A true story of greed and murder of Native Americans by their countrymen Journalist Dennis McAuliffe Jr. grew up believing that his Osage Indian grandmother, Sybil Bolton, had died an early death in 1925 from kidney disease. It was only by chance that he learned the real cause was a gunshot wound, and that her murder may well have been engineered by his own grandfather. As McAuliffe peeled away layers of suppressed history, he learned that Sybil was a victim of the "Osage Reign of Terror"—a systematic killing spree in the 1920s when white men descended upon the oil-rich Osage reservation to court, marry, and murder Native women to gain control of their money. The Deaths of Sybil Bolton is part murder mystery, part family memoir, and part spiritual journey.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the Osage Indians were traditional tribal people who owned Oklahoma's most valuable oil reserves. During the 1920s, they became members of the wealthy oil population. Tracing the experiences of John Grayeagle, a young Osage, Charles Red Corn, describes the Osage experience of the 1920s.
FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE * Named a Best Mystery and Thriller Book of all Time by Time A haunting epic following a Native American government official who investigates the murder of Grace Blanket: an Osage woman who was once the richest person in her territory until the greed of white men led to her death and a future of uncertainty for her family. When rivers of oil are discovered beneath the land belonging to the Osage tribe during the Oklahoma oil boom, Grace Blanket becomes the wealthiest person in the territory. Tragically, she is murdered at the hands of greedy men, leaving her daughter Nola orphaned. After the Graycloud family takes Nola in, they too begin dying mysteriously. Though they send letters to Washington DC begging for help, the family continues to slowly disappear until Native American government official Stace Red Hawk ventures west to investigate the terrors plaguing the Osage tribe. Stace is not only able to uncover the rampant fraud, intimidation, and murder that led to the deaths of Grace Blanket and the Greycloud family, but also finds something truly extraordinary—a realization of his deepest self and an abundance of love and appreciation for his native people and their brave past.
A compelling dual-narrated tale from Jennifer Latham that questions how far we've come with race relations. Some bodies won't stay buried. Some stories need to be told. When seventeen-year-old Rowan Chase finds a skeleton on her family's property, she has no idea that investigating the brutal century-old murder will lead to a summer of painful discoveries about the present and the past. Nearly one hundred years earlier, a misguided violent encounter propels seventeen-year-old Will Tillman into a racial firestorm. In a country rife with violence against blacks and a hometown segregated by Jim Crow, Will must make hard choices on a painful journey towards self discovery and face his inner demons in order to do what's right the night Tulsa burns. Through intricately interwoven alternating perspectives, Jennifer Latham's lightning-paced page-turner brings the Tulsa race riot of 1921 to blazing life and raises important questions about the complex state of US race relations--both yesterday and today.
Story of the biggest murder case in the history of northeastern Oklahoma: E. C. Mullendore III, the 32-year old scion of the most famous family was murdered at his home on the Cross Bell Ranch in Osage County, Oklahoma in September, 1970.
A dead body discovered in an abandoned house on Southeast 29th Street in Oklahoma City. In a city and a state where crime and violence were common, it might have seemed routine. But death—especially murder—is never routine, and the investigation of this particular death led young Oklahoma City detective Walter Gage on a journey he could never have imagined. 1920's. Oklahoma. Oil. Boomtowns spring up almost overnight. Drillers, roughnecks, landmen—and gangsters, prostitutes, con-men, all following the money. And there was a lot. When the American government moved members of the Osage tribe into northern Oklahoma, it had no intention of making the Osage, as a group, the wealthiest people in the world. The land itself was wonderful for cattle, covered as it was with Big Bluegrass, Little Bluegrass, and Switchgrass, some growing to four or five feet in height and highly nutritious. But it wasn't what was on top of the land that made the Osage rich; it was what was beneath it: oil. Oklahoma, not long a state, was booming. Oil wells were popping up in many areas of the state. Towns that had existed only as small farming communities or had not existed at all were suddenly bustling cities. Many of the huge oil companies that were familiar names in America for most of the twentieth century got their starts in the Oklahoma oil fields. So lots of people got rich. The Osage tribe was in a rather special position. Their treaties with the United States government meant that royalties from oil taken from Osage land went, not to the landholder, but to the tribe as a whole. That royalty money was then distributed to all tribal members equally.That meant, in a way, that although a few landholders might have actually received less royalty money than they would have under the usual circumstances, it also meant that every adult member of the Osage tribe rather quickly became wealthy. Wealthy? Millionaires, each and every one. What did this mean to people who were, by American standards, scarcely “civilized”? In simple terms, it meant that they were prey. A Few Dead Indians is the story of the long delayed investigation into the murders of at least twenty members of the Osage tribe, the beginning of the Oklahoma Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, and the life and involvement of young agent Walter Gage.
Native American Studies covers key issues such as the intimate relationship of culture to land; the nature of cultural exchange and conflict in the period after European contact; the unique relationship of Native communities with the United States government; the significance of language; the vitality of contemporary cultures; and the variety of Native artistic styles, from literature and poetry to painting and sculpture to performance arts.
The Condition of the Working Class in England is one of the best-known works of Friedrich Engels. Originally written in German as Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England, it is a study of the working class in Victorian England. It was also Engels' first book, written during his stay in Manchester from 1842 to 1844. Manchester was then at the very heart of the Industrial Revolution, and Engels compiled his study from his own observations and detailed contemporary reports. Engels argues that the Industrial Revolution made workers worse off. He shows, for example, that in large industrial cities mortality from disease, as well as death-rates for workers were higher than in the countryside. In cities like Manchester and Liverpool mortality from smallpox, measles, scarlet fever and whooping cough was four times as high as in the surrounding countryside, and mortality from convulsions was ten times as high as in the countryside. The overall death-rate in Manchester and Liverpool was significantly higher than the national average (one in 32.72 and one in 31.90 and even one in 29.90, compared with one in 45 or one in 46). An interesting example shows the increase in the overall death-rates in the industrial town of Carlisle where before the introduction of mills (1779–1787), 4,408 out of 10,000 children died before reaching the age of five, and after their introduction the figure rose to 4,738. Before the introduction of mills, 1,006 out of 10,000 adults died before reaching 39 years old, and after their introduction the death rate rose to 1,261 out of 10,000.
