Profiles Manhattan Island's first residents, the Munsee Indians, from their first interactions with European settlers in 1524 to the group's relocation to reservations in the Midwest and Canada during the eighteenth century.

To be stewards of the earth, not owners: this was the way of the Lenape. Considering themselves sacred land keepers, they walked gently; they preserved the world they inhabited. Drawing on a wide range of historical sources, interviews with living Algonquin elders, and first-hand explorations of the ancient trails, burial grounds, and sacred sites, Native New Yorkers offers a rare glimpse into the civilization that served as the blueprint for modern New York. A fascinating history, supplemented with maps, timelines, and a glossary of Algonquin words, this book is an important and timely celebration of a forgotten people.

Winner - 2023 John Brinkerhoff Jackson Book Prize, UVA Center for Cultural Landscapes With more than eight hundred sprawling green acres in the middle of one of the world’s densest cities, Central Park is an urban masterpiece. Designed in the middle of the nineteenth century by the landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, it is a model for city parks worldwide. But before it became Central Park, the land was the site of farms, businesses, churches, wars, and burial grounds—and home to many different kinds of New Yorkers. This book is the authoritative account of the place that would become Central Park. From the first Dutch family to settle on the land through the political crusade to create America’s first major urban park, Sara Cedar Miller chronicles two and a half centuries of history. She tells the stories of Indigenous hunters, enslaved people and enslavers, American patriots and British loyalists, the Black landowners of Seneca Village, Irish pig farmers, tavern owners, Catholic sisters, Jewish protesters, and more. Miller unveils a British fortification and camp during the Revolutionary War, a suburban retreat from the yellow fever epidemics at the turn of the nineteenth century, and the properties that a group of free Black Americans used to secure their right to vote. Tales of political chicanery, real estate speculation, cons, and scams stand alongside democratic idealism, the striving of immigrants, and powerfully human lives. Before Central Park shows how much of the history of early America is still etched upon the landscapes of Central Park today.

The story of the Thomas Indian School has been overlooked by history and historians even though it predated, lasted longer, and affected a larger number of Indian children than most of the more well-known federal boarding schools. Founded by the Presbyterian missionaries on the Cattaraugus Seneca Reservation in western New York, the Thomas Asylum for Orphan and Destitute Indian Children, as it was formally named, shared many of the characteristics of the government-operated Indian schools. However, its students were driven to its doors not by Indian agents, but by desperation. Forcibly removed from their land, Iroquois families suffered from poverty, disease, and disruptions in their traditional ways of life, leaving behind many abandoned children. The story of the Thomas Indian School is the story of the Iroquois people and the suffering and despair of the children who found themselves trapped in an institution from which there was little chance for escape. Although the school began as a refuge for children, it also served as a mechanism for “civilizing” and converting native children to Christianity. As the school’s population swelled and financial support dried up, the founders were forced to turn the school over to the state of New York. Under the State Board of Charities, children were subjected to prejudice, poor treatment, and long-term institutionalization, resulting in alienation from their families and cultures. In this harrowing yet essential book, Burich offers new and important insights into the role and nature of boarding schools and their destructive effect on generations of indigenous populations.

A complex and troubled history defines the borders of upstate New York beyond the physical boundaries of its rivers and lakes. The United States and the state were often deceptive in their territory negotiations with the Iroquois Six Nations. Amidst the growing quest for more land among settlers and then fledgling Americans, the Indian nations attempted to maintain their autonomy. Yet state land continued to encroach the Six Nations. Local historian Cindy Amrhein takes a close and critical view of these transactions. Evidence of dubious deals, bribes, faulty surveys and coerced signatures may help explain why many of the Nations now feel they were cheated out of their territory.

Winner of the 2021 Bancroft Prize and the 2021 Ridenhour Book Prize Finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Nonfiction Named a Top Ten Best Book of 2020 by the Washington Post and Publishers Weekly and a New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2020 A masterful and unsettling history of “Indian Removal,” the forced migration of Native Americans across the Mississippi River in the 1830s and the state-sponsored theft of their lands. In May 1830, the United States launched an unprecedented campaign to expel 80,000 Native Americans from their eastern homelands to territories west of the Mississippi River. In a firestorm of fraud and violence, thousands of Native Americans lost their lives, and thousands more lost their farms and possessions. The operation soon devolved into an unofficial policy of extermination, enabled by US officials, southern planters, and northern speculators. Hailed for its searing insight, Unworthy Republic transforms our understanding of this pivotal period in American history.