"This is one of the most thoughtful, beautifully written works of history on any topic that I have read in a long while. Miles has taken a complex set of issues that have been long obscured by a desire for a romantic and guilt-free past, and with grace and sensitivity, has completely rewritten history."--Leslie M. Harris, Emory University
House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story
At the turn of the nineteenth century, James Vann, a Cherokee chief and entrepreneur, established Diamond Hill in Georgia, the most famous plantation in the southeastern Cherokee Nation. In this first full-length study to reconstruct the history of the plantation, Tiya Miles tells the story of Diamond Hill's founding, its flourishing, its takeover by white land-lottery winners on the eve of the Cherokee Removal, its decay, and ultimately its renovation in the 1950s. This moving multiracial history sheds light on the various cultural communities that interacted within the plantation boundaries—from elite Cherokee slaveholders to Cherokee subsistence farmers, from black slaves of various ethnic backgrounds to free blacks from the North and South, from German-speaking Moravian missionaries to white southern skilled laborers. Moreover, the book includes rich portraits of the women of these various communities. Vividly written and extensively researched, this history illuminates gender, class, and cross-racial relationships on the southern frontier.
“Tiya Miles's new book, The House on Diamond Hill , delves into the Chief Vann House's formative years, bringing to life the complex world of a multiracial and multicultural frontier South. . . . Deserves a prominent place on the bookshelves of anyone interested in Native Americans, slavery, plantation labor, or the antebellum South, as well as anyone who appreciates a beautiful, poignant read.-- Southern Cultures”
This is one of the most thoughtful, beautifully written works of history on any topic that I have read in a long while. Miles has taken a complex set of issues that have been long obscured by a desire for a romantic and guilt-free past, and with grace and sensitivity, has completely rewritten history.--Leslie M. Harris, Emory University|""Displaying pitch-perfect sensibility that weaves profound human empathy with piercing scholarly critique, Tiya Miles lays open the suffering of all those who found themselves enmeshed in the world of Diamond Hill. At once monument and memorial, the Vann House is Cherokee, African, and American slavery writ large.""--James F. Brooks, author of Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands
Tiya Miles is associate professor of history, American culture, Afro-American studies, and Native American studies at the University of Michigan. Her first book, "Ties That Bind: The Story of An Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom", won the Organization of American Historians' Turner Prize and the American Studies Association's Romero Prize.
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