The stories we told about America's westward expansion have changed in recent decades.
The stories of brave pioneers triumphing over hostile Indians have generally been replaced with more nuanced and realistic accounts of white people moving west and red people being uprooted from their ancestral homes to make room.
Jeffrey Ostler, history professor at the University of Oregon, takes an expansive look at the period in the book Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas. The book stops at the Civil War; it is the first of two volumes. The author visits with an overview of his analysis.