How Historians Should Evaluate AI

 The Historian's AI Evaluation Framework (HAIEF): Twelve Questions Before You Trust a Machine-Written Past

by Alvin Blackshear, retired Historian   <ablackshear@gmail.com>
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In the summer of 2026, two of the world's largest consulting firms had to pull back work they had already delivered to clients. PwC withdrew AI-generated reports after discovering they contained fabricated citations and references to sources that did not exist.[1] KPMG ran into the same problem: investigators reviewing one of its AI-assisted reports found that most of its citations were fabricated or misleading.[2] Neither firm works in history. Neither incident involved archives, manuscripts, or a single primary source. That is exactly why they matter here.

It would be easy for historians to read those stories and conclude they describe someone else's problem, a corporate reporting failure, a compliance issue, a cautionary tale about consulting culture. That reading is a mistake. What failed at PwC and KPMG was not domain knowledge. It was sourcing discipline: the basic, mechanical trustworthiness of a citation. If large language models fabricate references in financial and regulatory reporting, where the source material is comparatively narrow and well-indexed, there is no reason to expect better behavior in historical research, where the source base is vast, unevenly digitized, and full of the kind of ambiguity these systems are worst at handling. This is not a story about historians being unusually vulnerable to bad AI output. It is a story about a structural failure mode that will show up wherever citation and provenance matter, and few disciplines depend on citation and provenance more than history does.

There is a second, related problem, and it may be more dangerous than outright fabrication because it is harder to catch. Recent reporting on AI accuracy has noted a troubling pattern: as these systems have become more fluent, they have not necessarily become more honest about what they don't know. Instead, they increasingly deliver incorrect information with the same confident tone as correct information, rather than flagging uncertainty or hedging where hedging is warranted. Any historian will recognize this failure mode immediately, because it is precisely what they are trained to distrust in human sources. A memoir written decades after the fact, a diplomatic cable reporting secondhand rumor as established fact, a witness testifying with total conviction about details that turn out to be wrong — historians have centuries of methodological practice built around the fact that confidence is not evidence. A machine that states falsehoods fluently and without hedging is not a new problem for historical method. It is an old problem wearing a new interface.

Put these two failure modes together, fabricated sourcing and confident error, and you arrive at the central argument of this piece: a language model can perform well on the accuracy benchmarks the AI industry currently uses, and still fail every test a professional historian would apply to a piece of research. General-purpose evaluation metrics measure things like factual accuracy rates, hallucination frequency, and human preference scores. None of those metrics ask whether a source actually exists in the form cited, whether a quotation can be independently located, whether a narrative acknowledges live scholarly disagreement, or whether the chronology holds together under scrutiny. A model can score 95 percent on general factual accuracy and still produce a historical narrative that treats a contested interpretation as settled, leans on secondary literature while ignoring available primary sources, and quietly imports present-day assumptions into a past context that didn't share them. None of that shows up in a hallucination-rate benchmark. All of it would get a paper rejected by a competent peer reviewer.

 That gap, between what general AI evaluation measures and what historical method actually requires, is the subject of this article. This is not a piece about whether historians should use AI, or how to prompt it more effectively; that ground has already been covered well by other writers, including practical workflow guides for AI-assisted historical research. This is a piece about something narrower and, so far, largely unaddressed: how a working historian should grade what the AI hands back. It is meant to function less like an essay and more like a QA protocol, a practical checklist you could actually run against a piece of AI-generated research before you decide whether to trust, cite, or build on it. 

What the research actually shows

The clearest empirical precedent for this kind of evaluation comes from a 2026 comparative study that pitted trained historians against generative AI tools: ChatGPT-4, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, on parallel case studies in ancient history. The researchers found a consistent pattern: AI tools were genuinely strong at broad content discovery and thematic synthesis, the kind of work that benefits from fast pattern-matching across large bodies of text. But they were consistently weaker than human historians on source verification, chronological reasoning, provenance, and contextual interpretation, which are the parts of the discipline that depend on judgment rather than retrieval. The study's authors argued for a human-in-the-loop approach that treats AI as a research accelerant rather than a substitute for scholarly adjudication.

