Indians are the most recent immigrants in Massachusetts. Though a tiny minority, their contributions are numerous and far-reaching. Swami Vivekananda arrived in Boston in 1893 and left a lasting legacy of Hindu philosophy. Sushil Tuli opened a unique community bank, Leader Bank, as the first and only minority-owned bank in the state of Massachusetts. The Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at MIT, created with the grant of $20 million by Desh and Jaishree Deshpande, empowers MIT's researchers to make a difference in the world by developing innovative technologies. Author Meenal Atul Pandya details the influence of Indians on Massachusetts history.

From the late eighteenth century through the end of the Civil War, Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians bought, sold, and owned Africans and African Americans as slaves, a fact that persisted after the tribes' removal from the Deep South to Indian Territory. The tribes formulated racial and gender ideologies that justified this practice and marginalized free black people in the Indian nations well after the Civil War and slavery had ended. Through the end of the nineteenth century, ongoing conflicts among Choctaw, Chickasaw, and U.S. lawmakers left untold numbers of former slaves and their descendants in the two Indian nations without citizenship in either the Indian nations or the United States. In this groundbreaking study, Barbara Krauthamer rewrites the history of southern slavery, emancipation, race, and citizenship to reveal the centrality of Native American slaveholders and the black people they enslaved. Krauthamer's examination of slavery and emancipation highlights the ways Indian women's gender roles changed with the arrival of slavery and changed again after emancipation and reveals complex dynamics of race that shaped the lives of black people and Indians both before and after removal.

New insights on an important Native American writer.

In The Other One Percent, Sanjoy Chakravorty, Devesh Kapur, and Nirvikar Singh provide the first authoritative and systematic overview of South Asians living in the United States.

This book traces the development of John Eliot’s mission to the Algonquian-speaking people of Massachusetts Bay, from his arrival in 1631 until his death in 1690. It explores John Eliot’s determination to use the Massachusett dialect of Algonquian, both in speech and in print, as a language of conversion and Christianity. The book analyzes the spoken words of religious conversion and the written transcription of those narratives; it also considers the Algonquian language texts and English language texts which Eliot published to support the mission. Central to this study is an insistence that John Eliot consciously situated his mission within a tapestry of contesting transatlantic and political forces, and that this framework had a direct impact on the ways in which Native American penitents shaped and contested their Christian identities. To that end, the study begins by examining John Eliot’s transatlantic network of correspondents and missionary-supporters in England, it then considers the impact of conversion narratives in spoken and written forms, and ends by evaluating the impact of literacy on praying Indian communities. The study maps the coalescence of different communities that shaped, or were shaped by, Eliot’s seventeenth-century mission.

This study of Boston's West Indian immigrants examines the identities, goals, and aspirations of two generations of black migrants from the British-held Caribbean who settled in Boston between 1900 and 1950. Describing their experience among Boston's American-born blacks and in the context of the city's immigrant history, the book charts new conceptual territory. The Other Black Bostonians explores the pre-migration background of the immigrants, work and housing, identity, culture and community, activism and social mobility. What emerges is a detailed picture of black immigrant life. Johnson's work makes a contribution to the study of the black diaspora as it charts the history of this first wave of Caribbean immigrants.

Reconstructs the history of a Native American tribe over eight turbulent decades of domination and dislocation