Boom Town
Boom Town

Author: Sam Anderson

Publisher: Crown

Published: 2018-08-21

Total Pages: 455

ISBN-13: 0804137323

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A brilliant, kaleidoscopic narrative of Oklahoma City—a great American story of civics, basketball, and destiny, from award-winning journalist Sam Anderson NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • NPR • Chicago Tribune • San Francisco Chronicle • The Economist • Deadspin Oklahoma City was born from chaos. It was founded in a bizarre but momentous “Land Run” in 1889, when thousands of people lined up along the borders of Oklahoma Territory and rushed in at noon to stake their claims. Since then, it has been a city torn between the wild energy that drives its outsized ambitions, and the forces of order that seek sustainable progress. Nowhere was this dynamic better realized than in the drama of the Oklahoma City Thunder basketball team’s 2012-13 season, when the Thunder’s brilliant general manager, Sam Presti, ignited a firestorm by trading future superstar James Harden just days before the first game. Presti’s all-in gamble on “the Process”—the patient, methodical management style that dictated the trade as the team’s best hope for long-term greatness—kicked off a pivotal year in the city’s history, one that would include pitched battles over urban planning, a series of cataclysmic tornadoes, and the frenzied hope that an NBA championship might finally deliver the glory of which the city had always dreamed. Boom Town announces the arrival of an exciting literary voice. Sam Anderson, former book critic for New York magazine and now a staff writer at the New York Times magazine, unfolds an idiosyncratic mix of American history, sports reporting, urban studies, gonzo memoir, and much more to tell the strange but compelling story of an American city whose unique mix of geography and history make it a fascinating microcosm of the democratic experiment. Filled with characters ranging from NBA superstars Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook; to Flaming Lips oddball frontman Wayne Coyne; to legendary Great Plains meteorologist Gary England; to Stanley Draper, Oklahoma City's would-be Robert Moses; to civil rights activist Clara Luper; to the citizens and public servants who survived the notorious 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building, Boom Town offers a remarkable look at the urban tapestry woven from control and chaos, sports and civics.

This Land Is Herland
This Land Is Herland

Author: Sarah Eppler Janda

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2021-07-07

Total Pages: 410

ISBN-13: 0806178590

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Since well before ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 secured their right to vote, women in Oklahoma have sought to change and uplift their communities through political activism. This Land Is Herland brings together the stories of thirteen women activists and explores their varied experiences from the territorial period to the present. Organized chronologically, the essays discuss Progressive reformer Kate Barnard, educator and civil rights leader Clara Luper, and Comanche leader and activist LaDonna Harris, as well as lesser-known individuals such as Cherokee historian and educator Rachel Caroline Eaton, entrepreneur and NAACP organizer California M. Taylor, and Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) champion Wanda Jo Peltier Stapleton. Edited by Sarah Eppler Janda and Patricia Loughlin, the collection connects Oklahoma women’s individual and collective endeavors to the larger themes of intersectionality, suffrage, politics, motherhood, and civil rights in the American West and the United States. The historians explore how race, ethnicity, social class, gender, and political power shaped—and were shaped by—these women’s efforts to improve their local, state, and national communities. Underscoring the diversity of women’s experiences, the editors and contributors provide fresh and engaging perspectives on the western roots of gendered activism in Oklahoma. This volume expands and enhances our understanding of the complexities of western women’s history.

Voices of Oklahoma
Voices of Oklahoma

Author: John Erling

Publisher: Mullerhaus Publishing Arts

Published: 2018-12-03

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 9780997841091

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For 30 years John Erling entertained Tulsans as the stimulating host of Erling in the Morning on KRMG radio. Known for his interviews with people of all walks of life--from politicians to celebrities to everyday people--John provided the perfect forum on his talk show to deliberate the hottest local and national topics. As a well-respected community leader and member of the Oklahoma Broadcasters Hall of Fame and Oklahoma Historians Hall of Fame, Erling is now devoting his energy and enthusiasm to the VoicesofOklahoma.com oral history project. He has interviewed hundreds of his fellow Oklahomans for this endeavor. All have had stories that serve to inspire, instruct, and entertain future generations of Oklahomans. In commemoration of the project's tenth anniversary, this book has been written to introduce VoicesofOklahoma.com to a new audience, and to provide dedicated visitors with some of their favorite stories between the covers of a book.

