Bookshelf
UPCOMING
TIES THAT BIND: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom. (Tiya Miles, University of California Press, 329 pp., paperback - $21.95)
TIES THAT BIND tells the saga of Shoe Boots, a famed Cherokee warrior and successful farmer, and Doll, an African slave he acquired in the 1790s.
Over the next 30 years, Shoe Boots and Doll lived together as master and slave and also as lifelong partners who, with their children and grandchildren, experienced key events in American history including slavery, the Creek War, the founding of the Cherokee Nation, its subsequent removal along the Trail of Tears and the Civil War. This is the story of their lives in slavery and in freedom.
Crafted from historical and literary sources, TIES THAT BIND portrays the members of the Shoe Boots' family. Doll is known through the records of things done to her - her purchase, her marriage and the loss of her children - but also through her petition to the federal government for the pension owed to her as Shoe Boots' widow. A rendition of the realities of black slavery within Native American tribes, the book provides the fullest picture we have of the complexities, ironies and tensions among African Americans, Native Americans and whites in the first half of the 19th century.
Miles is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan. (August)
RECENT
WEST BOUND: Stories of Providence. (Robert F. Gish, West End Press, 135 pp., paperback - $15.95)
The interlocking stories in WEST BOUND cover the migration of J.J., his new wife Naomi and their son Otis from Tulsa, Okla., to their settlement in Albuquerque, N.M.; Otis' coming of age amid the shifting fortunes of his family; and events in other peoples' lives at the same place and time.
Author Robert F. Gish creates a world where the workings of Providence are hard to fathom and their outcome often hard to bear. From the Tulsa race riots of 1921 to Buck's last coon hunt, the reader never finds a place to rest though rough justice is always at work.
Gish has written more than a dozen works of fiction, nonfiction, folktales, biography and essays. He is an Oklahoma native of Cherokee-Anglo descent and lives with his wife Judith in Albuquerque. (2005)
THE RIVERS OF WAR. (Eric Flint, Random House Publishing, 448 pp., hardcover - $29.95)
In the War of 1812, U.S. troops are battling the British on the Canadian border even as a fight is being waged against the Creek followers of the Indian leader Tecumseh and his brother known as The Prophet.
In Europe, Napoleon Bonaparte's war has become a losing proposition and the British are only months away from unleashing an assault on Washington. Fateful choices are being made in the corridors of power and on the American frontier.
As Andrew Jackson, backed by Cherokee warriors, leads a fierce attack on the Creek tribes, his young republic will soon need every citizen soldier it can find. Through the remarkable adventures of men who were really there - men of mixed race, mixed emotions and a singular purpose - THE RIVERS OF WAR carries us in this new direction transforming a chapter of American history. With a cast of characters ranging from James Monroe and James Madison to Sam Houston, Francis Scott Key and Cherokees chief John Ross and Major Ridge, THE RIVERS OF WAR travels from the battle of Horseshoe Bend to the battle of New Orleans. (2005)
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| TO MARRY AN INDIAN |
TO MARRY AN INDIAN: The Marriage of Harriett Gold and Elias Boudinot in Letters, 1823-1839. (Therese Strouth Gaul, University of North Carolina Press, 256 pp., paperback - $21.95)
When 19-year-old Harriett Gold, from a prominent white family in Cornwall, Conn., announced in 1825 her intention to marry a Cherokee man, her shocked family initiated a correspondence debating her decision to marry an Indian. Eventually, Gold's family members reconciled themselves to her wishes and she married Elias Boudinot in 1826. After the marriage, she returned with Boudinot to the Cherokee Nation where he went on to become a political figure and editor of the first Native American newspaper - the Cherokee Phoenix.
Providing rare firsthand documentation of race relations in the early 19th-century United States, this volume collects the Gold family correspondence during the engagement period as well as letters the young couple sent to the family describing their experiences in New Echota, Ga., during the years prior to the Cherokee removal. The correspondence provides a factual accompaniment to the many fictionalized accounts of contacts between Native Americans and Euro-Americans and supports the recognition that letters form an important category of literature.
Gaul is associate professor of English at Texas Christian University. (2005)
- Travis Snell