Ethnology and Empire: Languages, Literature, and the Making of the North American Borderlands

Winner, The Early American Literature Book Prize

Ethnology and Empire tells stories about words and ideas, and ideas about
words that developed in concert with shifting conceptions about Native peoples
and western spaces in the nineteenth-century United States. Contextualizing the
emergence of Native American linguistics as both a professionalized research
discipline and as popular literary concern of American culture prior to the
U.S.-Mexico War, Robert Lawrence Gunn reveals the manner in
which r...