The Best Books on the American West and Native American History

One book to read first, one that rewrote the whole continent's story, the classic that everyone has read and the book written to answer it, and the historians who took the frontier myth apart

The best single-volume Native American history for most readers is David Treuer's The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee (2019). It begins where Dee Brown's famous book ends, at the massacre of 1890, and its argument is that Native America did not die there: it tells the twentieth century as a story of survival, adaptation and return, from the boarding schools and the reservation system through the activism of the 1970s to the casino economies and language revivals of today. It is also the book that explains, better than any other, why the older way of telling this history has stopped satisfying anyone.

Around it this list ranges widely. Pekka Hämäläinen's Indigenous Continent (2022) is the new grand synthesis, arguing that for most of the four centuries after Columbus the continent remained Indigenous, and his earlier The Comanche Empire (2008) is the book that made the case in miniature. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is the short, angry counter-narrative. Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970) remains the most-read book on the subject and has to be read for that reason alone. S. C. Gwynne's Empire of the Summer Moon is the popular history of the Comanche wars. Patricia Nelson Limerick's The Legacy of Conquest and Richard White's It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own are the two books that turned the history of the West from a frontier romance into a serious field.

Every title below is checked against Open Library and publisher records, with editions, years and ISBNs verified rather than scraped. This is a subject where the arguments between historians are as important as the events, and the guide sets them out rather than pretending there is one settled story.

The books

Which American West or Native American history book to start with

Start with Treuer. It is the one book on this list that is both a personal work, its author is Ojibwe and writes partly from his own reservation at Leech Lake, and a real synthesis of the scholarship. The first hundred pages compress the whole story before 1890 into a sharp, readable summary, and the rest of the book carries it forward through material most general readers have never encountered: the allotment policy that broke up reservations, the termination era, the relocation programmes, the occupations of Alcatraz and Wounded Knee in the 1970s, and the legal and economic revival since. It is long but not dense, and it can be read by anyone.

Read Hämäläinen second if you want the big picture, and choose which of his two books by appetite. Indigenous Continent covers the whole continent from first contact to the late nineteenth century and argues that European colonial power was, for most of that time, a thin and precarious thing on the edges of an Indigenous world. It is a sweeping book and a controversial one, for reasons discussed below. The Comanche Empire is narrower, deeper and, in this guide's view, the better book: a study of how one people built a horse-borne power on the southern Plains that dictated terms to Spain, Mexico, Texas and for a time the United States. It won the Bancroft Prize and it changed how historians write about Native polities.

Then read Brown and Treuer against each other, which is what Treuer intended. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was published in 1970, sold in the millions, and fixed in the public mind the image of the western Indian wars as a thirty-year tragedy ending in extinction. It is still moving, and it was a genuine achievement to build a narrative of the years from 1860 to 1890 out of the Indian side of the treaty councils and testimony. But it stops in 1890 and treats the stop as an ending, which is exactly the assumption Treuer's title rejects. Gwynne's Empire of the Summer Moon is the popular counterpart on the Comanche, told through Quanah Parker and his captive mother Cynthia Ann Parker; it is a gripping read and it should be read after Hämäläinen, not instead of him.

Limerick and White are for readers who want the West as a whole, not only its Native history. Limerick's book is short, witty and argumentative; White's is a large textbook and the standard one-volume history of the region. If you want one, take Limerick, and go to White when you need the detail on any particular decade or theme. Dunbar-Ortiz's book is short enough to read in two sittings and is the most explicitly political title on the list; it is best read once you have Treuer and Hämäläinen in hand, so that you can see what it is arguing against and what it leaves out.

What this list leaves out, and where to go next. There is no book here on the Native Northeast or Southeast before the nineteenth century; Daniel Richter's Facing East from Indian Country, which tells the colonial period from the Native side looking east, is the one to add, and Kathleen DuVal's Native Nations (2024) is the newest survey of Native political history over a thousand years. There is no book on the boarding schools, the reservation economy or federal Indian law on their own; Treuer covers all three in passing and his bibliography points onward. And there is nothing on the Spanish and Mexican West before the Americans arrived, which White covers in his opening chapters and which the guide to the Aztecs on this site approaches from the other direction. Eight books give a reader the spine of the story; these fill it in.

On audiobooks. Treuer reads well in audio and the personal passages gain from it. Brown and Gwynne are both narrative books and work well spoken. Hämäläinen's two books are dense with places and peoples and are better on the page, where the maps can be consulted; the same is true of White, which is a reference book as much as a history.

What the historians argue about

The oldest argument in this field is about the frontier. In 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner told the American Historical Association that the westward-moving frontier had shaped the national character, and for most of the twentieth century the history of the West was written in that frame: a process of settlement, an advance of civilisation, a story with white pioneers at its centre and Native people as obstacles. Limerick's The Legacy of Conquest (1987) is the book that did most to break the frame. Her argument was that the West is a place, not a process, that its history did not end in 1890, that conquest rather than settlement is the honest word for what happened, and that the region's real subjects are property, water, federal power and the meeting of many peoples. White's textbook, published four years later, was the first full history written on those lines, and its title, taken from a cowboy song, is a joke at the expense of the old romance. Together they are what is called the New Western History, and though the label has aged, its assumptions are now simply how the field works.

