The Center for Great Plains Studies is pleased to announce a lecture by the 4th Annual Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize winner. The Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize was created to emphasize the interdisciplinary importance of the Great Plains in today's publishing and educational market. Only first edition, full-length, nonfiction books published in 2008 were evaluated for the award.

Imperial Layers: How an Indigenous Empire Changed the Course of American History

During the rise of imperial struggles in North America in the 18th and 19th centuries, the powerful Comanche empire eclipsed its European rivals in military prowess, political prestige, economic power, commercial control, and cultural influence in the fiercely contested lands of the American Southwest, southern Great Plains, and northern Mexico. Pekka Hämäläinen, author of The Comanche Empire, proposes a rethinking of the apparent inevitability of white domination in North America and the key features of the standard history — from inter-group Native American relations, to French and Spanish imperial successes and failures, to the early history of Mexico, to Anglo-American imperial ambitions and the efforts of the post-Civil War United States military. The United States did not push into a power vacuum in the Southwest but rather into an expanding imperial realm of the Comanches, who in the early 19th century held much of northern Mexico as a captive territory. In the Southwest, the expansionist United States plunged into an old and still evolving history of indigenous imperialism, which here emerges as the missing component in the sweeping historical sequence that saw the Mexican Far North turning into the American Southwest and the U.S. emerging as a continental empire.