Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.3 | The History Cooperative

American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories. By Daniel H. Usner Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. xvi, 189 pp. $45.00, isbn 0-8032-4556-4.)

In the movie Fried Green Tomatoes, there sits cemented to his La-Z-Boy a minor character named Ed. His wife, played by Kathy Bates, desires a fuller relationship, but Ed cannot be distracted from his television, from his Atlanta Braves, not even when she wraps herself in Saran Wrap. 1

In two ways, Ed resembles old-fashioned historians of the South. Oblivious to gender relations, they clung to a reductive view of native peoples. Indian nations, geographically removed and chronologically confined, did not really belong in histories of the South. 2

Enter the revisionist Daniel H. Usner Jr. Many readers will no doubt remember how his 1985 Journal of American History essay, "American Indians on the Cotton Frontier," stitched Indian history into southern history, changing both. Now, Usner is back with an interesting and important book. . . .

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