RaveThe Times Literary SupplementTreuer’s revisionism leaves the reader with the understanding that foundational tales of indigenous suffering can be repurposed as a kind of prehistory for complex stories, typically absent from collective memory and scholarly literature, of Native nations that survived and thrived ... Some of these stories are familiar. Others are fresh. All are well told. Treuer builds characters and paints scenes that, in aggregate, connect a Native past to the present and future ... With this book, a new era might begin, in which popular conceptions of Native history include more than just a series of wounds.
Manisha Sinha
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement\"At once encyclopedic and analytically original, this massive tome – including back matter, the work swells to more than 700 pages – is a book of field-defining significance ... Sinha is at her best when she documents a vibrant and coherent intellectual tradition among African Americans ... Sinha’s treatment of the origins of the women’s rights movement reveals one of her book’s most glaring weaknesses (along with an occasional tendency to be somewhat ungenerous to previous generations of scholars who studied abolitionism and also to her peers now working in the field): inflexibility ... Sinha has nonetheless produced a powerful, ambitious work of scholarship. The research is extraordinary ... Her prose is also careful and often elegant, her argument bold ... Manisha Sinha’s book offers us a glimpse of a usable past: a diverse and inclusive story of abolitionism.\
