With deep research and lively prose, prize-winning historian Christina Snyder reinterprets the history of Jacksonian era America through an experimental educational community called Great Crossings, a place where Indians, settlers, and slaves were transformed and tried to secure their place in a changing world. The Choctaw Indian Academy at Great Crossings, Kentucky, which existed from 1825 to 1848, represented dreams for a future for the US that never materialized. The Choctaws hoped that establishing a school for their children outside of their homelands with the US War Department would signal that they were 'civilized' and deserved a place in the nation....Snyder...details how Great Crossings became an anachronism in a US bent on the removal of all American Indians westward in order to facilitate a massive expansion of the South's plantation economy built on African and African American slave labor. Highly recommended.