Famine: The Century the World Went Hungry

This book names the men who ordered it and the numbers behind what it cost. General Philip Sheridan telling the Texas legislature in 1875 to let hunters exterminate the herds because it would settle the Indian question faster than the army ever could. A Cherokee soldier's own written account of families marched a thousand miles on rations that never arrived. A federal report in 1928 that found children at government boarding schools fed on eleven cents a day. A Montana winter in 1884 that killed a quarter of a reservation's population while Congress debated a budget line.

Built on treaty records, army correspondence, and firsthand testimony rather than assumption, this account follows the full arc from precontact abundance to the food sovereignty movements reclaiming tribal land and tradition today. Readers of serious American history will not find a gentler version of this story anywhere else, and they will not want one.

Buy this book now and read the century America has spent seven decades not fully explaining.