I'll keep this simple: if you read this exceptionally researched and beautifully written book and still think the United States is great or has ever been great, you need to take a long hard look in your mirror, then ask your god for forgiveness. ...more

I got this book as a gift from a friend and I feel really grateful. I don't want to say I enjoyed the book per se because I didn't really. It was quite hard reading about all the ugly things we've done as a country to the indigenous people here and everywhere honestly. Most of these things I hadn't ...more

Warning: Only read this is you are prepared for just about your entire elementary-middle-high school education shattered.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has taken the history of the United States and told it through its very first residents - the Indigenous nations.

She begins by establishing what life was like ...more

Not so much a history of the Indigenous Peoples of North America as much as a re-telling of American history that actually includes their unfortunate role within it, which is way more prominent in ways you haven't imagined.
This is a succinct, powerful read whose basic premise, the US is a settler-co ...more

"An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States" by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a good overview of U.S. history from the perspective of the Indigenous Peoples of North America.

This is an important book. This is not a pleasant book to read.

Dunbar-Ortiz demonstrates that the United States, since ...more

This was a difficult read. The events covered are—of course--brutal, and there is so much to take in about the unimaginable cruelty of the white colonists of the Americas. Every time I read about colonization (which is ongoing), I learn it is somehow is even worse than I previously thought.

This was ...more

While I am in passionate agreement with the thrust of this book — that the United States is a “crime scene” founded on a systematic strategy of genocide — I found Dunbar-Ortiz to be an infuriatingly unreliable narrator. It’s unfortunate because I was excited to pick up this book and really, really w ...more

Not since David Stannard's "American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World" have I read such a clear history of the United States. In no way do I want to diminish from the great work of Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" but that text did not stay with me or speak to me in th ...more

The case that the dispossession of Native Americans and the seizure of their lands constituted a genocide and a form of colonialism/imperialism in the modern-day United States is an easy and powerful one to make. It's frustrating, then, that Dunbar-Ortiz decides to overstate it, bringing in another ...more

A wonderful historical book which demystifies a lot in American history. It goes without saying that victors and conquerors dictate how history remembers events, and the vanquished and colonized's version of events is hardly considered. So just as the title of the book suggests, this history is cent ...more