Cover of the book Ties That Bind

Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (American Crossroads)

This beautifully written book, now in its second edition, tells the haunting saga of a quintessentially American family. In the late 1790s, Shoe Boots, a famed Cherokee warrior and successful farmer, acquired an African slave named Doll. Over the next thirty years, Shoe Boots and Doll lived together as master and slave and also as lifelong partners who, with their children and grandchildren, experienced key events in American history—including slavery, the Creek War, the founding of the Cherokee Nation and subsequent removal of Native Americans along the Trail of Tears, and the Civil War. This is the gripping story of their lives, in slavery and in freedom.

Updated with a new preface and an appendix of key primary sources, this remains an essential book for students of Native American history, African American history, and the history of race and ethnicity in the United States.

Published by University of California Press; Second Edition edition
Published  June 23, 2015


tiesTies That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom

Ties That Bind was awarded the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians (2006) and the Lora Romero Distinguished First Book Award from the American Studies Association (2006).  In 2006, Miles was named a “Top Young Historian” by the History News Network.
Ties that Bind has been voted one of the ten most influential books in Native American and Indigenous Studies in the first decade of the twenty-first century by the membership of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA).

Published by Berkeley: University of California Press
Published 2005


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