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Amanda Bellows

Amanda Bellows

Amanda Bellows is a historian of the United States and teaches undergraduates at the New School. Her new book, The Explorers: A New History of America in Ten Expeditions, was published by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, earlier this month. Bellows is also the author of American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination.

York, the enslaved man who accompanied Lewis and Clark on their history-making expedition, appears in the rightmost canoe in this 1905 painting by Charles Marion Russell.

The Forgotten Black Explorers Who Transformed Americans’ Understanding of the Wilderness

Esteban, York and James Beckwourth charted the American frontier between the 16th and 19th centuries