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Colin Calloway's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Colin Calloway recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Colin Calloway's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1

The Middle Ground

Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650 - 1815

Richard White | 4.25

An acclaimed book and widely acknowledged classic, The Middle Ground steps outside the simple stories of Indian-white relations – stories of conquest and assimilation and stories of cultural persistence. It is, instead, about a search for accommodation and common meaning. It tells how Europeans and Indians met, regarding each other as alien, as other, as virtually nonhuman, and how between 1650 and 1815 they constructed a common, mutually comprehensible world in the region around the Great Lakes that the French called pays d'en haut. Here the older worlds of the Algonquians and of... more
Recommended by Colin Calloway, and 1 others.

Colin CallowayRichard White complicates understandings of Indian and white relations by looking at how Indians and Europeans constructed a complex world that was new to all the participants. (Source)

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2

The Invasion of America

Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest

Francis Jennings | 4.24

In this iconoclastic book, Francis Jennings recasts the story of American colonization as a territorial invasion. The traditional history of early America paints the colonies as a transplantation of European culture to a new continent--a "virgin land" in which Native Americans were assigned the role of foil whose main contribution was to stimulate the energy and ingenuity of European dispossessors. Jennings rejects this ideology and examines the relationships between Europeans and Indians from a far more critical point of view. Shorn of old mythology and rationalizations, Puritan actions are... more
Recommended by Colin Calloway, and 1 others.

Colin CallowaySome people would say this book is polemical. He exposes the mythologies of early contact. (Source)

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3

Custer Died for Your Sins

An Indian Manifesto

Jr. Vine Deloria | 4.31

In his new preface to this paperback edition, the author observes, "The Indian world has changed so substantially since the first publication of this book that some things contained in it seem new again." Indeed, it seems that each generation of whites and Indians will have to read and reread Vine Deloria’s Manifesto for some time to come, before we absorb his special, ironic Indian point of view and what he tells us, with a great deal of humor, about U.S. race relations, federal bureaucracies, Christian churches, and social scientists. This book continues to be required reading for all... more
Recommended by Colin Calloway, and 1 others.

Colin CallowayWhat this collection did was alter the way we think about and discuss Native American history. (Source)

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4

The Columbian Exchange

Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492

Alfred W. Crosby Jr. | 4.09

Thirty years ago, Alfred Crosby published a small work that illuminated a simple point, that the most important changes brought on by the voyages of Columbus were not social or political, but biological in nature. The book told the story of how 1492 sparked the movement of organisms, both large and small, in both directions across the Atlantic. This Columbian exchange, between the Old World and the New, changed the history of our planet drastically and forever.



The book The Columbian Exchange changed the field of history drastically and forever as well. It... more
Recommended by Colin Calloway, and 1 others.

Colin CallowayThis book is hugely important because it puts early colonial history into a broader context. (Source)

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5

1491

New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

Charles C. Mann | 4.31

In this groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology, Charles C. Mann radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492.

Contrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness; rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the land around them. The astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running water and immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city. Mexican cultures created corn in a...

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Recommended by Adam Conover, Scott Keyes, Colin Calloway, and 3 others.

Adam Conover@TheBaltimoreSon @CharlesCMann Sure it! A total revolution in my understanding of history, all in one book. Amazing stuff. (Source)

Scott KeyesIt’s one of those books that takes everything you thought you knew about the history of European colonialists and indigenous groups in the Americas and turns it on its head. Just a fascinating deep-dive into early American history that questions a lot of dogma we were taught in school. (Source)

Colin CallowayThe book provides a huge hemispheric overview. (Source)

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