The twenty-six grievances in the Declaration of Independence targeted two distinct categories of British policies: reforms and punishments. Parliamentary reforms like taxing the colonies to help pay for the 10,000 troops left in America at the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 (mostly as a human wall protecting colonists from Native Americans – and vice versa) angered free colonists, but not sufficiently to make them want out of the British Empire. Free Americans did, however, protest Parliament’s reforms, for example, by tarring and feathering Customs officials who cracked down on molasses smugglers, burning stamped paper, and throwing 340 chests of tea – taxed by Parliament and carried to American ports by the East India Company – into Boston Harbor. To punish the colonists for these protests, Parliament revoked Massachusetts’ charter, sent troops to reoccupy Boston, and more. Ultimately royal officials in the colonies even forged informal alliances with black Americans previously enslaved by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and other Founders. It was these British punishments, not Parliament’s original reforms, that pushed free colonists over the edge into independence.

Chapter 2 describes the original concepts and related research of the author Brave Heart and Indigenous colleagues. The new operationalization of historical trauma described in the Introduction is applied to this context, for example when it comes to discrimination, intergenerational transmission, and social pathologies. The chapter provides empirical material on, among others, the immediate consequences that fully or partially substantiate the assumptions, including assumed mediating factors of historical trauma effects such as traditional values or cultural identity. The chapter concludes by reviewing the first available studies on healing, involving an adjunct program to group therapy with traditional Indigenous content, as well as empowerment through entrepreneurship programs tailored to youth. The conclusion of the chapter is that not all the possibilities of a broader conceptualization of historical trauma in this area have been realized.

The treatment of North American Indigenous nations as domestic rather than foreign nations is deeply woven into the political-legal fabric of the United States. Even before the United States could exert any real authority in vast regions of Native North America, US officials fancifully defined the independent Indigenous nations whose territories they sought to expropriate as falling under the preeminent sovereignty of the United States. The customary exclusion of US–Indigenous relations from the history of American foreign relations reflected and reinforced this imperial project. Of course, Indigenous nations were, and are, sovereign peoples. This chapter provides a roadmap for those endeavoring to narrate histories that more accurately reflect the nation-to-nation dynamics of US–Indigenous relations. Drawing on the work of Native American and borderlands historians, along with those of Native American and Indigenous Studies scholars more broadly, it offers guidance on how to engage with frameworks such as settler colonialism and methodologies such as ethnohistory to contribute to building a critical and ethical body of work that explicitly frames US–Indigenous relations as international rather than domestic history.

The American Revolution transformed Indigenous American nations. But their history throughout the colonial period was one of great change and rupture well before 1776. Colonization introduced disease, new material goods, economic transformations, and countless new ideas to the Indigenous people of North America over the course of generations. In this context, Indigenous communities changed, adapted, and above all survived through many challenges and opportunities. By the mid eighteenth century, several Indigenous groups were building power and stability in the midst of change, even as others struggled, migrated, and consolidated. In the 1750s, imperial conflicts between France and Great Britain altered the political context in which several groups had built influence and authority. In the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War, Eastern Indians faced the British empire without a counterbalancing French colonial government. This severe change constrained Indigenous options and strategy on the eve of Revolution.

This chapter examines the profound influence of settler colonialism in mid eighteenth-century North America, a period marked by the American Revolution and the birth of a new nation. Unlike other forms of colonialism, settler colonialism aimed at the deliberate erasure of Indigenous histories and cultures, seeking to establish a permanent non-Indigenous society on Indigenous lands. This process, driven by land hunger, religious fervor, and European imperial competition, has left deep legacies of dispossession, violence, and socioeconomic disparities. The American Revolution is analyzed as a “settler uprising” — a dual resistance against British policies and a pivotal moment in settler colonialism. The role of settler colonialism and its global implications are critical to comprehending the Revolution and its enduring effects.

