Campus News

Book reframes Native American history

The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000-1927
Jace Weaver
The University of North Carolina Press
Cloth: $29.99

From the earliest moments of European contact, Native Americans have played a pivotal role in the Atlantic experience, yet they often have been relegated to the margins of historical record.

In The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000-1927, Jace Weaver’s survey of history and literature synthesizes scholarship to place indigenous people of the Americas at the center of the understanding of the Atlantic world. Weaver, the Franklin Professor of Native American Studies in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, illuminates their travels through the region, revealing how they changed the course of world history.

Indigenous Americans, Weaver shows, crossed the Atlantic as royal dignitaries, diplomats, slaves, laborers, soldiers, performers and tourists. And they carried resources and knowledge that shaped world civilization. Weaver makes clear that indigenous travelers were cosmopolitan agents of international change.