by Richard Subber | Jan 28, 2019 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History
“…conquerors who saw themselves
more as guardians…”
Book review:
The Comanche Empire
by Pekka Hämäläinen
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.
This book will change your mind about how the West was won.
Hint: The Comanches got there first.
The Comanches arrived obscurely in the American Southwest in 1706. The Comanche Empire provocatively makes the case that the Comanches created an imposing Southwestern American empire that spanned 150 years. They blunted the 18th century colonial ambitions of the Spanish in Mexico and the French in Louisiana, and stalled the westward thrust of Americans and the U.S. government until the middle of the 19th century. A broad coalition of Comanche rancheria chiefs throughout the territory of Comancheria first dominated the Apaches, eventually turned against their Ute allies, and commercially or militarily subjugated numerous lesser tribes.
Comanches managed a succession of peace treaties and conflicts with the Spaniards and completely blocked their repeated efforts to extend colonial settlements northward from Mexico. The political, commercial and military supremacy of the Comanches was based principally on their success in adopting and adapting Spanish horses for efficient transportation, military power, and a thriving and lucrative trade in horses throughout the Southwest.
Hämäläinen‘s central argument invites—indeed it obviously provokes—a reasonable dispute about the credibility of his claim for a Comanche empire. Clearly, in classical political or geopolitical usage, the claim is untenable, at least in part; the Comanche empire had neither fixed borders, nor a single self-sustaining centralized supreme authority, nor a durable bureaucracy, nor a definitive political structure.
Nevertheless, the Comanches had a respected, recurring broadly representative council of chiefs that planned and organized extensive raids, trading and other commerce, and military operations. Their hunting, pasturing, and trading territories had indistinct geographic borders that were never surveyed or adjudicated; Comanches never sought to occupy and permanently control any specifically delineated territory. In The Comanche Empire, Hämäläinen says they were “conquerors who saw themselves more as guardians than governors of the land and its bounties.” Nonetheless, the geographical extent of the their domains was well known, respected and enforced by the Comanches.
Each Comanche rancheria had its own geographic territory, rigorous socio-military culture and hierarchical organization. The situational circumstances of Comanche military superiority, their control of trade and their ability through the decades to repeatedly impose and maintain obviously favorable terms in their treaty and trade agreements are undeniable evidence of the Comanches’ extended dominance of terrain, physical resources, culture and commerce, and, not least in importance, the Spanish and French colonial enterprises that sought to compete with them.
For decades the Comanches set the terms of their success; no competing power could defeat them, and no Indians or Europeans could evade the Comanches’ dominance in their domain.
It becomes obvious: the Comanches created a de facto empire.
Ultimately, they were marginalized by a combination of drought that constrained their bison hunting and weakened their pastoral horse culture, disruption of trade that limited their access to essential carbohydrate foodstuffs, epidemic disease that repeatedly thinned the Comanche populations, predatory bison hunting by the Americans in the early 1870s that wiped out the Indians’ essential food resource, and, finally, by the irresistible tide of U.S. government-sponsored westward migration that pushed American citizens into Comanche territory.
Too bad the Comanches left no accounts of their own. It would be fascinating to hear this story in their own words.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2019 All rights reserved.
many waters: more poems with 53 free verse poems,
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by Richard Subber | Oct 13, 2018 | American history, History
America was already
an “old world”…
October 12, 2025, was the 533rd anniversary of the “discovery” of “the New World” by Christopher Columbus.
Columbus and his men made landfall in the Bahamas, possibly on what is now called San Salvador Island, on October 12, 1492. You may know the song: “the Nina, the Pinta, the Santa Maria, were sailing vessels three…”
Let’s cut to the chase: Columbus never “discovered” America. He never saw the North American continent, much less set foot on it. Columbus made four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean and did a lot of snooping around the Caribbean islands and the northern coast of South America.
An adventurer named Juan Ponce de León gets the teddy bear for being the first European to wade ashore on the coastline of what is now the continental United States. He explored the coast of a land mass that he named “Florida” more than 20 years after the first Columbus gig—on April 2, 1513, de León and his men landed (possibly at the place we now call St. Augustine) and claimed the territory for Spain.
Of course, the Europeans were late to the party.
At least millions of native Americans—probably tens of millions—had been living on the North American continent for thousands of years before the smelly, hairy white men from Europe barged in.
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2018 All rights reserved.
Book review: American Colonies
you see, so many and so much
came before the Pilgrims
by Alan Taylor
click here
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My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 52 free verse and haiku poems,
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by Richard Subber | Jun 30, 2018 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History
…men who brought
their own shovels to work…
Book review:
Who Built America?
Working People
and the Nation’s Economy,
Politics, Culture, and Society,
Vol. 1 To 1877
by Christopher Clark and Nancy A. Hewitt
New York: Worth Publishers, 2000
721 pages, with a substantial Appendix and index
Who Built America? is a comprehensive, widely sourced reference work that tackles the story of the actual building of America and our cities, commerce/industries, and infrastructures.
Clark and Hewitt give full respect to the groups of people who labored to do so: native Americans, women and children, minorities, and immigrants are fully credited.
I think that a useful feature is the summary chronology and suggested complementary readings at the end of each chapter.
Who Built America? is a go-to reference for any serious student of American history.
Volume 2, covering the Reconstruction through the end of the 20th century, is an equally appealing component of this series published by the American Social History Project, City University of New York.
This 2000 edition of Who Built America? was written by Christopher Clark and Nancy A. Hewitt, based on the original edition written by Levine, Brier, Brundage, Countryman, Fennel, and Rediker.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2018 All rights reserved.
