Free (ADE-DRM ePub) Rising Up From Indian Country [1812 Culture & Military History]

[ATDrake]

Rising Up from Indian Country: The Battle of Fort Dearborn and the Birth of Chicago by Ann Durkin Keating (faculty profile), a professor of history at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, is her accessibly-written history book about Exactly What It Says In The Title (Wikipedia), a tragic but important event that had lasting repercussions for the Native American Potawatomi people (Wikipedia) involved and the formation of early Chicago, as well as being part of the War of 1812, free courtesy of the University of Chicago Press.

This is their featured Free Book of the Month selection for August, and not only covers the military aspects, but also the cultural background for decades both before and after, with the underlying causes and the lingering effects.

Currently free throughout the month of August directly @ the university's dedicated promo page (ADE-DRM ePub available worldwide in return for your valid email address)

And this has been the selected 3rd (non-repeat) free ebook thread of the day.

Normally it would have had tougher competition from the Tor SF freebie, especially since Walton is a fellow Canadian and today is one of our holidays, but TBH I wasn't that impressed with the opening chapters of the 2nd book in the Just City series when I tried it from the library's New Books shelf a few months ago (though that may simply be due to sequelitis and it'll be perfectly cromulent once read in order), and quality quasi-academic non-fiction freebies are just as welcome as sfnal ones and this looks like a very nifty history which covers multiple aspects of the relevant time period, which is something I always like to see. Also, it's been a while since we've gotten one of these in ePub instead of PDF, so bonus points.

Enjoy!

Description
In August 1812, under threat from the Potawatomi, Captain Nathan Heald began the evacuation of ninety-four people from the isolated outpost of Fort Dearborn to Fort Wayne, hundreds of miles away. The group included several dozen soldiers, as well as nine women and eighteen children. After traveling only a mile and a half, they were attacked by five hundred Potawatomi warriors. In under an hour, fifty-two members of Heald’s party were killed, and the rest were taken prisoner; the Potawatomi then burned Fort Dearborn before returning to their villages.

These events are now seen as a foundational moment in Chicago’s storied past. With Rising up from Indian Country, noted historian Ann Durkin Keating richly recounts the Battle of Fort Dearborn while situating it within the context of several wider histories that span the nearly four decades between the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, in which Native Americans gave up a square mile at the mouth of the Chicago River, and the 1833 Treaty of Chicago, in which the American government and the Potawatomi exchanged five million acres of land west of the Mississippi River for a tract of the same size in northeast Illinois and southeast Wisconsin.

In the first book devoted entirely to this crucial period, Keating tells a story not only of military conquest but of the lives of people on all sides of the conflict. She highlights such figures as Jean Baptiste Point de Sable and John Kinzie and demonstrates that early Chicago was a place of cross-cultural reliance among the French, the Americans, and the Native Americans. Published to commemorate the bicentennial of the Battle of Fort Dearborn, this gripping account of the birth of Chicago will become required reading for anyone seeking to understand the city and its complex origins.

[ATDrake]

Just a reminder that this will probably be the last day to pick up the freebie if you haven't already.

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

Just a reminder that this will probably be the last day to pick up the freebie if you haven't already.

Thanks for the reminder. I missed this one. I really like military history.