| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Comanche Empire. By Pekka Hämäläinen. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. viii, 500 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-300-12654-9.)

It was probably inevitable that a book with this title would appear to cap seven decades of Comanche revisionism. Since the 1930s anthropologists have been verifying aspects of humanity previously denied the Comanches, namely social and political organization, law, and religion. Rupert N. Richardson's The Comanche Barrier to South Plains Settlement (1933) put the tribe on the map historically, though only as an obstacle to Anglo-Texan expansion. Their earlier role vis-à-vis the Spanish and French in the Southwest was then addressed in Elizabeth A. H. John's Storms Brewed in Other Men's Worlds (1975). Attention to the Comanches has intensified recently with several studies treating such topics as the frontier-as-borderland, southwestern slavery, and native politics and military societies. Increasingly, these prototypical plains buffalo hunters and horse pastoralists have materialized as sophisticated actors with their own manifest destiny.

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