What did it mean to have a national economy? The American Revolution provided the political space and the ideological impetus for institutional changes that over time fundamentally altered American economies. As policymakers developed ad hoc solutions to individual and governmental debt woes, they prompted resistance and counterresistance, and eventually created a national economy. This chapter begins with the economic possibilities and constraints created by the new Constitution in 1788 and what these meant for slavery, productivity, invention, and the development of capitalism. It explores how the expansion of land, slavery, and goods shaped the development of an integrated national economy, while also creating variation in how and for whom economic opportunities and limitations applied. Finally, because the national economy worked differently depending on where one lived, and whether one was male or female, Black, white, or brown, this chapter uses the lives of several individuals to understand its different aspects.

The American War of Independence felt the influence not only of statesmen and generals but also of subordinate officers, enlisted men, women, Native Americans, and African Americans. Red-letter events were triggered by incidents as diverse as grassroots rebellions and epidemics. A crucial mistake might cost a general a battle – but it could also have the ironic effect of leaving him better off than before. Factors such as climate, disease, and geography further complicated commanders’ decisionmaking process, if anything increasing their significance. Various white, enslaved, and Indigenous leaders excelled at everything from manipulating morale to obtain their ends using nothing more than threats. But commanders’ influence was not always positive. For example, it took George Washington most of the Revolutionary War to learn what his British counterparts had known all along – that the war was his to win so long as he stifled his own aggressive instincts and mostly stayed on defense.

In considering the cacophony of calls to action and the responses or lack thereof to these efforts, this chapter provides a comprehensive view of the varied tools of mobilization that attempted to entice men and women to serve or support military service and the Revolution by engaging in a conflict that entangled individuals throughout the Atlantic world. In a war that involved the military mobilization of more than 175,000 individuals within the colonies and about 300,000 British and Irish subjects alongside 30,000 Hessians, studying the process behind these figures highlights an opportunity to better understand not only the mechanics of the war but the meaning given to the Revolution by individuals who chose at various moments during the eight years of war to heed the call to action in many forms.

There was no inevitability about the tumults between Britain and the thirteen colonies that eventually led to the American Revolution. North American colonists had little intention of escaping the British empire – they loved it so much that they were willing in 1756 to fight for its survival. They had little interest in their disparate colonies joining together into a larger federation. White Americans and West Indians – though not the large and growing enslaved population of British America – were happy with the status quo and were proud of their many achievements as settlers in a new world, especially in the dynamic period of the first half of the eighteenth century. They were a happy, contented and prosperous people, as numerous writings of the time insisted. Secure in their loyalty to the British monarch, to British laws, and to the majesty of a growing British Atlantic empire, Revolution was not in contemplation.

William E. Hartmann and Joseph P. Gone use insights from Beatrice Medicine and Vine Deloria Jr., two luminaries in understanding how anthropology might better serve Indigenous peoples, as an evaluative framework to review five recent ethnographies on psychosocial well-being among Native Americans and three areas of Indigenous scholarship.Hartmann and Gone observe commonalities across areas of Indigenous scholarship and variation among ethnographic works in their degrees of theoretical abstraction, affordances for community control, and attention to relationality in knowledge production. Recommendations related to shifting the ethnographic gaze away from Indigenous peoples toward structures of power that constrain Indigenous self-determination are made in hopes of fostering more reciprocal relations between psychological anthropology and Native American peoples.

Discontent in Britain’s Thirteen Colonies had built to open violence by the mid-1770s, much of it occurring in and around Boston. (See Map 19.) A lack of representation and perceptions that British leaders pursued overbearing policies because they were indifferent or even hostile to the plight of the inhabitants pushed ever more colonists towards open rebellion. In response, the tools Britain possessed to confront its colonial troubles were limited by the nature of its government and the few instruments at its disposal. These included the army and navy, but their use at Boston only exacerbated tensions. Fighting flared on 19 April 1775 when British soldiers attempted to seize munitions at Concord, Massachusetts. Along the way, at Lexington, shots were fired and several colonists were killed. Afterwards, colonists sniped at and harried the British on their return to Boston. In the wake of Lexington and Concord, American militia gathered around Boston, surrounding its British garrison. Nearly two months after the outbreak of hostilities, the Americans seized and fortified the strategic Charlestown Peninsula overlooking Boston harbour. In response, the British stormed the position in what became known as the battle of Bunker Hill: the first major battle of the American Revolution. At the end of the day, the British held the field, but at the cost of nearly a quarter of their army in Boston.

