Shoe Boots, a famed Cherokee warrior and successful farmer, and Doll, an African slave he acquired in the late 1790s. Over the next thirty years, Shoe Boots and Doll lived together as master and slave and also as lifelong partners who, with their children and grandchildren, experienced key events in American history.

A meditation on one of Western philosophy's biggest puzzles: the relation of mind and matter. What is the role of imagination in defining material substance? In a study of the poetics of materialist philosophy, the text traces the historical union of matter and metaphor through a range of topics.