A separate line of research has approached the problem from the model side rather than the historian's side, building benchmarks specifically designed to test historical reasoning. That work has found that even the strongest available models struggle with the kind of sophisticated evidentiary reasoning that is routine for a trained historian, the weighing conflicting accounts, recognizing genre and authorial bias, and reconstructing plausible sequences of events from incomplete evidence. This is a useful corrective to the assumption that model capability will simply catch up with historical judgment as systems improve. The gap is not just about scale; it is about a kind of reasoning these systems are not currently built to do well.

Not every recent contribution to this literature is critical of AI's role in historical work. Case studies of experienced historians integrating AI into their actual research workflows, mapping specific tasks to language models, to conceptual work the historian retains, and to conventional computational tools, that describe an approach where AI expands capacity without replacing judgment, provided the historian maintains rigorous cross-checking at every stage. That distinction matters for this piece: the argument here is not that AI is useless for historical work. It's that historians need a way to grade the output that general AI evaluation frameworks were never designed to provide. 

Introducing the framework: HAIEF[3]

What follows is a two-part tool. The first is a practitioner-facing checklist, including twelve diagnostic questions meant to be run quickly against any piece of AI-generated historical research, the way you'd run a gut-check before deciding whether something is worth building on. The second is a more formal, citable rubric that breaks the same underlying concerns into eight scored criteria, useful when you need to document *why* a piece of AI output was accepted or rejected, not just whether it was.

The twelve questions:

1. Are all citations real?

2. Can every quotation be independently located?

3. Is the chronology internally consistent?

4. Does the AI distinguish primary from secondary sources?

5. Are archival collections correctly identified?

6. Are names, dates, and places cross-checked?

7. Does the narrative reflect historiographical debate?

8. Does the AI acknowledge uncertainty?

9. Does it introduce present-day assumptions into historical contexts?

10. Can another historian reproduce the research?

11. Which claims require archival verification?

12. What percentage of the output would I actually trust without checking?

 That last question is deliberately blunt, and it's the one I'd argue matters most in practice. Every other question on the list is diagnostic.  It tells you where a piece of AI research is likely to break down. Question twelve forces a number out of you, an honest estimate of how much of the output you'd actually stand behind without independent verification. In my own use, that number is rarely above 40 or 50 percent for anything involving primary-source claims, and treating that as a normal, expected ceiling, rather than a failure of the tool, is the right posture to bring to this work.

The formal rubric maps the same territory onto eight criteria: citation authenticity (do the cited works exist and actually support the claim made), provenance (is every factual assertion traceable to a reliable source), chronological accuracy (do the dates and sequences hold together internally), primary-source fidelity (are quotations and archival references accurate to the original), historiography (does the output acknowledge that scholarly consensus is contested where it is contested), context (are events read within their own historical setting rather than through present-day assumptions), uncertainty (does the output distinguish established fact from inference), and reproducibility (could another historian, working from the same cited evidence, independently reach the same conclusions).

The value of running both versions side by side is that they serve different moments in the workflow. The twelve questions are what you ask while you're reading the output, in real time, deciding whether to keep going or start over. The eight-criterion rubric is what you fill out afterward, when you need a defensible record of why a source was trusted or discarded, which is useful for peer review, for training research assistants, or for documenting due diligence in a professional or editorial context. 

Who this is for

Historians and academic researchers are the most obvious audience, and the stakes for them are the highest: a fabricated citation or an unacknowledged historiographical dispute that makes it into a submitted paper is a professional liability, not just an inconvenience.

