The first history of Indian slavery in the Mississippi Valley during the colonial era. Based almost entirely on original source documents from the United States, France, and Spain, Carl J. Ekberg's Stealing Indian Women provides a novel overview of Indian slavery in the Mississippi Valley. His detailed study of a fascinating and convoluted criminal case involving various slave women and a métis (mixed-blood) woodsman named Céladon illuminates race and gender relations, Creole culture, and the lives of Indian slaves--particularly women--in ways never before possible.

Descendants of indentured laborers brought from India to the Caribbean between 1845 and 1917 comprise more than forty percent of Trinidad’s population today. While many Indo-Trinidadians identify themselves as Indian, what “Indian” signifies—about nationalism, gender, culture, caste, race, and religion—in the Caribbean is different from what it means on the subcontinent. Yet the ways that “Indianness” is conceived of and performed in India and in Trinidad have historically been, and remain, intimately related. Offering an innovative analysis of how ideas of Indian identity negotiated within the Indian diaspora in Trinidad affect cultural identities “back home,” Tejaswini Niranjana models a necessary project: comparative research across the global South, scholarship that decenters the “first world” West as the referent against which postcolonial subjects understand themselves and are understood by others. Niranjana draws on nineteenth-century travel narratives, anthropological and historical studies of Trinidad, Hindi film music, and the lyrics, performance, and reception of chutney-soca and calypso songs to argue that perceptions of Indian female sexuality in Trinidad have long been central to the formation and disruption of dominant narratives of nationhood, modernity, and normative sexuality in India. She illuminates debates in India about “the woman question” as they played out in the early-twentieth-century campaign against indentured servitude in the tropics. In so doing, she reveals India’s disavowal of the indentured woman—viewed as morally depraved by her forced labor in Trinidad—as central to its own anticolonial struggle. Turning to the present, Niranjana looks to Trinidad’s most dynamic site of cultural negotiation: popular music. She describes how contested ideas of Indian femininity are staged by contemporary Trinidadian musicians—male and female, of both Indian and African descent—in genres ranging from new hybrids like chutney-soca to the older but still vibrant music of Afro-Caribbean calypso.

A memoir—written in the wake of a cancer diagnosis—that zeroes in on the crux between two brothers: one who became an LAPD officer, and the other a terrorist Sunil Dutta is a twenty-year veteran of the LAPD. Before that, he was a biologist at the University of California and a translator of classic Indian poetry. Before that, he was a destitute refugee, one of so many uprooted by the genocidal violence surrounding the Partition of India. Back then, he had a brother. Back then, they were children together, chasing whatever fun and solace they could find in impossible conditions. Sunil looked up to Raju. He admired his strength, his character. Raju took a different path. He was arrested, he fled the law, he became a fugitive. He became a terrorist. Then he became a father—and then a murderer. After being diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer later in life, Sunil urgently wanted to understand what choices had led he and his brother down such radically different paths. In Stealing Green Mangoes, Dutta takes us from his family home in Rajasthan to America, to France, to the streets of southeastern Los Angeles, homing in on the questions that tore him and Raju apart: Can you outgrow the madness that made you? Can you make peace with the ghosts of your past? A memoir with sweeping, spiritual ambitions, Stealing Green Mangoes tells the story of a man who pushed back against the forces that captured his own brother and built a compassionate, meaningful life in a broken world.

Dr. Ekberg's masterwork on the old French town south of St. Louis brings into sharp focus life in colonial America. Ekberg has rendered a rich portrait of community life on the most fascinating of American frontiers, the composite world of French Creoles and American Indians in the Mississippi Valley. This is an important book and a good read to boot. That's how Yale University's John Mack Faragher praised this book.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A twisting, haunting true-life murder mystery about one of the most monstrous crimes in American history, from the author of The Wager and The Lost City of Z, “one of the preeminent adventure and true-crime writers working today."—New York Magazine • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • NOW A MARTIN SCORSESE PICTURE “A shocking whodunit…What more could fans of true-crime thrillers ask?”—USA Today “A masterful work of literary journalism crafted with the urgency of a mystery.” —The Boston Globe In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe. Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. One of her relatives was shot. Another was poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more and more Osage were dying under mysterious circumstances, and many of those who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered. As the death toll rose, the newly created FBI took up the case, and the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to try to unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including a Native American agent who infiltrated the region, and together with the Osage began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history. Look for David Grann’s latest bestselling book, The Wager!

Caught between a father who thought success and freedom could be found only in America and a grandfather who risked his life to guarantee such ideals in their homeland of India, twenty-three-year-old Rajiv Kothari is lost in a nation he has always called home and beckoned by the one his father left long ago. Stealing the Ambassador is a literary page-turner that blends the experiences of a first-generation Indian American with those of his immigrant father and revolutionary grandfather, their intertwined stories probing the balance between fiction and history, between old country and new, between fathers and sons. Following his father's sudden death, Rajiv finds himself alone and bewildered. As he attempts to reconstruct his father's life, he begins to better understand his own, and when he chances to meet a new Indian immigrant, eerily reminiscent of his own father, their uncanny interaction grants Rajiv insight into the euphoria that his father felt when he first arrived in the country and its gradual deterioration into frustrated estrangement. Events lead Rajiv to a reverse migration, back to the subcontinent of his father's birth. There he reconnects with his aged grandfather -- once a saboteur responsible for bombings in pre-Independence British India and now mysteriously destitute. Discovering the source of this impoverishment, Rajiv is awakened to a second understanding of his childhood hero, a reconsideration that illuminates the relationships between grandfather, father, and grandson while pointing to new definitions of bravery and familial loyalty. Stealing the Ambassador is a stunning debut from the young Sameer Parekh. In depicting the ways that families are at the source of both our frustration with and our loyalty to identity, Parekh sheds new light on the immigrant experience and on the complexity and power of family relations.

Intro -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- List of Abbreviations -- Introduction -- Chapter 1: From France to the Frontier -- Chapter 2: Settling "Paincourt" : Indians, the Fur Trade, and Farms -- Chapter 3: "A Strange Mixture" : Rulers, Misrule, and Unruly Inhabitants in the 1760s -- Chapter 4: Power Dynamics and the Indian Presence in St. Louis -- Chapter 5: Sex, Race, and Empire: The Peopling of St. Louis -- Chapter 6: "The World, the Flesh, and the Devil" : Conflicts over Religion, Alcohol, and Authority -- Chapter 7: A Village in Crisis: Conflict and Violence on the Brink of War -- Chapter 8: "l'Année du Coup" : The "Last Day of St. Louis" and the Revolutionary War -- Chapter 9: The Struggles of the 1780s -- Chapter 10: St. Louis in the 1790s: The Enemies Within and Without -- Conclusion: "The Devil Take All" or "A Happy Change"? : The End of European Rule and the American Takeover -- Afterword -- Bibliography -- Index.