US History to 1877
Trail of Tears: Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation by John Ehle

Having little knowledge of the Cherokee removal and the history that took place in this moment in America’s past, the book Trail of Tears: Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation by John Ehle, offers an insight to the politics, social dynamics and class struggles the Cherokee Nation faced in the late 1830s. The book was very comprehensive and the scope of the book covers nearly 100 years of Native American History. Ehle captures the history of the Native American people by showing the readers what led to the events infamously known as the Trail of Tears. The author uses real military orders, journals, and letters which aid in creating a book that keeps the reader interested in the history that unfolded. The book is very dense with research and the style it is written in is from a contemporary voice, in other words, as the reader you sometimes get the feeling of emotion involved and other times there is a history textbook feeling from the author, which made the reading slightly difficult. I expected the novel to be very emotional narrative that would be sympathetic towards the Cherokee people, but it was a mixture of narrative plus historical facts. The book portrays the actual history, through the use of the many primary sources mentioned earlier, of the Cherokee people, but I believe that the author used that to frame the personalities of his characters as to what their decision making might have been like at the time. Having no connection to this part of history, I empathized with the Cherokee nation and cannot image the amount of suffering they faced in this time. This is something that I think the author did well, portraying the history of the people and the sheer magnitude of suffering the Cherokees went through.
The major players at the time were John Ridge and John Ross.