New & Noted: David J. Silverman

A sweeping chronicle placing race at the center of Native American U.S. history, from the award-winning author of This Land Is Their Land.

When the colonial era began, Europeans did not consider themselves as “Whites,” and Native Americans did not think of themselves as “Indians.” Yet as a genocidal struggle for America unfolded over the course of generations, all that changed. Euro-Americans developed a sense of racial identity, superiority, and national mission-of being chosen. They contended that Indians were damned to disappear so Whites could spread Christian civilization. Native people countered that the Great Spirit had created Indians and Whites separately and intended America to belong to Indians alone.

In The Chosen and the Damned, acclaimed historian David J. Silverman traces Indian-White racial arguments across four centuries, from the bloody colonial wars for territory to the national wars of extermination justified as “Manifest Destiny”; from the creation of reservations and boarding schools to the rise of the Red Power movement and beyond. In this transformative retelling, Silverman shows how White identity, defined against Indians, became central to American nationhood. He also reveals how Indian identity contributed to Native Americans’ resistance and resilience as modern tribal people, even as it has sometimes pit them against one another on the basis of race.

The epochal story of race in America is typically understood as a Black and White issue. The Chosen and the Damned restores the defining role Native people have played, and continue to play, in our national history.

David J. Silverman is a professor of history at George Washington University. He is the author of the award-winning This Land is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving (Bloomsbury, 2019), as well as Thundersticks, Ninigret, Red Brethren, and Faith and Boundaries. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, National Geographic, and the Daily Beast. He lives in Washington, D.C.