A Millennia in North America // “Native Nations” Kathleen DuVal
Nationally bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Kathleen DuVal is making a special stop to the Main Reading Room to share her award-winning compendium of the history of Native peoples in America. For a period of time, Indigenous people maintained an upper hand and used Europeans in pursuit of their own interests. In Native Nations, we see how Mohawks closely controlled trade with the Dutch (influencing global markets) and how Quapaws manipulated French colonists. As an essential and important addition to the growing North American history centered on Indigenous nations, Kathleen DuVal shows how the definitions of power shifted over time, but the sovereignty and influence of Native peoples remained a constant—and will continue far into the future in the context of those who built our country.
If you are unable to attend the event but would like to purchase one or more signed copies, please visit Buxton Books.
About the Book
Long before the colonization of North America, Indigenous Americans built diverse civilizations and adapted to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally. And, as award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal vividly recounts, when Europeans did arrive, no civilization came to a halt because of a few wandering explorers, even when the strangers came well-armed. A millennium ago, North American cities rivaled urban centers around the world in size. Then, following a period of climate change and instability, numerous smaller nations emerged, moving away from rather than toward urbanization. From this urban past, egalitarian government structures, diplomacy, and complex economies spread across North America. So, when Europeans showed up in the sixteenth century, they encountered societies they did not understand—those having developed differently from their own—and whose power they often underestimated.
Pulitzer Prize Winner • National Bestseller • Winner of the Bancroft Prize, The Cundill History Prize, and The Mark Lynton History Prize
About the Author
Kathleen DuVal is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Native Nations: A Millennium in North America and other books, including Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution and the U.S. history textbook Give Me Liberty! She is a history professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. DuVal is a Guggenheim Fellow and has won the Bancroft Prize and written for The Atlantic, Time magazine, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.