A new book by a noted historian attempts to show how expanding American democracy hurt Native Americans in the early days of the nation and how tribes viewed the young United States as an entity seeking to erase them from existence.

University of Oregon history professor Jeffrey Ostler's just-released "Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution and Bleeding Kansas" argues that the emergence of American democracy depended on the taking of Native lands.

Leaders of the fledgling nation also felt that removing Native Americans from the ancestral land — by any means necessary — was key to allowing an expanding and poorer white population to move west, the historian writes.

Ostler said he based his book on 30 years of research by other scholars in the field of Native American studies but wanted to do a large survey of how tribes saw the looming U.S. threat.