Native Peoples in the History of the United States
Tuesdays, October 6 - November 10, 5:30-7pm ET

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

Over the last 75 years, knowledge of the history and culture of Native Americans has experienced enormous gains. Like so much else in the United States and the modern Western world, these gains were touched off and reflected back on each other by the release of pent up political, social, and cultural energies after World War II. Their acceleration commenced with particularly explosive impact starting in the mid-1960s. Yet the integration of Native American history into the traditional history of the United States and into Americans’ understanding of their collective history lagged behind that of women and people of color. Only recently has serious scholarship about the indigenous people of North American matured enough to have a substantial impact on the way professional historians think about the entire history of the United States.

The expanded historical knowledge about North American indigenous peoples is the subject of this course. It will examine what is now known about the history of indigenous Americans’ communities and culture. It will explore how the knowledge we’ve recently come to possess changes as well as leaves relatively unmolested conventional previous knowledge about the peoples whose residence in North America long antedated that of the continent’s later European settlers. It will also explore how that knowledge similarly affects or leaves unchanged the history of North America’s Europeans settlements. In short, given what historians have so far learned by introducing our Native fellow-citizens into the larger history of the United States and by subjecting their past to historical inquiry (just as they have by introducing the history of women, Blacks, and others whose histories were until recent decades also left out of serious investigation), the course will examine how, if at all, we must alter our understanding of the larger history of the United States.

In taking up such matters, the course will proceed chronologically with the help of a narrative of American Indian history, which commences before European “contact” with the Western Hemisphere and ends in the present. That narrative, published in 2023, is however, as are all works emerging from scholarly inquiry, filled with robust argument. The book is The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History by Ned Blackhawk, the Howard R. Lamar Professor of History at Yale. While course assignments will be drawn exclusively from Blackhawk’s book, analogous recent survey of the same subject is Kathleen Duval, Native Nations: A Millennium in North America, published in 2025. You’re free to read and compare both, as well, of course, any and all sources cited in them

COURSE FORMAT:

This is an interactive online seminar course that meets weekly over 6 weeks. Live online sessions will use the zoom platform. Weekly reading or other forms of materials may be assigned. Weekly sessions will be recorded and available for registered participants to access throughout the course.

There are no papers or grades. This course does not offer any credits or certificates. This course is intended for learning for the love of learning.

COURSE MATERIALS:

This course will require participants to rent/buy/borrow the following text:

Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History

Registrants will receive access to the course website about two weeks before the course starts.

COURSE CANCELLATION POLICY:

Registrants can cancel and receive a full refund up to September 21. After September 21, there will be no refunds issued. Yale Alumni College courses are subject to schedule changes as well as cancellations. If Yale Alumni College must cancel any course prior to its start due to low enrollment, you will be notified of this by the cancellation date. Upon cancellation of a course, registrants may transfer their registration to another available course or have the registration fee fully refunded.

In the event of a disruption to the original course schedule, including but not limited to; Professor absence, hazardous weather conditions, or local travel restrictions, Yale Alumni College will do its best to reschedule the missed class for the week immediately following the original end date at the same course time and day.

image: Painting by Thomas Hill "Indians of the Northwest" (1874)