For 11 years, astride the Missouri-Kansas border, Cass County endured the vortex of our nation’s most violent confl ict. Citizens struggled between three raging fi res, Secessionism, Unionism, and an undying Border War. Cass County’s uncivil war, intimate, cruel, and total, suffered no man, woman or child to escape loss or injury – their individual stories weave history’s fabric. Violent circumstances forged leaders who shaped Missouri’s political and military history. Caught Between Three Fires, for the fi rst time, reconstructs a lost history, erased by total destruction, Order No. 11, and time’s purposeful neglect.
This innovative study presents a new, integrated view of the Civil War and Reconstruction and the history of the western United States. Award-winning historians such as Steven Hahn, Martha Sandweiss, William Deverell, Virginia Scharff, and Stephen Kantrowitz offer original essays on lives, choices, and legacies in the American West, discussing the consequences for American Indian nations, the link between Reconstruction and suffrage movements, and cross-border interactions with Canada and Mexico. In the West, Civil War battlefields and Civil War politics engaged a wide range of ethnic and racial distinctions, raising questions that would arise only later in places farther east. Histories of Reconstruction in the South ignore the connections to previous occupation efforts and citizenship debates in the West. The stories contained in this volume complicate our understanding of the paths from slavery to freedom for white as well as non-white Americans. By placing the histories of the American West and the Civil War and Reconstruction period within one sustained conversation, this volume expands the limits of both by emphasizing how struggles over land, labor, sovereignty, and citizenship shaped the U.S. nation-state in this tumultuous era. This volume highlights significant moments and common concerns of this continuous conflict, as it stretched across the continent and throughout the nineteenth century. Publishing on the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War, this collection brings eminent historians into conversation, looking at the Civil War from several Western perspectives, and delivers a refreshingly disorienting view intended for scholars, general readers, and students. Published in Cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.
Nurlaelawati's close and contextually sensitive analysis of judicial practice in Indonesia's Islamic courts yields invaluable insights into the subtle dynamics of legal change in a modern Islamic legal system. Prof. Mark Cammack, Professor of Law, Southwestern Law School, Los Angeles --
Molly Wingate, middle-aged, portly, dark browed and strong, stood at the door of the rude tent which for the time made her home. She was pointing down the road which lay like an écru ribbon thrown down across the prairie grass, bordered beyond by the timber-grown bluffs of the Missouri. Jesse Wingate allowed his team of harness-marked horses to continue their eager drinking at the watering hole of the little stream near which the camp was pitched until, their thirst quenched, they began burying their muzzles and blowing into the water in sensuous enjoyment. He stood, a strong and tall man of perhaps forty-five years, of keen blue eye and short, close-matted, tawny beard. His garb was the loose dress of the outlying settler of the Western lands three-quarters of a century ago. A farmer he must have been back home. Could this encampment, on the very front of the American civilization, now be called a home? Beyond the prairie road could be seen a double furrow of jet-black glistening sod, framing the green grass and its spangling flowers, first browsing of the plow on virgin soil. It might have been the opening of a farm. But if so, why the crude bivouac? Why the gear of travelers? Why the massed arklike wagons, the scores of morning fires lifting lazy blue wreaths of smoke against the morning mists? The truth was that Jesse Wingate, earlier and impatient on the front, out of the very suppression of energy, had been trying his plow in the first white furrows beyond the Missouri in the great year of 1848. Four hundred other near-by plows alike were avid for the soil of Oregon; as witness this long line of newcomers, late at the frontier rendezvous. "It's the Liberty wagons from down river," said the campmaster at length. "Missouri movers and settlers from lower Illinois. It's time. We can't lie here much longer waiting for Missouri or Illinois, either. The grass is up." "Well, we'd have to wait for Molly to end her spring term, teaching in Clay School, in Liberty," rejoined his wife, "else why'd we send her there to graduate? Twelve dollars a month, cash money, ain't to be sneezed at." "No; nor is two thousand miles of trail between here and Oregon, before snow, to be sneezed at, either. If Molly ain't with those wagons I'll send Jed over for her to-day. If I'm going to be captain I can't hold the people here on the river any longer, with May already begun." "She'll be here to-day," asserted his wife. "She said she would. Besides, I think that's her riding a little one side the road now. Not that I know who all is with her. One young man--two. Well"--with maternal pride--"Molly ain't never lacked for beaus!
