| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Steven Conn. History's Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2004. Pp. xii, 276. $35.00.
In this scrupulous and imaginative study, Steven Conn examines nineteenth-century American intellectual preoccupations with Native Americans. The century gave rise, Conn argues, to voluminous writing sweeping across the fields of art and photography, history, ethnology, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, natural science, and pseudo-sciences of various kinds. This constant, if not always fruitful, inquiry was driven by a quest to understand who Native Americans were, why they lived as they did, and, often, what defined their relationship to history. Ironically, and tragically, even as amateurs and experts pondered such weighty questions, the nation pursued policies and military campaigns that provided some definitive answers to the last question, at least. There is little evidence in this account that the Indian removal generated an equal degree of enthusiasm among intellectuals to prevent the real, as opposed to putative or cultural, extinction of tribes in the United States. On the contrary, the scholarship generated often served to rationalize if not advance the goals of conquest and annihilation.	1
The varied studies Conn analyzes merit examination mostly for what they reveal about the world views of the nineteenth-century Americans who produced them. As Conn observes, "writings about Native Americans in the nineteenth century traversed the full spectrum from the serious and learned, to the silly and laughable" (p. 7). The ends of the spectrum are not always entirely distinguishable, however, as Conn details the earnestness with which nineteenth-century intellectuals pursued a range of theories and ideas long since discarded by more contemporary scholarship.	. . .

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