[noteworthy]
As they often do, the idea for this book began with a very simple rhetorical question: how did we get from there to here? How, in a blink of time, did we morph from a tiny republic of three million mostly illiterate and ethnocentric Europeans, in 1787, to a nation of 300 million mostly well-educated and genetically diverse Americans who represent every ethnic group and culture on the planet?
Kicking the Loose Stones Home By Paul VanDevelder
Excerpted from “Savages and Scoundrels: The Untold Story of America’s Road to Empire Through Indian Territory,” by Paul VanDevelder, published in April 2009 by Yale University Press. Copyright © 2009 by Paul VanDevelder. Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press.
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It’s a ridiculously loaded question, of course, and I had probably asked it many times before without ever giving the answer any serious thought - for its very ridiculousness. With extraordinary patience, effort, and scholarship, historians and journalists have been writing thousand page books for well over a century in hopes of answering tiny slivers of that question. But on a warm June day in 1996, I must have been in an expansive mood. My mother and father and I happened to find ourselves a mere hundred miles apart, on opposite sides of the Great Smokey Mountains of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina, so from our homes on opposite coasts, we had made a date the previous week to meet in the small mountain village of Cherokee on the North Carolina side of the mountains, where my mother was planning to visit the Eastern Band Cherokee tribal headquarters. Having learned a great deal about sleuthing valuable information from historical records in a Library of Congress course on genealogy, my mom was hoping to track down some elusive answers to questions about her mother's murky family of origin. Like most American families whose widely flung ancestors arrived on these shores more than a
