Peace and Friendship

By Stephen Aron,

Book cover of Peace and Friendship

Book description

A new understanding of how the West came to be

For over 35 years, the dominant histories of the American West have been narratives of horrific conflicts. Framed in terms of empire building, these histories use modern constructs of ethnic cleansing and genocide to reckon the costs of centuries of…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Peace and Friendship as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Sticking with the theme of history books I read this past year, Aron's Peace and Friendship certainly got me thinking about the "frontier" in a different way. Unlike the stereotypical violence one would expect with a history of frontier relations between Native peoples and Europeans, this book offers a story of "concord"--those fleeting moments when Indigenous people and Euro-American newcomers met, collaborated, an coexisted in the contact zones of North America. Aron is expansive in tracing these moments from early Kentucky to Missouri, the Pacific Coast, the Great Plains, and many points in between. But just as his book shows…

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