History of the Indians, of North and South America

Published in 1844, this comprehensive survey attempts to catalogue the Indigenous peoples of both American continents at a moment when their populations had already been devastated by centuries of colonization. Samuel G. Goodrich, a prolific American educator and publisher, assembles what was known of Native American origins, tribal classifications, and cultural practices while documenting the catastrophic population decline that had reduced numbers from estimated millions to mere remnants. The work reflects its era: it privileges European records over Indigenous oral traditions, employs now-outmoded racial classifications, and unconsciously illustrates the very erasure it describes. Yet it preserves invaluable 19th-century observations about tribal customs, territorial distributions, and the author"s contemporaries" theories about peopling of the Americas. Goodrich writes with genuine sorrow about the vanishing of entire nations, offering demographic estimates (15 to 25 million at contact, with some contemporary guesses reaching 150 million) that modern scholarship has largely validated. For readers interested in early American historiography, this serves as a troubling but essential artifact: a lament for lost peoples written by someone who benefited from their dispossession.