Category: 3-BookTalkSometimeCommentary

In his book, Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal(University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), Dr. Gregory D. Smithers effectively articulates the complex history of Native Southerners. Smithers conveys the history of Native Southerners through numerous historical eras while properly reinterpreting popular misconceptions about the past in a way that is compelling and easy to understand. Smithers expresses the rich and complex history of Native Southerners as it was while exposing the reality of settler colonialism and U.S. removal policies. As shown throughout the book, Native Southerners were constantly adapting to a changing world. But ultimately Native Southerners flourished, leading Smither to state, “My, how the architects of removal and assimilation failed.”

Gregory D. Smithers is an American historian with a particular interest in the rich history of the Cherokee people, Indigenous history in the Southeast, and environmental history. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis. He has taught in California, Hawaii, Scotland, and Ohio. He currently lives in Richmond, Virginia, where he is a professor of American history and Eminent Scholar in the College of Humanities and Sciences at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Colin Mustful has an M.A. in history from Minnesota State University, Mankato, and is currently a candidate for an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Augsburg University. You can learn more about his work at his website: www.colinmustful.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

The American obsession with categorizing people by race isn’t just a problem for our institutions. For multi-racial and multi-ethnic Americans, it can be intensely personal. On today’s episode of A Word, Jason Johnson is joined by journalist Natasha Alford. She shares her own unique experience navigating America’s complicated ideas about race in her new book, American Negra: A Memoir. Alford shares how her African American and Puerto Rican heritage shaped her understanding of race in her early life, and how those ideas were challenged when she attended Harvard University and later became a journalist.  

Guest: Natasha Alford, author of American Negra: A Memoir

Podcast production by Kristie Taiwo-Makanjuola

Want more A Word? Subscribe to Slate Plus to immediately access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of our show page. Or, visit slate.com/awordplus to get access wherever you listen.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stress is all around us, but that doesn’t mean it needs to run our entire lives. According to Dr. Romie Mushtaq – a neurologist turned corporate wellness consultant – the main culprit behind our culture of stress is what she calls a “busy brain.”

This week on Well, Now Dr. Kavita Patel and Maya Feller, RDN talk with Dr. Mushtaq about curing our busy brains and her latest book The Busy Brain Cure: The Eight-Week Plan to Find Focus, Tame Anxiety and Sleep Again.

If you liked this episode, check out: What We Get Wrong About Love

Podcast production by Vic Whitley-Berry with editorial oversight by Alicia Montgomery.

Send your comments and recommendations on what to cover to wellnow@slate.com

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stories of Our Living Ephemera: Storytelling Methodologies in the Archives of the Cherokee National Seminaries, 1846-1907 (Utah State University Press, 2023) recovers the history of the Cherokee National Seminaries from scattered archives and colonized research practices by critically weaving together pedagogy and archival artifacts with Cherokee traditional stories and Indigenous worldviews. This unique text adds these voices to writing studies history and presents these stories as models of active rhetorical practices of assimilation resistance in colonized spaces.

Emily Legg turns to the Cherokee medicine wheel and cardinal directions as a Cherokee rhetorical discipline of knowledge making in the archives, an embodied and material practice that steers knowledge through the four cardinal directions around all relations. Going beyond historiography, Legg delineates educational practices that are intertwined with multiple strands of traditional Cherokee stories that privilege Indigenous and matriarchal theoretical lenses. Stories of Our Living Ephemera synthesizes the connections between contemporary and nineteenth-century academic experiences to articulate the ways that colonial institutions and research can be Indigenized by centering Native American sovereignty.

By undoing the erasure of Cherokee literacy and educational practices, Stories of Our Living Ephemera celebrates the importance of storytelling, especially to those who are learning about Indigenous histories and rhetorics. This book is of cultural importance and value to academics interested in composition and pedagogy, the Cherokee Nation, and a general audience seeking to learn about Indigenous rhetorical devices and Cherokee history.

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

In part two of our series on friendship, we’re looking at how to revitalize a relationship that began in a previous phase of life. 

Michelle and Blair became fast friends in grad school. That bond survived graduation, marriages, and even a cross-country move. They now live just a short drive from one another—but things have never felt so distant. Michelle wants to know how to evolve their friendship to be more compatible with the present day. On today’s episode, Courtney Martin brings on Rhaina Cohen, author of The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center. Rhaina will help Michelle—and all of us—prepare for a daunting conversation.

Miss last week’s episode? Learn how to expand your horizons with new, cross-generational friendships. If you’re enjoying this series, check out our other friendship episodes:

How To Find Your People

How To Make Friends as an Adult

How To Make Friends… Like a Man

How To Talk to Strangers

How To Show Up For a Friend With Cancer

Do you have a problem that needs solving? Send us a note at howto@slate.com or leave us a voicemail at 646-495-4001 and we might have you on the show. Subscribe for free on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen.

