Ned Blackhawk is an enrolled member of the Te-Moak tribe of the Western Shoshone and a historian on the faculty of Yale University. His scholarly work focuses on Native American history and the early American West. Blackhawk's first major book, Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empire in the Early American West, was published in 2006. The work received significant recognition, earning both the Frederick Jackson Turner Award and the Robert M. Utley Prize in 2007. His later book, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History, published in 2023, achieved broader acclaim. This work won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2023 and the Mark Lynton History Prize in 2024.