Boom Town
Boom Town

Author: Sam Anderson

Publisher: Crown

Published: 2018-08-21

Total Pages: 513

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.

After Removal
After Removal

Author: Samuel J. Wells

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2010-12-01

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 1617030848

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This informative study helps to complete the saga of the Choctaw by documenting the life and culture of those who escaped removal. It is an account that until now has been left largely untold. The Choctaw Indians, once one of the largest and most advanced tribes in North America, have mainly been studied as the first victims of removal during the Jacksonian era. After signing the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1830, the great mass of the tribe—about 20,000 of perhaps 25,000—was resettled in what is present-day Oklahoma. What became of the thousands that remained? The history of the Choctaw remaining in Mississippi has been given only scant attention by scholars, and generally it has been forgotten by the public. As this new book points out, several thousand remained on individual land allotments or as itinerant farm workers and continued to follow old customs. Many of mixed blood abandoned their ancestral ways and were merged into the white community. Some faded into the wilderness. Despite many obstacles, the remnants of this Mississippi Choctaw society endured and in the modern era through federal legislation have been recognized as a society known as the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians.

African Cherokees in Indian Territory
African Cherokees in Indian Territory

Author: Celia E. Naylor

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2009-09-15

Total Pages: 375

ISBN-13: 0807877549

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Forcibly removed from their homes in the late 1830s, Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw Indians brought their African-descended slaves with them along the Trail of Tears and resettled in Indian Territory, present-day Oklahoma. Celia E. Naylor vividly charts the experiences of enslaved and free African Cherokees from the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma's entry into the Union in 1907. Carefully extracting the voices of former slaves from interviews and mining a range of sources in Oklahoma, she creates an engaging narrative of the composite lives of African Cherokees. Naylor explores how slaves connected with Indian communities not only through Indian customs--language, clothing, and food--but also through bonds of kinship. Examining this intricate and emotionally charged history, Naylor demonstrates that the "red over black" relationship was no more benign than "white over black." She presents new angles to traditional understandings of slave resistance and counters previous romanticized ideas of slavery in the Cherokee Nation. She also challenges contemporary racial and cultural conceptions of African-descended people in the United States. Naylor reveals how black Cherokee identities evolved reflecting complex notions about race, culture, "blood," kinship, and nationality. Indeed, Cherokee freedpeople's struggle for recognition and equal rights that began in the nineteenth century continues even today in Oklahoma.

1889
1889

Author: Michael J. Hightower

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2018-09-20

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 0806162341

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After immigrants flooded into central Oklahoma during the land rush of 1889 and the future capital of Oklahoma City sprang up “within a fortnight,” the city’s residents adopted the slogan “born grown” to describe their new home. But the territory’s creation was never so simple or straightforward. The real story, steeped in the politics of the Gilded Age, unfolds in 1889, Michael J. Hightower’s revealing look at a moment in history that, in all its turmoil and complexity, transcends the myth. Hightower frames his story within the larger history of Old Oklahoma, beginning in Indian Territory, where displaced tribes and freedmen, wealthy cattlemen, and prospective homesteaders became embroiled in disputes over public land and federal government policies. Against this fraught background, 1889 travels back and forth between Washington, D.C., and the Oklahoma frontier to describe the politics of settlement, public land use, and the first stirrings of urban development. Drawing on eyewitness accounts, Hightower captures the drama of the Boomer incursions and the Run of ’89, as well as the nascent urbanization of the townsite that would become Oklahoma City. All of these events played out in a political vacuum until Congress officially created Oklahoma Territory in the Organic Act of May 1890. The story of central Oklahoma is profoundly American, showing the region to have been a crucible for melding competing national interests and visions of the future. Boomers, businessmen, cattlemen, soldiers, politicians, pundits, and African and Native Americans squared off—sometimes peacefully, often not—in disagreements over public lands that would resonate in western history long after 1889.

The Choctaws in Oklahoma
The Choctaws in Oklahoma

Author: Clara Sue Kidwell

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2008-07-01

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 9780806140063

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The Choctaws in Oklahoma begins with the Choctaws' removal from Mississippi to Indian Territory in the 1830s and then traces the history of the tribe's subsequent efforts to retain and expand its rights and to reassert tribal sovereignty in the late twentieth century. This book illustrates the Choctaws' remarkable success in asserting their sovereignty and establishing a national identity in the face of seemingly insurmountable legal obstacles.

I've Been Here All the While
I've Been Here All the While

Author: Alaina E. Roberts

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2021-03-12

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0812297989

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Perhaps no other symbol has more resonance in African American history than that of "40 acres and a mule"—the lost promise of Black reparations for slavery after the Civil War. In I've Been Here All the While, we meet the Black people who actually received this mythic 40 acres, the American settlers who coveted this land, and the Native Americans whose holdings it originated from. In nineteenth-century Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma), a story unfolds that ties African American and Native American history tightly together, revealing a western theatre of Civil War and Reconstruction, in which Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole Indians, their Black slaves, and African Americans and whites from the eastern United States fought military and rhetorical battles to lay claim to land that had been taken from others. Through chapters that chart cycles of dispossession, land seizure, and settlement in Indian Territory, Alaina E. Roberts draws on archival research and family history to upend the traditional story of Reconstruction. She connects debates about Black freedom and Native American citizenship to westward expansion onto Native land. As Black, white, and Native people constructed ideas of race, belonging, and national identity, this part of the West became, for a short time, the last place where Black people could escape Jim Crow, finding land and exercising political rights, until Oklahoma statehood in 1907.

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 Great Oklahoma Swindle
The Great Oklahoma Swindle

Author: Russell Cobb

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2020-03

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 149622003X

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This unflinching look at Oklahoma's singular past helpfully fills in lesser-known aspects of the historical record.--Publishers Weekly An Oklahoma Bestseller 2021 Director's Award in the Oklahoma Book Awards Board of Directors Award for special merit Look down as you buzz across America, and Oklahoma looks like another "flyover state." A closer inspection, however, reveals one of the most tragic, fascinating, and unpredictable places in the United States. Over the span of a century, Oklahoma gave birth to movements for an African American homeland, a vibrant Socialist Party, armed rebellions of radical farmers, and an insurrection by a man called Crazy Snake. In the same era, the state saw numerous oil booms, one of which transformed the small town of Tulsa into the "oil capital of the world." Add to the chaos one of the nation's worst episodes of racial violence, a statewide takeover by the Ku Klux Klan, and the rise of a paranoid far-right agenda by a fundamentalist preacher named Billy James Hargis and you have the recipe for America's most paradoxical state. Far from being a placid place in the heart of Flyover Country, Oklahoma has been a laboratory for all kinds of social, political, and artistic movements, producing a singular list of weirdos, geniuses, and villains. In The Great Oklahoma Swindle Russell Cobb tells the story of a state rich in natural resources and artistic talent, yet near the bottom in education and social welfare. Raised in Tulsa, Cobb engages Oklahomans across the boundaries of race and class to hear their troubles, anxieties, and aspirations and delves deep to understand their contradictory and often stridently independent attitudes. Interweaving memoir, social commentary, and sometimes surprising research around the themes of race, religion, and politics, Cobb presents an insightful portrait that will make you rethink everything you thought you knew about the American Heartland.