| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880–1930. By Alan Trachtenberg. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004. xxvi, 369 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-374-29975-7.)

In his fascinating new book, Alan Trachtenberg recounts Henry James's observations from the visitors' balcony at Ellis Island, recorded in The American Scene (1907). James raised the question of how to connect the "'inconceivable alien'" to "'"old" Americans'" without, in Trachtenberg's wonderful phrase, causing the "sensitive citizen into imagining something like an Indian raid on the homestead of the American ego" (p. 116). The ironic yet reassuring answer to that question emerged through nostalgic commemoration of Indians as models for an appropriate understanding of American identity. By staging Indians as romantic and noble first Americans, Americanizers of various stripes sought to provide a template for transforming immigrants into citizens.

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