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The last stand of Custer and Sitting Bull
It’s hard for us in the twenty-first century to imagine the role that George Armstrong Custer played in American popular culture well into the 1970s. The lieutenant colonel of the Seventh Cavalry was famous for leading 210 men into a bloody rout by Chief Sitting Bull – and Custer became the mixed symbol of bravery, spectacular military failure and Native American resistance to America’s manifest destiny.
In this week’s Bookpod episode, Nathaniel Philbrick talks about The Last Stand, the book he wrote to explore the character of the event’s main players – and of the nineteenth-century world powers that began wresting natural resources from smaller countries and territories. (6 minutes, 3 seconds, mp3. Transcript available in pdf.)
