Tiya MilesThe House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story

Tiya Miles explores a complicated and multilayered subject in her book, The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story. It is a seemingly innocuous entity—a historic house in Georgia. However, the house is the Chief Vann House, a nineteenth-century mansion on traditional Cherokee land erected by a Cherokee family who owned more than one hundred slaves. When writing an earlier book about African and Cherokee interrelated histories, Miles came across the house with its interwoven past of Cherokee, European-American, and African and African-American lives. In this book, she takes a material culture approach—examining an “artifact” (the house) and uncovering its cultural, historical, and social contexts.With her background in African-American studies, Miles brings in scholarship about the African diaspora, slavery, the antebellum South, and black consciousness. She discusses subjugation and its many layers in this story—Cherokee men over Cherokee women, Cherokee men/women over African slaves, the United States over Cherokees. Also, she defines the mechanisms of slavery and its key facet of “the dehumanization of another person that transfers a sense of perverse superiority onto the slave owner” (116). Instead of talking about slaves generally, she defines three different slave populations on the Vann estate—slaves from Africa, slaves of African descent born in Cherokee country who spoke Cherokee, and slaves of mixed African and Cherokee ancestries. Each has a different and interlocking story.Instead of enduring as faceless statistics, Miles retells the lives of certain slaves, male and female, to illuminate life as a slave on the Vann estate. Caty, Patience, Grace, Pleasant, Isaac, and Michael had their own ways and methods of dealing with life as an enslaved person. Miles shows how slaves were treated and how they reacted. They were sold, punished, brutally abused, and overworked. The slaves resisted through work slowdowns, destroying tools, running away, burning homes, and committing suicide.Violence figures heavily in this book. It is uncensored and unapologetic. At times, it became too much. However, the Vann estate was a place of tremendous abuse. Nevertheless, Miles tackles deeply contentious issues that many do not want to address—black chattel slavery, domestic violence, colonialism, Indian Removal, and Cherokee slave holders. She demonstrates that the sources are there. It is a commendable topic which hopefully produces more scholarship.

This is a dark side of history.

First of all, it's just a good read: captivating story and elegant prose.As an historian, I was impressed with Miles' command and interpretation of primary source material. There is enough historical context, but not so much that the primary sources are lost. Her read of primary sources is careful and methodical yet without the heavy-handed reference to method or dogmatic allegiance to historical narratives typical of social and cultural history. Hers is a good way to introduce race and gender to an academic and to a popular audience, and specifically to potential hostile audiences. There are chapters toward the end of the book to address these issues of method and narrative context explicitly.Also, thanks for the beautiful title and dispatching the jokey title/subtitle that has become convention in academic historical works. This book should serves as a model format for academic historians. In fact, if I were now to write a monograph, I would pattern mine against this. It is a breath of fresh air. Finallly, as an American social / women's historian, it inspired me to read more native American history.Bravo Ms. Miles!

The story, while informative, was just like a school book. No one in my book club was a fan either.

I loved the book! Ms. Miles is a wonderful writer and shared more about the Vann Plantation than any other book I have read regarding James Vann, Joseph Vann, Wahli Vann and Peggy Scott Vann and the people who lived and worked at Diamond Hill.

Great book! She included a table in the appendices which tells the names, occupations, special skills, etc. of many of the slaves which was a fascinating addition to the text.

Wonderful, the author did an outstanding job on her research, would recommend this to a friend, my second book by Mrs Miles.

I read this book as an assignment for a college class. It was a good book. It just isn't one that I would have chosen for my self. It reads like a research paper and is very informative and I learned a lot.I was surprised that Native American's had slaves and plantations.If you like history, you will like this.~Me