Peter Cozzens book The Earth is Weeping does not ignore injustices done to the Indians, but he insists we not ignore the white perspective, either. Cozzen contends Brown’s book made no attempt at historical balance. But in the 1970s that view changed as people began seeing whites as villainous conquerors, and the Indians as victims-thanks in no small part to Dee Brown’s influential book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Following the tragedy/massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, most Americas for the next 80 years viewed brave Indian fighters (cavalry) and courageous settlers as heroic. The Earth is Weeping is a book that tries to bring balance to the historical record of the American Indian Wars. For 125 years, much of both popular and academic history, film, and fiction has depicted the period as an absolute struggle between good and evil, reversing the roles of heroes and villains as necessary to accommodate the changing national conscious. No epoch in American history, in fact, is more deeply steeped in myth than the era of the Indian Wars of the American West. In his 2016 book The Earth is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West, author Peter Cozzens delivers a narrative history of the American Indian Wars that tries to reset the record.
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