Denver Brunsman Books

This account of the Lakota Indians traces their rich and often surprising history from the early sixteenth to the early twenty-first century. Pekka Hamalainen explores the Lakotas' roots as marginal hunter-gatherers and reveals how they reinvented themselves twice: first as a river people who dominated the Missouri Valley, America's great commercial artery, and then -- in what was America's first sweeping westward expansion -- as a horse people who ruled supreme on the vast high plains. Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull are iconic figures in the American imagination, but in this book they emerge as something different: the architects of Lakota America, an expansive and enduring Indigenous regime that commanded human fates in the North American interior for generations.

From a prize-winning scholar of Indigenous history, a landmark work that overturns America's dominant origin story

Naval impressment played a crucial role in Britain's rise, maintaining the Royal Navy and contributing to the expansion of its empire. This practice resulted in a significant number of forced laborers, with impressed seamen being the second largest group after enslaved Africans in the eighteenth century. The book explores the historical implications and the human cost of this system, highlighting its impact on both the navy and the broader context of British imperialism.