How To’s executive producer is Derek John. Joel Meyer is our senior editor/producer. The show is produced by Rosemary Belson and Kevin Bendis. 

Slate Plus members get bonus segments and ad-free podcast feeds. Sign up now at slate.com/howtoplus.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Felix Salmon sits down with Carrie Sun, whose book Private Equity: A Memoir recalls her life as the right-hand woman of a billionaire hedge fund manager. Burnt out on corporate life, Carrie wanted a low-key day job while she pursued her writing career. Instead, she found herself in a world of high-octane Wall Street hustle where profit is paramount. She and Felix discuss Wall Street culture, 

If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get an ad-free experience across the network and an additional segment of our regular show every week. You’ll also be supporting the work we do here on Slate Money. Sign up now at slate.com/moneyplus to help support our work.

Podcast production by Jared Downing and Cheyna Roth.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For western colonists in the early American backcountry, disputes often ended in bloodshed and death. Making the Frontier Man: Violence, White Manhood, and Authority in the Early Western Backcountry (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023) by Dr. Matthew C. Ward examines early life and the origins of lawless behaviour in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio from 1750 to 1815. It provides a key to understanding why the trans-Appalachian West was prone to violent struggles, especially between white men. Traumatic experiences of the Revolution and the Forty Years War legitimised killing as a means of self-defence—of property, reputation, and rights—transferring power from the county courts to the ordinary citizen. Backcountry men waged war against American Indians in state-sponsored militias as they worked to establish farms and seize property in the West. And white neighbours declared war on each other, often taking extreme measures to resolve petty disputes that ended with infamous family feuds.

Making the Frontier Man focuses on these experiences of western expansion and how they influenced American culture and society, specifically the nature of western manhood, which radically transformed in the North American environment. In search of independence and improvement, the new American man was also destitute, frustrated by the economic and political power of his elite counterparts, and undermined by failure. He was aggressive, misogynistic, racist, and violent, and looked to reclaim his dominance and masculinity by any means necessary.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies

This week, host Isaac Butler talks to writer Amitava Kumar, whose latest novel is My Beloved Life. In the interview, Amitava discusses his habit of writing every day—a habit he strongly recommends to his students at Vassar College. Then he shares the process behind his new novel and explains how he drew upon other novels for inspiration. 

After the interview, Isaac and co-host Ronald Young Jr. talk about daily writing practices, how to establish a writing voice, and much more. 

In the exclusive Slate Plus segment, Isaac and Amitava talk about how much they love novels about ordinary life. 

Send your questions about creativity and any other feedback to working@slate.com or give us a call at (304) 933-9675.

Podcast production by Cameron Drews.

If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get an ad-free experience across the network and exclusive content on many shows—you’ll also be supporting the work we do here on Working. Sign up now at slate.com/workingplus to help support our work.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Plotz talks with author Kiley Reid about her new book, Come & Get It. They discuss how money can work in the same way as language, writing realistic dialogue, and the things we can’t let go of. 

Tweet us your questions @SlateGabfest or email us at gabfest@slate.com. (Messages could be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)

Podcast production by Cheyna Roth.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Properties of Empire: Indians, Colonists, and Land Speculators on the New England Frontier (NYU Press, 2019), Ian Saxine, Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Bridgewater State University, shows the dynamic relationship between Native and English systems of property on the turbulent edge of Britain’s empire, and how so many colonists came to believe their prosperity depended on acknowledging Indigenous land rights. As absentee land speculators and hardscrabble colonists squabbled over conflicting visions for the frontier, Wabanaki Indians’ unity allowed them to forcefully project their own interpretations of often poorly remembered old land deeds and treaties. The result was the creation of a system of property in Maine that defied English law, and preserved Native power and territory. Eventually, ordinary colonists, dissident speculators, and grasping officials succeeded in undermining and finally destroying this arrangement, a process that took place in councils and courtrooms, in taverns and treaties, and on battlefields.

Properties of Empire challenges assumptions about the relationship between Indigenous and imperial property creation in early America, as well as the fixed nature of Indian “sales” of land, revealing the existence of a prolonged struggle to re-interpret seventeenth-century land transactions and treaties well into the eighteenth century. The ongoing struggle to construct a commonly agreed-upon culture of landownership shaped diplomacy, imperial administration, and matters of colonial law in powerful ways, and its legacy remains with us today.

Ryan Tripp is adjunct history faculty for the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/native-american-studies