The first book to chart autonomy's conceptual growth in Native American literature from the late eighteenth to the early twenty-first century, A New Continent of Liberty examines, against the backdrop of Euro-American literature, how Native American authors have sought to reclaim and redefine distinctive versions of an ideal of self-rule grounded in the natural world. Beginning with the writings of Samson Occom, and extending through a range of fiction and nonfiction works by William Apess, Sarah Winnemucca, Zitkala-Sa, N. Scott Momaday, Gerald Vizenor, and Louise Erdrich, Geoff Hamilton sketches a movement of gradual but resolute ascent: from often desperate early efforts, pitted against the historical realities of genocide and cultural annihilation, to preserve any sense of self and community, toward expressions of a resurgent autonomy that affirm new, iIndigenous models of eunomia, a fertile blending of human and natural orders.

This encyclopedia introduces readers to American poetry, fiction and nonfiction with a focus on the environment (broadly defined as humanity's natural surroundings), from the discovery of America through the present. The work includes biographical and literary entries on material from early explorers and colonists such as Columbus, Bartolome de Las Casas and Thomas Harriot; through Native American creation myths; canonical 18th- and 19th-century works of Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, Twain, Dickinson, et al.; to more recent figures such as Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, Stanley Cavell, Rachel Carson, Jon Krakauer and Al Gore. It is meant to provide a synoptic appreciation of how the very concept of the environment has changed over the past five centuries, offering both a general introduction to the topic and a valuable resource for high school and university courses focused on environmental issues.

The first book to chart autonomy's conceptual growth in Native American literature from the late eighteenth to the early twenty-first century, A New Continent of Liberty examines, against the backdrop of Euro-American literature, how Native American authors have sought to reclaim and redefine distinctive versions of an ideal of self-rule grounded in the natural world. Beginning with the writings of Samson Occom, and extending through a range of fiction and nonfiction works by William Apess, Sarah Winnemucca, Zitkala-Sa, N. Scott Momaday, Gerald Vizenor, and Louise Erdrich, Geoff Hamilton sketches a movement of gradual but resolute ascent: from often desperate early efforts, pitted against the historical realities of genocide and cultural annihilation, to preserve any sense of self and community, toward expressions of a resurgent autonomy that affirm new, iIndigenous models of eunomia, a fertile blending of human and natural orders.