The Cherokees: A Population History is the first full-length demographic study of an American Indian group from the protohistorical period to the present. Thornton shows the effects of disease, warfare, genocide, miscegenation, removal and relocation, and destruction of traditional lifeways on the Cherokees. He discusses their mysterious origins, their first contact with Europeans (prob-ably in 1540), and their fluctuation in population during the eighteenth century, when the Old World brought them smallpox. The toll taken by massive relocations in the following century, most notably the removal of the Cherokees from the Southeast to In-dian Territory, and by warfare, predating the American Revolution and including the Civil War, also enters into Thornton's calculations. He goes on to measure the resurgence of the Cherokees in the twentieth century, focusing on such population centers as North Carolina, Oklahoma, and California.

Spanning three hundred years and the colonial regimes of Spain, Mexico, and the United States, Maurice S. Crandall's sweeping history of Native American political rights in what is now New Mexico, Arizona, and Sonora demonstrates how Indigenous communities implemented, subverted, rejected, and indigenized colonial ideologies of democracy, both to accommodate and to oppose colonial power. Focusing on four groups--Pueblos in New Mexico, Hopis in northern Arizona, and Tohono O'odhams and Yaquis in Arizona/Sonora--Crandall reveals the ways Indigenous peoples absorbed and adapted colonially imposed forms of politics to exercise sovereignty based on localized political, economic, and social needs. Using sources that include oral histories and multinational archives, this book allows us to compare Spanish, Mexican, and American conceptions of Indian citizenship, and adds to our understanding of the centuries-long struggle of Indigenous groups to assert their sovereignty in the face of settler colonial rule.