This chapter moves beyond a captivity scholarship based almost entirely on the experiences of White or White-descent captives and their Indian captors to study an account of nineteenth-century borderland captivity in the US Southwest, where – contrary to what the plethora of Anglo captivity scholarship indicates – most captives were of Mexican and/or Indigenous descent. To do so, I read Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and the Goodness of God (1682) alongside María Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would’ve Thought It? (1872). This Mexican-American historical romance novel and, I would add, fictionalization of an Indian captivity narrative, retells the history of Mexican dispossession at the conclusion of the Mexican-American War through fictional Mohave captive and emerging Mexican American elite, Lola Medina. Within a broader rethinking of the captivity narrative genre, I argue that captivity narratives helped produced proto-Latinx subjects as racially discrete individuals, even while the factual condition of nineteenth-century captivity forced individuals of Latin-American descent into ambiguous relation with other racialized communities.

American Indian tribes are not often considered in comparative constitutional law but should garner more attention. Many tribes are dynamically remolding their constitutional structures. Nowhere is this dynamism more on display than in the re-shaping and re-structuring of tribal democratic institutions. The takeaway from this chapter is that tribal governments are experimenting carefully with different democratic structures, and the need for institutional change is seen as a moment of growth rather than a failure in their practice of iterative and evolutionary self-government. Reforms have become an almost natural – if not celebrated – part of perfecting their government structure.

This chapter focuses on ways to understand the Vietnam War through the operation of race in US interventions during the 1960s. As part of the inquiry, it examines friction between the United States and Panama in 1964 and the invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965. France’s legacy in Vietnam and the US adaptation of French racialized colonial policies provide a backdrop for the war. The Cold War, rather than territorial annexation or economic exploitation, provided the chief rationale for the US presence in Vietnam and provided a path for particularly American forms of racism to emerge there and in areas of US domestic life that were affected by the conflict. In the interim, Vietnam served as a laboratory in which various theories about modernization and development were evaluated and carried out. The experiences of American minorities in the military are documented, including officials’ efforts to control dissidence in the ranks. African Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Asian Americans experienced the war in somewhat different ways, but all found themselves confronted by leading assumptions and practices about their minoritarian status. The war led many to see themselves as racially defined in a struggle whose costs were disproportionately borne by people of color amidst discrimination at home and by Vietnamese combatants abroad. As a result new sensibilities led to transformation in American civil society.

On the first two days of September, two musicals opened that offered descriptions of different peoples of colour for white Broadway audiences: Sissle and Blake’s The Chocolate Dandies (African Americans); and Friml, Stothart, Harbach and Hammerstein’s Rose-Marie (Indigenous peoples of Canada). Problematic stereotypes were performed in both instances, though The Chocolate Dandies featured Josephine Baker and Elisabeth Welch in its cast. Musicals opening later in the month included a new edition of The Passing Show and George Gershwin’s musical written expressly for London, Primrose, with a book by Guy Bolton supervised by George Grossmith, Jr.

From the beginning, local language policies were crucial to the formation of the English-only movement. From the 1970s into the 1980s and 1990s, relatively disparate activists and politicians started to notice each other, collaborate with each other, and form English-only organizations together. To tell this story, I focus on the perspectives and experiences of key figures like Emmy Shafer, who started the current English-only movement in 1980 when she started organizing support for an Antibilingualism Ordinance targeting Spanish and Kreyòl in Dade County, Florida. Shafer pioneered a number of groundbreaking strategies that would become a blueprint, like emphasizing the local economy, starting a nonprofit, and hiring a ghostwriter. I also introduce the two figures who really popularized the idea of making English official: John Tanton and Senator S. I. Hayakawa. I discuss the founding of U.S. English and of English Language Advocates (later renamed ProEnglish). Ultimately, these people and organizations paved the way for the local language policies discussed in future chapters.