The second argument is about power, and it is the one Hämäläinen has pressed hardest. The traditional picture, shared even by sympathetic writers like Brown, has Native peoples as the victims of an inexorable European advance. Beginning in the 1990s, historians such as Richard White in The Middle Ground and Daniel Richter in Facing East from Indian Country argued that for long stretches of colonial history Native nations held the balance of power and set the terms of trade, diplomacy and war. The Comanche Empire took this furthest, describing the Comanches not as a tribe but as an imperial power with its own economy of horses, captives and trade. Indigenous Continent extended the claim to the whole continent and the whole period, and here reviewers divided. Admirers saw it as the overdue correction of a Eurocentric story; critics, among them historians of Native America, thought that the language of empire flattened very different Native societies into a single model, that it understated the catastrophe of disease and dispossession, and that a story of Indigenous strength can end up minimising what was done. The disagreement is real and worth having; Treuer's book is a good place to see it from the inside, since it insists on both the survival and the loss.

The third argument is about words, above all the word genocide. Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States argues that the United States was a settler-colonial state from its foundation and that its policy toward Native peoples was genocidal in intent and effect. Many historians accept the settler-colonial frame and use the word genocide for specific episodes, California in the 1850s and 1860s above all; others resist using it for the whole span of American history, on the grounds that policy varied enormously over time and that disease did much of the killing before any policy existed. Treuer is careful with the word; Hämäläinen largely avoids it; Brown never used it but supplied the images that made it seem apt. A reader should know that the argument is partly about definitions and partly about moral accounting, and that serious scholars sit on both sides.

The fourth argument is about who tells the story. Brown was a white librarian in Illinois; his book was written from documents, and it presents Native people almost entirely as they appear in those documents, speaking at councils and dying in battles, with little of ordinary life. Gwynne's book has been criticised by some scholars for reviving older tropes of Comanche savagery even while admiring Comanche power. Treuer's book is the most prominent recent history of Native America written by a Native historian, and part of its purpose is to show what changes when the writer belongs to the story. That has continued: Ned Blackhawk's The Rediscovery of America (2023), which argues that Native history is central to American history rather than a side chapter, won the National Book Award, and the field's centre of gravity has moved toward Native authorship in a way that would have been hard to imagine when Brown wrote.

One thing none of these books disputes: the scale of what happened. The disagreements are about explanation, framing and emphasis, and about how the twentieth century should be told. On the nineteenth-century record of removal, war, the reservation system and the deliberate assault on Native land, language and religion, Brown, Treuer, Hämäläinen, Dunbar-Ortiz, Limerick and White are describing the same events.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best single-volume history of Native Americans?

David Treuer's The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee (2019). It summarises the centuries before 1890 in its opening section and then tells the twentieth century, which most histories skip, as a story of survival and revival. Pekka Hämäläinen's Indigenous Continent (2022) is the ambitious alternative for the period before 1890, and Ned Blackhawk's The Rediscovery of America (2023) is the newest major synthesis.

Is Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee still worth reading?

Yes, with its date in mind. Dee Brown's 1970 book is still the most-read account of the western Indian wars and it is genuinely moving, but it ends at Wounded Knee in 1890 and treats that as the end of Native history, which is the assumption later historians, above all David Treuer, wrote to overturn. Read it, then read Treuer.

What is the best book on the Comanches?

Pekka Hämäläinen's The Comanche Empire (2008) is the scholarly book, and it won the Bancroft Prize for its argument that the Comanches built a real empire on the southern Plains. S. C. Gwynne's Empire of the Summer Moon (2010) is the popular narrative, told through Quanah Parker; it is more readable and less careful, and some scholars think it leans on old stereotypes. Reading Hämäläinen first makes Gwynne a better book. The two disagree on emphasis more than on fact: Hämäläinen is interested in the Comanches as a political and economic system, in horses, trade and captive-taking as the foundations of a power that lasted well over a century; Gwynne is interested in the war with Texas and in the Parker family, and his Comanches are more often fighters than traders. A reader who finishes both will have the fullest picture available in English of a people whose history was, until recently, told almost entirely by their enemies.

What is the New Western History?

The rewriting of the history of the American West that began in the 1980s, associated above all with Patricia Nelson Limerick's The Legacy of Conquest (1987) and Richard White's It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own (1991). It rejected Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis of 1893, treated the West as a region rather than a process, put conquest, federal power, corporations and the region's many peoples at the centre, and carried the story past 1890. Its assumptions are now standard.

Explore related events on the timeline

• The American Civil War on the interactive timeline
• European Arrival in the Americas on the interactive timeline

Related guides

Sources consulted

• The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, Open Library record
• Indigenous Continent, Open Library record
• The Comanche Empire, Open Library record
• Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Open Library record
• Empire of the Summer Moon, Open Library record
• An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, Open Library record
• The Legacy of Conquest, Open Library record
• It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own, Open Library record

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