Book review: Forced Founders
by Woody Holton
The so-called “Founding Fathers”
weren’t the only ones
who helped to shape our independence…
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As with another eye: Poems of exactitude with 55 free verse and haiku poems,
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by Richard Subber | Apr 17, 2018 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History
…a conversational biography…
Book review:
John Eliot:
The Man Who Loved The Indians
by Carleton Beals
New York: Julian Messner, Inc., 1957
192 pages
This is an entertaining biography of the Puritan minister who was known during his lifetime (1604-1690) as the “Apostle to the Indians.” Rev. John Eliot was the colonial leader who was most influential in cooperating with Indian leaders to establish the “Praying Indian” towns in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Beals creates a fictionalized biography of convenient length. The narrative is filled with dialogue that is relevant to the story, but is, of course, completely inauthentic in the sense that there is only a fragmentary record of Eliot’s conversations with his fellow colonials and with American Indians. This isn’t a big deal. However, Beals’ conversational tone is not to my taste for serious biographical treatments.
John Eliot: The Man Who Loved The Indians is based on substantial research and offers a bibliography of 46 sources, including many that are well respected and well known to historians and students of the colonial period. There is a useful index.
Beals offers an appealing, if one-sided, complement to serious investigation of cultural and political dynamics in 17th century New England.
Caveat: Beals, without apology, writes his story using the European context. To be sure, Waban and the other Indians are characters in the story.
Beals doesn’t spend a lot of time on the brutality of their demise.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2018 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Reader (Der Vorleser)
It’s more than a rehash of WWII…
by Bernhard Schlink
My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 52 free verse and haiku poems,
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by Richard Subber | Mar 23, 2018 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History
…a very busy life…
Book review:
John Eliot: “Apostle to the Indians”
by Ola Elizabeth Winslow (1885-1977)
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1968
225 pages
John Eliot is a detailed, respectful biography of the mid-17th century Puritan minister who organized Praying Indian towns in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and translated (with the help of James the Printer and other Indians) the Geneva Bible into the Algonquian language of the eastern Massachusetts Indians.
Winslow offers a competent account of Eliot’s very busy life, and provides decent political and sociological context for his personal, tenacious, and domineering commitment to “civilize” the Indians and convert them to Christianity. Eliot’s tribulations and triumphs are clearly presented, and Winslow underscores the judgment of his contemporaries and of three centuries of scholarship that demonstrate that Eliot was a vigorous, decent, and exemplary man who did his lifelong best to promote the welfare of the Indians—as he conceived it.
There is a useful index, an extensive bibliography, and instructive notes to the text.
Caveat: Prof. Winslow was no ethnohistorian, and she wrote in a style that may be more valuable to a student than to a sincere historian. She endorses, without any apparent reluctance, the discredited conception of the indigenous Indians as “savages” who were “degraded” and burdened with “dark” minds that invited the self-conceived redemptive efforts of the colonists to “civilize” them and bring them into the English church.
This careless error—indeed, this gratuitous insult to 17th century native Americans who had a vibrant culture, lifestyle, and faith—is a very annoying distraction.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2018 All rights reserved.
A poet is a “maker”
…and it doesn’t have to rhyme…
click here
many waters: more poems with 53 free verse poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Mar 20, 2018 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History
a zealous missionary
without portfolio…
Book review:
Harriet Beecher Stowe:
A Spiritual Life
by Nancy Koester
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, MI, 2014
371 pages, with index
A Spiritual Life is a robust telling of the story of Harriet Beecher Stowe.
From the first page to the last, you can’t doubt that Stowe cared deeply about most aspects of private life, her faith, and the all-encompassing religious framework of the civitas. As a woman in the mid-19th century, she was a zealous missionary without portfolio.
No surprise here, Koester gives comprehensive analysis of the writing and impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (published 1852). It was a best-seller in the United States and in Great Britain. It moved multitudes to hate slavery or hate Harriet Beecher Stowe. It did not, despite President Lincoln’s mocking jest when he met Stowe at the White House, start “this great war.” During the run-up to the American Civil War, Uncle Tom’s Cabin did help to clarify existing polemical doctrines of opposing camps.
Koester’s aim is to illuminate Stowe’s spiritual life and her very public commitment to advocating her faith and the importance of religious observance and conviction.
If that’s not to your taste, I think reading A Spiritual Life will be drudgery. For me, it was illuminating.
For my taste, Koester mentions but does not usefully detail the context of other aspects of Stowe’s life and impact on American society. She was a woman who conspicuously did not abide by the social conventions that dictated a passive, private, familial role for women. She wrote and was published extensively (I was surprised to learn that she was a prolific writer, including novels, tracts and political broadsides). She had lots of contact with the great and near-great, including President Lincoln and Queen Victoria. Stowe more or less supported her extended family with her writing—it would be interesting to know how much money she made from her writing, because Stowe persisted in a socially risky career and lifestyle that might have been unattainable without a (relatively) high income. I suspect that Stowe was not one of the 99% in her time.
Koester nobly attempts to make her case that Harriet Beecher Stowe was a mover and shaker, non pareil, in the anti-slavery movement before, during and after the Civil War. I suggest that this is a circumstantial biography of a notable lady who was notably revered—and notably tolerated—by a great many of her contemporaries.
If the South actually had won the Civil War, I think it’s possible that Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, would be more than a tad less familiar to us.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2018 All rights reserved.
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many waters: more poems with 53 free verse poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
* * * * * *
