| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 38.2

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 38.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Shawnees and Their Neighbors, 1795–1870. By Stephen Warren. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005. ix + 217 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. $35.00.)

Stephen Warren, professor of history at Augustana College, has produced a masterful study of American Indians and nineteenth-century American history with his first book, The Shawnees and Their Neighbors. Originally a decentralized people with semi-autonomous villages and village chieftains, the Shawnees centralized under a few powerful figureheads over a period of four generations. Numerous factors contributed to this demise of what can only be labeled as a natural form of republicanism. These factors included the U. S. government demanding a single authority with whom to treat; the U. S. government using its patronage to precipitate the Americanization and modernization of the tribe; the teachings of Protestant missionaries; and the opportunism of a few Shawnee leaders and families who understood the power that comes with patronage and money. As a destructive consequence, politics became equal to—and, ultimately, superior to—culture. Though Warren mentions this only sporadically, the centralization of the Shawnees mirrors, almost identically, the centralization of the United States from the disparate, small, thirteen republics under the Articles of Confederation to the nation-state of Reconstruction as first articulated in the Gettysburg Address. The same process was occurring simultaneously in such places as Italy and Germany.

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