The Cherokees: A Population History is the first full-length demographic study of an American Indian group from the protohistorical period to the present. Thornton shows the effects of disease, warfare, genocide, miscegenation, removal and relocation, and destruction of traditional lifeways on the Cherokees. He discusses their mysterious origins, their first contact with Europeans (prob-ably in 1540), and their fluctuation in population during the eighteenth century, when the Old World brought them smallpox. The toll taken by massive relocations in the following century, most notably the removal of the Cherokees from the Southeast to In-dian Territory, and by warfare, predating the American Revolution and including the Civil War, also enters into Thornton's calculations. He goes on to measure the resurgence of the Cherokees in the twentieth century, focusing on such population centers as North Carolina, Oklahoma, and California.

From 1855 to 1856 in western Oregon, the Native peoples along the Rogue River outmaneuvered and repeatedly drove off white opponents. In The Rogue River Indian War and Its Aftermath, 1850–1980, historian E. A. Schwartz explores the tribal groups' resilience not only during this war but also in every period of federal Indian policy that followed. Schwartz's work examines Oregon Indian people's survival during American expansion as they coped with each federal initiative, from reservation policies in the nineteenth century through termination and restoration in the twentieth. While their resilience facilitated their success in adjusting to white society, it also made the people known today as the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians susceptible to federal termination programs in the 1970s—efforts that would have dissolved their communities and given their resources to non-Indians. Drawing on a range of federal documents and anthropological sources, Schwartz explores both the history of Native peoples of western Oregon and U.S. Indian policy and its effects.