The house on Diamond Hill : a Cherokee plantation story /

Miles (Michigan) is a prize-winning historian of African American and Cherokee relations. An elegant plantation house built in the 1820s by the Vann family of northern Georgia--wealthy Cherokee slaveholders, traders, and planters--shapes this history. Today, the restored historic house is a romanticized tourist destination that embodies both Indian and plantation mythologies. Miles uncovers the realities: black slavery, murder, interracial and intercultural conflict and exploitation, and the Cherokee struggle for survival in the face of violent, naked persecution. Beginning in 1828, the state of Georgia succeeded by stages in taking over Cherokee lands and dissolving autonomous Cherokee social and political institutions. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 established a federal policy of expelling Indian nations westward. By 1834, the Vanns huddled in their house, threatened by voracious whites who occupied it, threatened burning, and gobbled their land and businesses, driving the Vanns out forever. Miles's extensive sources range over Vann papers, Moravian mission papers, WPA Writers' Project research, Cherokee Nation papers, and a great variety of other archival and published sources. Her book is accessible and well written, its story important. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. R. Berleant-Schiller emerita, University of Connecticut

Miles (Afro-American & African studies and Native American studies, Univ. of Michigan; Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom) complements her earlier work by examining the development of racial attitudes among the elite class of Cherokees during the 19th century through the prism of the slaveholding Vann family and their plantation. By exploring the evolution of Cherokee racial views, the author illustrates that Cherokee slavery differed significantly from that practiced by white Americans during the same period. Although Cherokees employed slavery for its economic benefits, they also believed their adoption of slavery helped prove to the United States government that they had acculturated and thus had become "civilized." Verdict Recommended. For other perspectives on race among the Cherokees, see Fay A. Yarbrough's Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century, as well as Claudio Saunt's Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family, which analyzes similar issues during the same period among the Creek Indians.-John Burch, Campbellsville Univ. Lib., KY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.