Tourists of History
Tourists of History

Author: Marita Sturken

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2007-11

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 9780822341222

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DIVStudy of how the memorials created in Oklahoma City and at the World Trade Center site raise questions about the relationship between cultural memory and consumerism./div

The Jefferson Highway in Oklahoma: The Historic Osage Trace
The Jefferson Highway in Oklahoma: The Historic Osage Trace

Author: Jonita Mullins

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 1439658889

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Oklahoma's central location makes it a natural crossroads, and the trails of yesterday became the superhighways of today. Perhaps the best example is Route 69, also known as the Jefferson Highway. The paved highway was begun in 1915, but its course was heavily traveled for centuries before that. Engineers could map no better path than the generations who cut it through the wilderness out of necessity. Author Jonita Mullins leads a journey along this ancient way that recalls some of Oklahoma's most important history and celebrates some of its most fascinating characters.

Roadside History of Oklahoma
Roadside History of Oklahoma

Author: Francis L. Fugate

Publisher:

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780878422722

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Roadside History of Oklahoma invites tourists and residents alike to use the state's highways as avenues connecting the present with the past.

A Life on Fire
A Life on Fire

Author: Connie Cronley

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2021-08-26

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 0806177756

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“How can women wear diamonds when babies cry for bread?” Kate Barnard demanded in one of the incendiary stump speeches for which she was well known. In A Life on Fire, Connie Cronley tells the story of Catherine Ann “Kate” Barnard (1875–1930), a fiery political reformer and the first woman elected to state office in Oklahoma, as commissioner of charities and corrections in 1907—almost fifteen years before women won the right to vote in the United States. Born to hardscrabble settlers on the Nebraska prairie, Barnard committed her energy, courage, and charismatic oratory to the cause of Progressive reform and became a political powerhouse and national celebrity. As a champion of the poor, workers, children, the imprisoned, and the mentally ill, Barnard advocated for compulsory education, prison reform, improved mental health treatment, and laws against child labor. Before statehood, she stumped across the Twin Territories to unite farmers and miners into a powerful political alliance. She also helped write Oklahoma’s Progressive constitution, creating what some heralded as “a new kind of state.” But then she took on the so-called “Indian Question.” Defending Native orphans against a conspiracy of graft that reached from Oklahoma to Washington, D.C., she uncovered corrupt authorities and legal guardians stealing oil, gas, and timber rights from Native Americans’ federal allotments. In retaliation, legislators and grafters closed ranks and defunded her state office. Broken in health and heart, she left public office and died a recluse. She remains, however, a riveting figure in Oklahoma history, a fearless activist on behalf of the weak and helpless.

The Indians in Oklahoma
The Indians in Oklahoma

Author: Rennard Strickland

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 1980

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 9780806116754

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Outlines the lifestyle of the Indians in Oklahoma and their value system despite the white-man's encroachment of their land and widespread stereotyping.

The Oklahomans: The Story of Oklahoma and Its People: Volume I: Ancient-Statehood
The Oklahomans: The Story of Oklahoma and Its People: Volume I: Ancient-Statehood

Author: John J. Dwyer

Publisher: Red River Press

Published: 2016-11-15

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780985347024

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The unforgettable saga of America's last frontier-the Oklahoma Country. Never has the story of this great land and people been told like John J. Dwyer does it. Storybook, history book, coffee table book. Featuring the same colorful and readable format that has helped make his "The War Between the States: America's Uncivil War" a success, "The Oklahomans (Volume 1, Ancient-Statehood)," chronicles the saga of the winning-and losing-of a land. Some of the most famous cowboys, Indians, lawmen, outlaws, and explorers in American history stride across the pages of this unforgettable story. So do some of the country's greatest entrepreneurs, statesmen, Christian ministers, social pioneers, and athletes.