Steven Conn is Professor and Director of the Public History Program at The Ohio State University's Department of History. His 2004 book,
History's Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century, is "a study of how the study of Native Americans shaped a variety of intellectual discourses including linguistics, archaeology, anthropology and history from the late 18th century through the 1890s."
He applied the "
Page 99 Test" to the book and reported the following:
As it happens, p. 99 of my book History's Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century features one of the earliest known American daguerrotypes, a spectral portrait of Stephen DuPonceau. DuPonceau was one of dozens of American intellectuals who studied various aspects of Native America in the 19th century. Indeed, part of my purpose here is to demonstrate just how central the study of Indians was to the intellectual life of the United States.
In studying Native American languages, customs, archaeological remains etc these intellectuals tried to figure just who these people were, where they had come from and when. In so doing they shaped a distinctively American historical consciousness and by the end of the century had created a division between Euro-American, who had a history, and Native Americans who did not.
Learn
more about History's Shadow at the University of Chicago Press website.
--Marshal Zeringue
