100 books like Cherokee America

This book is one of the reasons why I became a historian.

Ulrich uncovered the nearly illegible diary of an eighteenth-century midwife in Maine and included excerpts of the original at the start of each chapter. When I read the excerpts, I thought: How could these possibly be significant and what do they mean, anyway?

And then, like a detective, a gifted mind-reader, and a learned botanist all rolled into one, Ulrich unpacked each entry, weaving each snippet into the fabric of a wide textile of social history that includes reproductive history, gender and marital relations, local economies, political conflicts, and religion.

Abortion and abortifacients play a marginal role in the story Ulrich tells, but the history of midwifery and reproductive health are central to it. 

This recommendation may seem like a wildcard, but bear with me. The book follows two Chinese immigrant siblings in nineteenth-century California who must survive after their father dies. I love how it explores tough family relationships, including between the siblings–a girl and a trans boy.

There's exciting new research on trans people in early America, and I appreciate how the book presents the character straightforwardly without overexplaining his identity anachronistically. I also appreciate its exploration of survival strategies for women and non-cis men in harsh circumstances, despite not being strictly eighteenth-century.

While the setting differs from my usual remit, the book's nuanced handling of gender and depiction of underrepresented experiences make it a valuable addition. Sometimes, works from adjacent periods can shed important light on the ones we study most closely.

I listened to this audiobook about motherhood while pushing my newborn second child in a stroller. Sarah Knott takes the reader through the stages of becoming a mother–conception, miscarriage, pregnancy, birth, newborn care, childcare, and resuming work–and then doing it again with a second child.

Throughout, Knott contrasts her own experiences with those of women in the past, especially in North America and Britain. The differences are striking, not just in healthcare but also in social support. I thought about the women I'd written about who had many children and how important familial support was.

As a fellow professor, I was heartened to read about Knott's experience returning to work and re-finding her academic mind. She writes poignantly about how motherhood is a constant interruption. It is so true!

When researching my book, I often had access to letters, diaries, and even houses of affluent women whose papers archives were preserved. But recreating their intimate home music-making proved difficult. This book contrasts starkly–it's about enslaved colonial Barbadian women. Yet Marisa Fuentes' masterful stitching of archival scraps accessing their lives is moving.

She inventively reads maps, architecture, and ephemera alongside traditional sources to glimpse past existences. Reading this helped me recognize my sources' abundance, but also that sources demand continual re-reading and re-understanding. You can't take their meaning for granted. As Fuentes portrays enslaved lives, I realized my book's genteel subjects, while documented, still harbored unplumbed depths requiring creative interpretation to access their full intimacies.

I value Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education by the Cherokee writer Diane Glancy because it is an empathetic history, one that compels me to understand its subjects from their perspective, Plains Indian prisoners taken captive defending their lands from the U.S. invasion and shipped to Fort Marion Prison in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1875. There, the prisoners were subject to a regime of reeducation in order to “kill the Indian and save the man,” as the head of the prison and founder of the Carlisle Indian School Brigadier General Richard Henry Pratt stated it.

This regime subsequently became the model for the Indian boarding schools. But Glancy brings home that this model of “dislocation” is “at the heart of [all] education,” such as mine:  a Jewish boy educated in an Episcopalian school where the curriculum without a thought erased my own culture.

I don’t usually read billionaire romance because the billionaires are often crappy humans, and I don’t enjoy reading about crappy people getting a happily-ever-after. This book was a great exception. Adam Redhawk isn’t just a billionaire, he’s an Eastern Band Cherokee billionaire who was taken from his home and community when he was a child. Now he’s hired a PI to help him find his long-lost siblings to reconnect with the past that was stolen from him. I enjoyed the romance and the characters a lot. If you read billionaire romance, let this be one of them.

Camuto’s supple prose draws the reader into a journey toward mountains that no longer exist, although they are named on some old maps: the southern Appalachians not as they are, but as they were before the European invasion. A keen historian and observant naturalist, Camuto walks deep into “what’s left of the backcountry,” documenting the hopeful reintroduction of the nearly extinct red wolf and reflecting on Cherokee place names, culture, and history. "Needless to say,” he confesses, “I never got to the Cherokee Mountains”—and, in sad irony, shortly after the book’s publication the red wolf reintroduction failed. Still, Camuto has succeeded in recording resonant reminiscences of places, peoples, and biotic populations now lost.

A beautiful manuscript documenting the overall racial tension between Indigenous, enslaved Africans, and Europeans is superbly described by Dr. Miles in all aspects. The undertones of admiration and challenges between all three racial groups is eloquently pictured in the relationship between Shoeboots, a prominent Cherokee Champion and farmer, and Doll, his companion and enslaved African woman. The three-decade depiction of Shoeboot’s and Doll’s lives together and Doll’s petition to the federal government requesting Shoe Boot’s pension as his widow is beyond historic. Ties that Bind is a true testament to the enslaved Africans tribal experience before, during, and after slavery; it is essential to one’s book collection.  

What do you think of when you picture an aerospace engineer? It’s probably some white guy in a white shirt. A native woman certainly doesn’t fit that stereotype, but that didn’t matter to Mary Gold Ross. It’s so rare to see books biographies about people who are Native working in STEM, yet representation matters.

This is a delightful journey of seeing the thankfulness expressed by the Cherokee people for the gifts of each season.  Reader and listeners might pause and think about “what is something for which I am thankful?” Page by page this question is answered as one becomes aware of the gifts we often take for granted—water to refresh us; air to sustain us; earth to hold us; and family who love us, and thus we give thanks.