When I read a historical work I am looking for it to do two things: teach me something new about a period, and also get me to question some of the things I thought I already knew. Hogeland's book delivers on both counts. Within the first couple of chapters, I suspect that most readers will be astonished that they have never heard of the precipitating military disaster that led to the formation of the regular US army. As Hogeland points out near the end of the book, most US citizens (and even a substantial portion of people from overseas) have heard of Custer and the battle of Little Big Horn. In that battle about 300 US soldiers were killed and wounded. The defeat of an ill advised 1791 expedition into native American territory, by contrast, killed almost four times that number--men, women, and children--and wiped out virtually all the commissioned officers and almost the entirety of what was then the US army. . .and yet few today know about it. Yet Hogeland makes a compelling and carefully researched case that it was the response to this disaster that put the US inevitably on the track of becoming an Imperial power. There is a direct line from the successful campaign led by--the also now largely forgotten--General Anthony Wayne to the modern War on Terror.

There is one additional thing that I expect from a professional historian and that is the ability to tell a good story. Hogeland is a great story-teller, and this book was a page-turner. However, I suspect that that won't be to everyone's taste, and occasionally he can come across as a little glib. He has done the necessary research, but he is also operating in an environment where many of the primary accounts are missing or exist in multiple competing versions. Usually he is conscientious in flagging competing accounts. But this also means that he has, of necessity, to extrapolate, to offer his best guess or interpretation. This simply reminds us that the job of the professional historian is not simply to tell us a story, but to tell us a plausible story consistent with the known empirical evidence.

The obvious importance of these events to the formation of a modern America should also cause us to reflect yet again--as if more evidence were needed--on the lamentable state of history teaching in US schools. US educational curricula continue to deal in shoddy and manifestly inadequate ways with race in general, and with the history of Native American conquest in particular. In that light, what makes Hogeland's book especially useful is that it clearly points to this historical moment as arguably one of only two instances (the other being King Phillip's War) where Native Americans had a real shot at stopping the nascent US invasion in its tracks. And they came very close to doing so, which leads to some fascinating historical "what ifs." ( )