David J. Silverman — The Chosen and The Damned
Historian places race at the center of Native American and colonial American history, reframing the founding narrative from the ground up.
Why we picked this
Silverman is one of the most rigorous historians of Native America working today. This book makes a structural argument about race and colonialism that changes how you read the founding.
David J. Silverman’s new work argues that race was not incidental to the American founding but foundational, structurally embedded in the relationships between Native peoples and European colonists from the earliest contact. By centering Indigenous experience, Silverman reframes the colonial period in ways that complicate and deepen the standard narrative.
Silverman is a professor of history at George Washington University and the author of several highly regarded books on Native American history, including “This Land Is Their Land,” which received widespread critical attention for its reexamination of the Mayflower story. He brings the same archival depth and willingness to challenge received wisdom to this new project.
The talk will address how racial categories were constructed, who benefited from those constructions, and what it means to take Indigenous perspectives seriously as historical sources rather than marginal footnotes. This is history that asks hard questions about origins.