This week we’ll be talking with Dr. Kevin Kokomoor of Coastal Carolina University about his new book, The Cherokee War of 1776: Native Destruction at the Dawn of American Independence (2026, John Hopkins University Press).

Americans remember 1776 as the year liberty was declared, the moment they cast off tyranny and proclaimed the self-evident truths of equality and freedom. But that same summer, as patriots celebrated their defiant new nation, American armies launched another campaign—this one aimed at destroying the Cherokee nation.

In The Cherokee War of 1776, Kevin Kokomoor recasts America’s founding moment by tracing the importance of westward ambition and settler violence to the origins of the Revolutionary War. And he uncovers the rarely acknowledged war waged by the emerging United States against the Cherokee people just days after the Declaration of Independence was signed. Far from a spontaneous frontier skirmish, this war was a coordinated, state-backed campaign with a clear aim: seize Indigenous land and crush Native resistance.