SHADES OF HIAWATHA Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880-1930 By Alan Trachtenberg

This book examines the ways in which Indians and immigrants became linked in the public imagination. A century ago, it was U.S. government policy to coercively prepare Native Americans for citizenship, even as immigrants from Europe and Asia sought American citizenship as a means of achieving freedom. Together, these groups changed the idea of what it meant to be American. (2005 paperback, Hill and Wang, 370 pages)