Genealogists are arguably the highest-volume, lowest-scrutiny users of AI-assisted historical research, and they are almost entirely unaddressed by the academic literature on this problem. Family history research routinely involves exactly the kind of claims, be it names, dates, places, relationships, that AI systems handle with the least reliability, and genealogists are less likely than academic historians to have institutional habits of source verification already built in.

Journalists covering historical topics under deadline face a particular version of this problem: the twelve-question checklist doubles as a fast fact-checking pass when there isn't time for a full archival dig, and question twelve, what percentage would you trust without checking, is a useful discipline for anyone filing on a clock.

Educators like myself have perhaps the most durable use case. Detecting AI-generated text is a losing, ever-shifting battle. Teaching students to interrogate AI output using a framework like this one, and not asking "did a machine write this" but rather, "would this survive a historian's scrutiny", is a skill that remains useful regardless of how the underlying technology changes. 

Closing

None of this should be mistaken for a claim that a checklist can do a historian's job. A framework like HAIEF can catch a fabricated citation, flag an inconsistent chronology, or surface a claim that needs archival verification before it gets treated as settled. What it cannot do is listen. Jan Burzlaff has argued that AI systems summarize but do not listen, reproduce but do not interpret.  These tools  achieve coherence while faltering at contradiction, and that historical writing is not simply an output to be optimized but a form of presence, a risk taken in the act of trying to make meaning where no prewritten frame will do. That distinction is worth sitting with rather than resolving. A verification framework can tell you whether the sourcing holds up. It cannot tell you whether the history has been understood. Those are different questions, and confusing them, mistaking a clean citation audit for genuine historical interpretation, may turn out to be the more consequential failure mode of all.

Sources

Burzlaff, Jan. "Fragments Not Prompts: Five Principles for Writing History in the Age of AI." Rethinking History (2026). https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2025.2546174.

Campbell, Chris. "The Historian in the Age of AI." Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (December 10, 2025). https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/transactions-of-the-royal-historical-society/article/historian-in-the-age-of-ai/37E3B742A2983DF4DAA2E38D48252F89.

"Generative AI as a Historical Source: Source Criticism, Citation Integrity, and the Jagged Frontier of Digital History." (March 20, 2026). https://acnsci.org/journal/index.php/cte/article/view/1438.

Fox, Yaniv. Using Generative AI in Historical Practice. Cambridge Elements. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2026. https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/abs/using-generative-ai-in-historical-practice/7C1392A6E9DBD379FAA42E2D16A6D45B.

Henriot, Christian. "The AI-Augmented Research Process: A Historian's Perspective." Preprint, arXiv, August 3, 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01779.

"HistoRAG: Embedding Historical Methodology in Retrieval-Augmented Generation." Preprint, arXiv, June 16, 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.18103.

"Can LLMs Act as Historians?" Preprint, arXiv, April 27, 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.24690.

Ruchniewicz, Krzysztof. "AI in History Education: The American Historical Association's Guidelines, the Views of Their Authors, and Their Reception within the Historical Community." Studia Historica 62, no. 1 (2026). https://doi.org/10.14746/sh.2026.62.1.003.

Solga, Raymond S., and Mohammed J. Sarwar. "Evaluating Generative AI in Historical Research: A Comparative Study on Identifying Primary Source Evidence in Ancient History." AI & Antiquity 2, no. 1 (February 26, 2026). https://doi.org/10.64946/aiantiquity.v2i1.003.

Financial Times. "PwC Withdraws AI-Generated Reports over Fabricated Citations." July 29, 2026. https://www.ft.com/content/7e149ac8-2ce2-4266-8940-192f9821b33c.

TechRadar Pro. "A Major KPMG Report on AI Was Found to Be Chock-Full of AI Hallucinations." June 12, 2026. https://www.techradar.com/pro/a-major-kpmg-report-on-ai-was-found-to-be-chock-full-of-ai-hallucinations.

Axios. "AI Chatbots Are Getting More Confident — and Sometimes More Wrong." May 30, 2026. https://www.axios.com/2026/05/30/ai-accuracy-chatbots-hallucinations.

