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Best of the National Book Festival: Native American History, 2019

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Welcome to our ongoing celebration of the Library of Congress National Book Festival. Each weekday, we will feature a video presentation from among the thousands of authors who have appeared at the National Book Festival and as part of our new year-long series, National Book Festival Presents. Mondays will feature topical nonfiction; Tuesday: poetry or literary fiction; Wednesday: history, biography, memoir; Thursday: popular fiction; and Friday: authors who write for children and teens. Please enjoy, and make sure to explore our full National Book Festival video collection!

During the 2019 Library of Congress National Book Festival, Colin G. Calloway and David Treuer discussed their most recent books on Native American history from the History & Biography stage with Gal Beckerman, an editor at The New York Times Book Review.

Colin G. Calloway is the John Kimball Jr. 1943 Professor of History and professor of Native American Studies at Dartmouth College. He served for two years as associate director and editor of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian at the Newberry Library in Chicago and taught for seven years at the University of Wyoming. He has been associated with Dartmouth since 1990. His books include his most recent, “The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans and the Birth of the Nation,” as well as “Pen and Ink Witchraft: Treaties and Treaty Making in American Indian History” and “The Indian History of an American Institution: Native Americans and Dartmouth.”

David Treuer is Ojibwe from the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. The author of novels, most recently “Prudence,” and books of nonfiction, he has also written for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Esquire, Slate and The Washington Post, among others. In 2006 he published a book of essays that contended that “Native American fiction does not exist.” He and his brother are working on an Ojibwe language grammar. His recent book is “The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present.”

Q&A begins at 40:10.

The 2020 Library of Congress National Book Festival will celebrate its 20th birthday this year. You can get up-to-the-minute news, schedule updates and other important festival information by subscribing to this blog. The festival is made possible by the generosity of sponsors. You too can support the festival by making a gift now.