Tim Alan Garrison and Greg O'Brien assemble contributions from leading ethnohistorians of the American South in a state-of-the-field volume of Native American history from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. Spanning such subjects as Seminole-African American kinship systems, Cherokee notions of guilt and innocence in evolving tribal jurisprudence, Indian captives and American empire, and second-wave feminist activism among Cherokee women in the 1970s, the book offers a dynamic examination of ethnohistorical methodology and evolving research subjects in southern Native American history. Theda Perdue and Michael Green, pioneers in the modern historiography of the Native South who developed it into a major field of scholarly inquiry today, speak in interviews with the editors about how that field evolved in the late twentieth century after the foundational work of James Mooney, John Swanton, Angie Debo, and Charles Hudson.

Introduction / Greg O'Brien -- An interview with Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green / Greg O'Brien -- The enterprise of war : the military economy of the Chickasaw Indians, 1715-1815 / David A. Nichols -- Quieting the ghosts : how the Choctaws and Chickasaws stopped fighting / Greg O'Brien -- Cherokee and Christian expressions of spirituality through first parents : Eve and Selu / Rowena McClinton -- Andrew Jackson's Indian son : native captives and American empire / Christina Snyder -- Inevitability and the southern opposition to Indian removal / Tim Alan Garrison -- An absolute and unconditional pardon : nineteenth-century Cherokee indigenous justice / Julie L. Reed -- Race, kinship, and belonging among the Florida Seminoles / Mikaëla M. Adams -- Witnessing the West : Barbara Longknife and the California gold rush / Rose Stremlau -- Cherokee women and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union / Izumi Ishii -- Kinship and capitalism in the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations / Malinda Maynor Lowery -- "Engaged in the struggle for liberation as they see it" : indigenous southern women and International Women's Year / Meg Devlin O'Sullivan -- Cherokee ghostings and the haunted South / James Taylor Carson.