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[1] https://www.ft.com/content/7e149ac8-2ce2-4266-8940-192f9821b33c?utm_source=chatgpt.com (2026-07-29)

[2] https://www.techradar.com/pro/a-major-kpmg-report-on-ai-was-found-to-be-chock-full-of-ai-hallucinations?utm_source=chatgpt.com (2026-06-12)

[3] HAIEF = Historian's AI Evaluation Framework

Assemblies of Sorrow: Performances of Black Endangerment in the Jim Crow Era - REVIEW

by Samuel Ng

During the Jim Crow era, Black activists appealed to a diverse population of migrating Black Americans by making them viscerally feel that the threat of anti-Black violence continued to afflict them as a group and to undergird blackness itself. To this end, they organized public gatherings, mostly comprised of Black people, that fostered fears of looming physical harm.

Samuel Galen Ng illuminates this Black consciousness as it emanated from feelings of collective endangerment. The dissemination and intensification of such feelings became a pivotal way of solidifying a national Black consciousness on the eve of the Civil Rights Movement. Ng examines how performances of Black endangerment performed political work that provided Black people with important means of political organizing and insurgency. As Ng shows, the grief and mourning that took place at the performances provided public spaces for individuals and communities to observe specific losses capable of impacting Americans across the country.

Ambitious and interdisciplinary, Assemblies of Sorrow explores an overlooked facet of Black organizing and protest and traces how activists shaped fear and grief into political action.

Samuel Galen Ng is an associate professor of Africana studies at Smith College.

University of Illinois Press
ISBN-13: 978-0252089404

Integration at Second Base: Jackie Robinson and the Quest for Black Citizenship - REVIEW

by Peter Eisenstadt

Jackie Robinson is one of the most enduring icons of the great American pastime―the man who broke baseball’s color line in the twentieth century, opening the door for his fellow professionals and allowing rising generations to dream of fame and glory on the diamond. But for number 42, playing for the Dodgers was just a beginning. As Peter Eisenstadt demonstrates in this compelling new biography, Robinson’s trailblazing journey was more than a role that fate thrust on him―it was politically informed and consciously connected in Robinson’s mind to a vision of integration and full Black citizenship.

When he ventured out of the Negro Leagues and into the majors, as the league’s sole Black player, his triumph could have stopped at mere tokenism. Eisenstadt reveals a more ambitious goal on Robinson’s part, as well as a side to the great sports hero we have never fully appreciated. This book explores the political and spiritual roots of Jackie Robinson’s quest for Black citizenship from his boyhood in Pasadena to his service days―during which he was court-martialed for refusing to change seats on a segregated bus―to a transcendent athletic career that included an MVP award, a World Series victory, and eventually a place in the Hall of Fame. In his life after baseball, Robinson went on to serve as a civil rights leader, columnist, and political advocate.

The determination that spurred his great achievements was always accompanied by an understanding of just how far society still needed to go: despite his success, at the end of his life he was convinced that he “never had it made.” In telling the story of Robinson’s remarkable life, this book sheds invaluable light on the complex meanings of integration.

Peter Eisenstadt is Affiliate Professor of History at Clemson University and the author of Against the Hounds of Hell: A Life of Howard Thurman.

University of Virginia Press
ISBN-13: 978-0813955001

The Secret War Against Hate: American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy - REVIEW

by Steven J. Ross

Americans today like to believe that the end of World War II brought a new era of tolerance in the United States. But antisemitism and racism went up-not down-after the war's end. Violence broke out in cities across the country, and the number of organized hate groups more than doubled from 1940 to 1946. In this shocking account of a resurgence of White Supremacy in America, celebrated historian Steven J. Ross reveals how four key leaders-Emory Burke, J. B. Stoner, James Madole, and George Lincoln Rockwell-worked together to “finish the job Hitler had begun,” launching deadly attacks on Jews and African Americans and building a network of terrorists across the U.S. In response to this “war of hate,” three men-Arnold Forster of the Anti-­Defamation League, George Mintzer of the American Jewish Committee, and James Sheldon of the Non-­Sectarian Anti­-Nazi League-along with dozens of men and women, launched a multipronged effort: They infiltrated, monitored, and undermined these hate groups, putting their own safety on the line and scoring important victories that, today, have been all but forgotten.

