Joshua Piker

This book has a lot of things to talk about--questions about how narrative is produced and what shapes it, about the various scales and levels that seeming 'microhistories' can address, about the pursuit of truth. The format for me wasn't so much ingenious as like... made sense and yet also felt repetitive at some times, though I know other people feel differently. Despite questioning narratives, Piker does cling pretty heavily to questions of truth, so he doesn't career into like postmodern history or whatever, but that clinging to truth comes across as weird because he buries what he thinks happened in like the last third of the book.

I will say that he does good work with putting Creek sovereignty specifically at the forefront of the conflict he's writing about, which is something I've discovered other folks writing about Native people during the period are Not Great at, and the careful attention to details is impressive work. I guess overall I just wasn't super moved by this book because of personal taste--it's not my era, and I'm not super invested in questions about like 'how do we do the work we do when everything is produced with bias'. It might be useful for teaching undergrads at an upper level, but I think you can accomplish many of these lessons without it, it's sort of whatever for me.… (more)