Tragic Encounters

Tragic Encounters: The People’s History of Native Americans by Page Smith (Amberley Publishing), 2015 477pp., £25, hard, ISBN 978-1-4456-5402-7

Page Smith was one of America’s greatest historians. He made his mark with a history of the United States published in eight volumes, each volume carrying the subtitle ‘A People’s History of the United States’. These were ground-breaking histories, composed as a long continuous narrative loosely organised around the themes present in each age or period. They were sourced almost entirely in contemporary accounts of the events and they set the ground for a whole new approach to history. During the last years of his life—he died in 1995--Smith concentrated on composing a history of Native Americans after the first European contact. This manuscript was discovered unpublished after his death though it has taken two decades for it to reach the book shelf.

An editorial note suggests that the book was a ‘draft away…from something that would have been submitted to the publisher’ and editorial alterations have been kept to a minimum.  Page Smith’s narrative turns to contemporaneous documents to provide the structure and substance of this history. Tragic Encounters allows these oppressed and nearly destroyed people a chance to tell their own story. The book is extremely well structured and written but it does reflect the thinking of the late 1980s and early 1990s.