Tracing the extraordinary work of these unsung heroes, The Secret War Against Hate provides a groundbreaking reconsideration of the legacy of the “Good War,” and essential reading on how America today can beat hate once again and build a just and united nation.

Steven J. Ross is a Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Southern California and Director of the Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life. He is the author of Hitler in Los Angeles, a Los Angeles Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist, Hollywood Left and Right, which received the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Film Scholars Award, and Working-Class Hollywood, named a Best Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times. He lives in Southern California.

Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN-13: 978-1635578003

The Fortune Tellers of Rue Daru - REVIEW

by Olesya Salnikova Gilmore

The Fortune Tellers of Rue Daru is one of those rare historical novels that feels both intimate and haunting. Set within the Russian émigré community of 1920s Paris, the story blends mystery, spirituality, and family secrets into something far more thoughtful than a conventional gothic thriller.

What stayed with me most was the emotional atmosphere. Olesya Salnikova Gilmore creates a Paris filled with displaced people carrying memories of another life, another country, and unresolved grief. The séances, tea rituals, and fortune-telling rooms on Rue Daru are richly imagined, but the real “ghosts” in this novel are loss, exile, and inherited silence.

At the center are Zina and Baba Valya, two women whose relationship gives the novel its heart. They are complex, protective, flawed, and deeply human. The story thoughtfully explores how women survive upheaval and how family secrets can shape generations long after the original wounds were created.

I also appreciated the restraint of the supernatural elements. The novel never slips into cheap horror. Instead, the mystical aspects feel tied to memory and emotional truth, which makes the story more unsettling and believable.

Our book club selected this novel for discussion, and it generated thoughtful conversations about family history, displacement, resilience, and the emotional weight of secrets passed between generations. For purposes of full disclosure and transparency, Random House kindly provided me with a complimentary review copy of this book.

The pacing occasionally slows in the middle, but the prose remains elegant and immersive throughout. Even during quieter sections, the novel maintains a dreamlike tension that keeps you invested.

For readers who enjoy atmospheric historical fiction, layered female characters, and mysteries rooted in emotion rather than shock, The Fortune Tellers of Rue Daru is deeply rewarding. It is melancholy, intelligent, and quietly unforgettable.

Olesya Salnikova Gilmore is the author of The Witch and the Tsar and The Haunting of Moscow House. Originally from Moscow, she was raised in the US and graduated from Pepperdine University with a BA in English/political science, and from Northwestern School of Law with a JD. She practiced litigation at a large law firm in Chicago for several years before pursuing her dream of becoming an author. She writes speculative gothic suspense and other dark fiction. She also loves exploring Eastern European history and folklore. Her work has appeared in LitHub, Tor.com, CrimeReads, Writer’s Digest, and Washington Independent Review of Books, among others. She lives in a wooded, lakeside suburb of Chicago with her husband and two daughters.

Berkley
ISBN-13: 978-0593952689

Ghalen: A Romance in Black - REVIEW

by Walter Mosley

The spellbinding novel introduces readers to Ghalen, a brilliant young Black man shaped by his parents' extraordinary love story. Mosley masterfully weaves a narrative marked by highs and lows, exploring themes of ambition, connection, and personal discovery, all while celebrating the beauty and complexity of Black identity.

Set for release Spring 2026, this remarkable work by master storyteller Mosley cements his legacy as one of the foremost authors of our time. Mosley's new novel promises to captivate readers with a unique, moving, and unflinchingly honest narrative that centers Black characters in a story of family, love, and growth unlike anything seen before.

