Manifest Destiny's Myriad Influences: Native Americans and the Rise of 20th-century Totalitarianism

Ned Blackhawk is the Howard R. Lamar Professorof History at Yale University where he has taught Native American and U.S. history since 2009. A member of the Te-Moak Tribe of the Western Shoshone Indians of Nevada, he is author and/or co-editor of many works in Indigenous Studies, including The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History , was published with Yale University Press as volume 13 in the Henry Roe Cloud Series on American Indians and Modernity.  It received the National Book Award for Nonfiction, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and Mark Lynton History Prize, among others. A national bestseller, it has been translated into eight foreign languages and will appear in a young adult version in September with Seven Stories Press. 

A regular commentator on historical works, Native American art, and public history, Blackhawk has published reviews in The Nation, Washington Post, New York Times Book Review, Reviews in American History, American Quarterly, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, and Atlantic Studies, among others. His museum catalogue entries include exhibitions for the National Museum of the American Indian, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Denver Art Museum for its 2025 retrospective “Kent Monkman: History is Painted by the Victors.” In 2024, he served as a scholarly contributor to The History Channel’s The West Series, co-produced by Kevin Coster and Doris Kerns Goodwin, and in 2025 to PBS’s The American Revolution Series, co-directed by Ken Burns. 

Blackhawk lectures widely and has served on literary and scholarly prize committees, including the 2026 Cundhill Prize Committee. He is faculty coordinator for the Yale Group for the Study of Native America. His current work focuses on the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War and the place of Native nations in the unfolding Revolutionary War, portions of which were featured in 2025 in The Boston Globe and The Atlantic.