About this ebook
For too long, we've been told America's story begins in 1492. That narrative erases fifteen thousand years of human achievement. America Before America restores the history that has been stolen and suppressed.
From the first migrations across Beringia (15,000 BCE) through great civilizations like Cahokia and Chaco Canyon, into the catastrophic epidemics that killed ninety percent of native peoples after 1492, through the Indian Wars and forced removals, the boarding school era (1879-1960s), and up to Standing Rock in 2016—this is the complete story.
You'll meet leaders whose names deserve to stand alongside Washington and Jefferson: Powhatan, Metacom, Red Cloud (the only native leader to win a war against the U.S.), Sitting Bull, and John Ross.
You'll learn about Poverty Point, a trading center whose influence stretched across half the continent. About the Ancestral Puebloans who engineered four hundred miles of roads from Chaco Canyon. About the Hohokam's five hundred miles of irrigation canals. About civilizations that rivaled Rome in complexity and exceeded it in engineering.
Every chapter is grounded in archaeological evidence, primary sources, and current scholarship. Specific dates, real people, documented events—not vague generalizations.
This is American history as it actually happened. The full story of conquest, resistance, survival, and renewal. Native American history isn't a subplot in the American story. It is the American story, from the Ice Age to today.
The truth has been waiting fifteen thousand years.