Ghalen, a brilliant young Black man, is the son of two seemingly mismatched parents. His mother, a gifted scientist, whose own mother expected her to exceed all the achievements in her family, and his father, a gentle cook at a small vegan restaurant, whose idiosyncratic nature shows the young woman a radically different love and understanding of life, despite his inexperience and lack of education. His parents’ grand love story starts it all off, setting us up to follow Ghalen and his family so deeply, that each new twist and turn feels personal.

"Ghalen is a story about love in Black America. This capacity for love is a central moment in the lives of all human beings. And so, for me it is a great pleasure to be able to talk about that passion inside the community that spawned me. I am thrilled to publish this novel with Amistad," says Mosley. Best known for his iconic Easy Rawlins and King Oliver mystery series, Mosley has written more than 60 books across genres, from mystery, to prolific literary fiction. Recently, his novel, The Last Day of Ptolemy Grey which tackles themes of aging, memory, and family, was adapted into an Apple TV+ limited series starring Samuel L. Jackson. Last fall, another of Mosley's novels, The Man in Basement, staring Willem Dafoe and Corey Hawkins, was released on streaming platforms by Disney/Hulu.

With Ghalen, Mosley brings forth that same literary, brilliance, offering a deeply cinematic and emotional exploration of characters often underrepresented in literature, such as the neurodivergent, the incarcerated, and immigrants grappling with their past.

Walter Mosley is one of America's most celebrated writers He was given the 2020 National Book Award's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America and honored with the Anisfield-Wolf Award, a Grammy, a PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award, the Robert Kirsch Award, numerous Edgars and several NAACP Image Awards. He is the author of more than sixty critically acclaimed books that cover a wide range of ideas, genres, and forms including fiction (literary, mystery, and science fiction), political monographs, writing guides including Elements of Fiction, a memoir in paintings, and the young adult novel .17. His work has been translated into twenty five languages. He has published fiction and nonfiction. The New Yorker, Playboy and The Nation. As an executive producer, he adapted his novel, The Last Day of Ptolemy Grey, for AppleTV+ and serves as a writer and executive producer for FX's Snowfall.

Amistad
ISBN: 9780063451551

Black Evidence: A History and a Warning - REVIEW

by Candis Watts Smith

From Reconstruction to Redemption, from the enactment of landmark civil rights legislation to the execution of the Southern strategy, from 2020’s multiracial protests to the swift elimination of policies etching out a more inclusive society, Americans regularly experience periods of racial reckoning followed by walloping retrenchment.

In Black Evidence, political scientist Candis Watts Smith shows that this pattern is the result of an American habit: denying the truths about our society that Black people experience and remember. Smith then delivers a warning: the effects of this habit ripple out, dulling our ability to identify the signs of authoritarianism and heightening our tolerance for cruelty. Still, she shows how these same truths offer models to overcome our repeated predicament.

Through a curation of critical moments across four centuries, Smith invites us to review the evidence that has been obscured, distorted, and denied. She rigorously investigates the practices that turn Black witnesses into liars in the court room, Black patients into superbodies that don’t feel pain in health care settings, Black people into subhumans in scientific experiments, and Black children into superpredators. She reveals what happens when Black voices are subject to exclusion―their communities are terrorized, their memories are refuted, and their resistance is pathologized.

Written with compassion and tempered optimism, Black Evidence prescribes a cure and encourages readers to practice the skills needed to build a truly multiracial democracy: confront our past, acknowledge the damage of inequality in our present, and listen to the voices of those who experience the problems we wish to solve for an equitable future.

Candis Watts Smith is professor of political science at Duke University. She is the author or coauthor of dozens of articles and books, including Stay Woke: A People’s Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter and Racial Stasis: The Millennial Generation and the Stagnation of Racial Attitudes in Americans Politics. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation. Smith is a cohost of the Democracy Works podcast, and her TEDx talk on myths about racism has been viewed over two million times. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.

