Audiobooks by David J. Silverman

The Chosen and The Damned: Native Americans and the Making of Race in the United States

"Bloomsbury presents The Chosen and The Damned: Native Americans and the Making of Race in the United States by David J. Silverman, read by James Markert. A sweeping chronicle placing race at the center of Native American U.S. history, from the award-winning author of This Land Is Their Land. When the colonial era began, Europeans did not consider themselves as “Whites,” and Native Americans did not think of themselves as “Indians.” Yet as a genocidal struggle for America unfolded over the course of generations, all that changed. Euro-Americans developed a sense of racial identity, superiority, and national mission—of being chosen. They contended that Indians were damned to disappear so Whites could spread Christian civilization. Native people countered that the Great Spirit had created Indians and Whites separately and intended America to belong to Indians alone. In The Chosen and the Damned, acclaimed historian David J. Silverman traces Indian-White racial arguments across four centuries, from the bloody colonial wars for territory to the national wars of extermination justified as “Manifest Destiny'; from the creation of reservations and boarding schools to the rise of the Red Power movement and beyond. In this transformative retelling, Silverman shows how White identity, defined against Indians, became central to American nationhood. He also reveals how Indian identity contributed to Native Americans’ resistance and resilience as modern tribal people, even as it has sometimes pit them against one another on the basis of race. The epochal story of race in America is typically understood as a Black and White issue. The Chosen and the Damned restores the defining role Native people have played, and continue to play, in our national history. C 2026 David J. Silverman P 2026 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC"

David J. Silverman (Author), James Markert (Narrator)

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This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving

"* Pre-order David J. Silverman's next audiobook, The Chosen and The Damned: Native Americans and the Making of Race in the United States. Coming February 2026. * Bloomsbury presents This Land Is Their Land by David J. Silverman, read by William Roberts. Ahead of the 400th anniversary of the first Thanksgiving, a new look at the Plymouth colony’s founding events, told for the first time with Wampanoag people at the heart of the story. In March 1621, when Plymouth’s survival was hanging in the balance, the Wampanoag sachem (or chief), Ousamequin (Massasoit), and Plymouth’s governor, John Carver, declared their people’s friendship for each other and a commitment to mutual defense. Later that autumn, the English gathered their first successful harvest and lifted the specter of starvation. Ousamequin and 90 of his men then visited Plymouth for the “First Thanksgiving.” The treaty remained operative until King Philip’s War in 1675, when 50 years of uneasy peace between the two parties would come to an end. 400 years after that famous meal, historian David J. Silverman sheds profound new light on the events that led to the creation, and bloody dissolution, of this alliance. Focusing on the Wampanoag Indians, Silverman deepens the narrative to consider tensions that developed well before 1620 and lasted long after the devastating war—tracing the Wampanoags’ ongoing struggle for self-determination up to this very day. This unsettling history reveals why some modern Native people hold a Day of Mourning on Thanksgiving, a holiday which celebrates a myth of colonialism and white proprietorship of the United States. This Land is Their Land shows that it is time to rethink how we, as a pluralistic nation, tell the history of Thanksgiving. C 2019 David J. Silverman P 2019 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC"

David J. Silverman (Author), William Roberts (Narrator)

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