On Wednesday night, Ned Blackhawk won the National Book Award in nonfiction for his groundbreaking history The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History.
Hundreds attended the 74th National Book Awards in New York City, raising more than $1 million for the National Book Foundation, which oversees the event and provides a wide range of public and educational programs.
Published by Yale University Press, The Rediscovery of America builds on decades of new scholarship in Native American and Indigenous studies to reveal an expansive, overdue retelling of U.S. history—one that recognizes Native peoples are fundamental to understanding the evolution of modern America.
The Rediscovery of America is being hailed as “an essential remedy to the historical record” (Esquire), “a monumental achievement” (Mother Jones), and “a sweeping, important, revisionist work of American history that places Native Americans front and center” (New York Times Book Review, cover review).
Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone) is the Howard R. Lamar Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University, where he is the faculty coordinator for the Yale Group for the Study of Native America. He is author or co-editor of three other books in Native American and Indigenous history.
In its announcement, the National Book Foundation said, “Historian Ned Blackhawk recontextualizes five centuries of U.S., Native, and non-native histories to argue that in the face of extreme violence, land dispossession, and catastrophic epidemics, Indigenous peoples played, and continue to play, an essential role in the development of American democracy.”
