The House on Diamond Hill

Here's a recent scholarly study of life in the Vann House, where, after the Vann family was forced to abandon their home, along with all the other Cherokees,  Amanda Caroline was born and grew up.  

Awards & Distinctions

2011 Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Prize, American Society for Ethnohistory

2011 National Council on Public History Book Award

2011 Lilla M. Hawes Award, Georgia Historical Society

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.

About the Author

Tiya Miles is the Elsa Barkley Brown Collegiate Professor of African American Womens History and professor of history, American culture, Afroamerican and African 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. In 2011 she was selected as a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.

336 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 18 illus., 1 table, 4 maps, appends., notes, bibl., index

Cloth

ISBN  978-0-8078-3418-3

Published: August 2010

Paper

ISBN  978-0-8078-7267-3

Published: August 2012

It's from The University of North Carolina Press, and you can order it here.