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Review
| History's Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century, by Steven Conn. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 276 pages. $35.00, cloth.
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| In History's Shadow, Steven Conn examines the study of Native Americans in the nineteenth century as a "chapter in the nation's intellectual life," one that helped to shape major conceptions of the nation's history. Conn makes three interrelated claims. First, the presence of American Indians challenged the fundamental ways Euro-Americans understood their world. Second, as they attempted to account for Native American language, history, and culture, Euro-Americans shifted from Biblical and classical explanatory paradigms to more scientific ones, prompted in part by the impact on American intellectual life of German criticism and Darwinian natural science. Finally, the analysis of Native Americans' relationship to their own history influenced which historical questions should be asked, what constituted evidence, and the forms of historical discourse. As a result, a new historical consciousness emerged about the mechanisms of history and the exceptional place in the flow of history occupied by the United States. With Native Americans providing a shadow history, the boundaries of what constituted history were redrawn. |
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After setting the parameters for his study, Conn devotes four chapters to exploring ways of supporting his thesis. Chapter two is devoted to an analysis of the visual imagery of Native Americans present in nineteenth century American culture. By examining the works of five painters and briefly of two photographers, Conn traces the change from conceptualizing Native Americans as a part of a didactic and moral history to locating them in anthropology rooted in natural history. Chapter three focuses on the study of Indian languages and the role it played in the development of modern linguistics, and later how it became a sub-genre of anthropology. Chapters four and five concentrate on how the study of Native Americans contributed to the fields of archaeology ("object-based epistemology") and anthropology with its constituent parts: linguistics, archaeology, physical anthropology, and ethnology. |
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History's Shadow—for all its wealth of detail and the sophistication of its analysis—is nevertheless clearly argued and is written in a style that would be accessible to advanced undergraduate students and graduate students. And considering the bias of the way American history has been written through the years, and the subject areas the book covers, it should appeal to professionals across several other disciplines as well. Because academic studies have become increasingly inclusive over the past fifty years, History's Shadow should have real classroom appeal for a variety of courses. It could easily be used as a supplementary text for classes on both the graduate and the upper-division undergraduate levels in nineteenth-century American history. It could also be used in ethnic studies, particularly in Native American studies, in courses in the social sciences, especially in anthropology, and (because of its emphasis on the development of the discipline of history), in American historiography courses. History's Shadow could provide a central text for a graduate seminar on "The Formation of Euro-American Views of Native Americans," where its core chapters could be augmented by additional texts. Because of its wide-ranging central thesis, it could even serve as a supplementary text in a variety of broader courses such as "Nineteenth Century American Intellectual History," "Native American History," or "The Development of American Anthropology". |
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The strengths of History's Shadow lie in the exceptionally wide scope of its thesis and in the clarity with which it is presented. There is no jargon or convoluted syntax to confuse or muddy Conn's discussion of his main points. While the individual topics covered by History's Shadow have been researched in a number of other works, amply cited in the footnotes, Conn makes a compelling argument for reassessing the importance of the study of Native Americans on the development not only of American intellectual history in general, but for the specific disciplines that contributed toward shaping that history. His tracing of the process whereby Native Americans were gradually erased from history as it came to be generally defined during the nineteenth century, while perhaps not entirely new, is at least synthesized here more forcefully and in greater intellectual depth and detail. Conn concludes his book with the observation by Stephen D. Peet that American history dates its beginnings from the discoveries of Columbus and confines itself mainly to the white race. History's Shadow is Stephen Conn's venture to question this thesis and to provide a corrective to its strange bias. |
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| Iowa State University |
Charles L. P. Silet |
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