W.W. Norton & Company
ISBN-13: 978-1324036272

Jefferson on Race - A Reader

by Thomas Jefferson, edited by Annette Gordon-Reed

Among America’s Founding Fathers, none was more deeply, personally, or controversially entangled with race and slavery than Thomas Jefferson. The man whose Declaration of Independence proclaimed that “all men are created equal” enslaved more than 600 people of African descent even as he acknowledged the injustice of slavery, saw himself as its opponent, and condemned it in his writings. How is this possible? In Jefferson on Race, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed gathers Jefferson’s most revealing writings about African Americans, slavery, and Native Americans, enabling readers as never before to directly explore his complex and contradictory thoughts, feelings, and decisions on these subjects—the most hotly debated aspect of his legacy.

These selections come from Jefferson’s public and private writings, letters, and plantation records, as well as accounts by contemporaries, including his son Madison Hemings and three other people formerly enslaved at Monticello. The book documents Jefferson’s ideas about—and self-image in relation to—African Americans, slavery, and Native Americans, as well as his conduct, including interactions with individual Black and Native people. The writings show how Jefferson responded to living in a multiracial slave society while professing progressive ideals, and how his views on race and slavery were shaped by his experiences with enslaved Black people.

Jefferson on Race is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand Jefferson’s conflicted attitudes—and the impact of race and slavery on American history.

Annette Gordon-Reed is a New York Times–bestselling historian and the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University. Her books include The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, which won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, and (with Peter S. Onuf) Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination.

Princeton University Press
ISBN-13: 978-0691122069

Stealing America: The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slavery in U.S. History - REVIEW

by Linford D. Fisher

Although the first enslaved Africans arrived in Jamestown in 1619, European slavery in America began more than a century before. In a work distinguished not only by its original research but by its “passionate prose” (James F. Brooks), historian Linford Fisher demonstrates how the enslavement of Indigenous people began in the years just after 1492, ensnaring an estimated three to six million Natives throughout the Americas. Although largely erased from the public consciousness, Native enslavement continued for centuries to become a colossal phenomenon that affected nearly 600,000 Native Americans in North America alone, revealing the shocking truth that American colonizers enslaved Natives in roughly the same numbers as they imported enslaved Africans.

From Virginia to California, from New England to Barbados, Stealing America traces the history of Indigenous enslavement and land dispossession, detailing how colonizers captured Natives and often deliberately mislabeled them as Black slaves to avoid detection. While the American Revolution pealed the bells of freedom for colonists, it paved a larcenous trail of westward expansion that subsequently plundered Indigenous land and stole the labor of Natives from nations like the Cherokee, Navajo, Nisean, and many others. “This double theft,” Fisher writes, “was central to the origins, growth, and eventual success of the English colonies and the United States―not just initially but throughout all of American history.”

In this expansive narrative, Fisher weaves together accounts of major episodes in American history including early colonization, the American Revolution, and the Civil War with lesser-known stories of Native enslavement and land loss. Fisher upends conventional histories about the nature of American slavery, revealing enslaved Natives in places we have overlooked, including southern antebellum plantations and the nineteenth-century American West. After Congress outlawed Native slavery in 1867, Americans forced Indigenous children into boarding schools and white homes, where they labored under forced assimilation. This practice was not reformed until the latter twentieth century, when Native nations finally secured increasing rights and self-determination.

Nearly fifteen years in the making, this magisterial volume not only uncovers a five-century genocidal history but also illuminates the myriad ways Native Americans have fought for their sovereignty and maintained community. The most comprehensive work of its kind, Stealing America emerges as a saga of both persistent colonialism and Indigenous resilience, one that reframes American history at its core. 90 illustrations; 19 maps.

Linford D. Fisher is an associate professor of history at Brown University. The author of The Indian Great Awakening and principal investigator of the Stolen Relations project, he lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Liveright
ISBN-13: 978-1324094951