writes of his childhood belief that he was descended from Clark and what his own research uncovers. Award-winning essayist and fiction writer Debra Magpie Earling describes the tribal ways that helped her nineteenth-century Salish ancestors survive, and that still work their magic today. Montana political figure Bill Yellowtail tells of the efficiency of Indian trade networks, explaining how axes that the expedition traded for food in the Mandan and Hidatsa villages of Kansas had already arrived in Nez Perce country by the time Lewis and Clark got there a few months and 1,000 miles later. Umatilla tribal leader Roberta Conner compares Lewis and Clark's journal entries about her people with what was actually going on, wittily questioning Clark's notion that the natives believed the white men "came from the clouds"--In other words, they were gods. Writer and artist N. Scott Momaday ends the book with a moving tribute to the "most difficult of journeys," calling it, in the truest sense, for both the men who entered the unknown and those who watched, "a vision quest," with the "visions gained being of profound consequence." Some of the essays are based on family stories, some on tribal or American history, still others on the particular circumstances of a tribe today--but each reflects the expedition's impact through the prism of the author's own, or the tribe's, point of view.--From publisher's description.

Follows the erratic courses of Senate and House through the nation's history, while profiling noteworthy and notorious Senators and Representatives and surveying the conception, organization, and evolution of the Congress as a basic institution of government.

Illustrated essays on the history and cultures of American Indians. Covers geographic locations, languages, spiritual beliefs, customs, and art. When Columbus landed in 1492, the New World was far from being a vast expanse of empty wilderness: it was home to some seventy-five million people. They ranged from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego, spoke as many as two thousand different languages, and lived in groups that varied from small bands of hunter-gatherers to the sophisticated and dazzling empires of the Incas and Aztecs. This brilliantly detailed and documented volume brings together essays by fifteen leading scholars field to present a comprehensive and richly evocative portrait of Native American life on the eve of Columbus's first landfall. Developed at the D'Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian and edited by award-winning author Alvin M. Josehpy, Jr., America in 1492 is an invaluable work that combines the insights of historians, anthropologists, and students of art, religion, and folklore. Its dozens of illustrations, drawn from largely from the rare books and manuscripts housed at the Newberry Library, open a window on worlds flourished in the Americas five hundred years ago.