"In no other single book is the essence of this region gathered for the general reader so schematically, so accessibly and so interestingly as in this volume ... New Mexico has reason to be proud of this civilized and entertaining book." So wrote Axton Clark in the New York Times when this practical guidebook was first published as part of the Work Projects Administration's American Guide Series. Half a century later, it stands as a historic document containing a wealth of information about New Mexico's places and people. The WPA Guide to 1930s New Mexico leads the modern traveler along eighteen fascinating road trips and offers and unimpeachable reference of comparing what is with what once was. Enhanced by the outstanding photography of Laura Gilpin and Ernest Knee, it captures the spirit of a place and time that still lingers in the "Land of Enchantment."
A reissue of a 1939 guide to Kansas compiled as part of the Federal Writers' Project during the Depression years, providing information not only about the attractions of the state, but serving as a cultural chronicle of an earlier time.
This thoughtful examination of a century of travel writing about the American West overturns a variety of popular and academic stereotypes. Looking at both European and American travelers’ accounts of the West, from de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America to William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, David Wrobel offers a counter narrative to the nation’s romantic entanglement with its western past and suggests the importance of some long-overlooked authors, lively and perceptive witnesses to our history who deserve new attention. Prior to the professionalization of academic disciplines, the reading public gained much of its knowledge about the world from travel writing. Travel writers found a wide and respectful audience for their reports on history, geography, and the natural world, in addition to reporting on aboriginal cultures before the advent of anthropology as a discipline. Although in recent decades western historians have paid little attention to travel writing, Wrobel demonstrates that this genre in fact offers an important and rich understanding of the American West—one that extends and complicates a simple reading of the West that promotes the notions of Manifest Destiny or American exceptionalism. Wrobel finds counterpoints to the mythic West of the nineteenth century in such varied accounts as George Catlin’s Adventures of the Ojibbeway and Ioway Indians in England, France, and Belgium (1852), Richard Francis Burton’s The City of the Saints (1861), and Mark Twain’s Following the Equator (1897), reminders of the messy and contradictory world that people navigated in the past much as they do in the present. His book is a testament to the instructive ways in which the best travel writers have represented the West.
compiled and written by the Federal Writers' Project of the Work Projects Administration for the State of Kansas ... Sponsored by the State Department of Education.
In what follows can be found the doors to a house of words and stories. This house of words and stories is the Archive of New Mexico and the doors are each of the documents contained within it. Like any house, New Mexico's archive has a tale of its own origin and a complex history. Although its walls have changed many times, its doors and the encounters with those doors hold stories known and told and others not yet revealed. In the Archives, there are thousands of doors (4,481) that open to a time of kings and popes, of inquisition and revolution. "These archives," writes Ralph Emerson Twitchell, "are by far the most valuable and interesting of any in the Southwest." Many of these documents were given a number by Twitchell, small stickers that were appended to the first page of each document, an act of heresy to archivists and yet these stickers have now become part of the artifact. These are the doors that Ralph Emerson Twitchell opened at the dawn of the 20th century with a key that has served scholars, policy-makers, and activists for generations. In 1914 Twitchell published in two volumes The Spanish Archives of New Mexico, the first calendar and guide to the documents from the Spanish colonial period. Volume Two of the two volumes focuses on the Spanish Archives of New Mexico, Series II, or SANM II. These 3,087 documents consist of administrative, civil, military, and ecclesiastical records of the Spanish colonial government in New Mexico, 1621-1821. The materials span a broad range of subjects, revealing information about such topics as domestic relations, political intrigue, crime and punishment, material culture, the Camino Real, relations between Spanish settlers and indigenous peoples, the intrusion of Anglo-Americans, and the growing unrest that resulted in Mexico's independence from Spain in 1821. As is the case with Volume One, these documents tell many stories. They reflect, for example, the creation and maintenance of colonial society in New Mexico; itself founded upon the casting and construction of colonizing categories. Decisions made by popes, kings and viceroys thousands of miles away from New Mexico defined the lives of everyday citizens, as did the reports of governors and clergy sent back to their superiors. They represent the history of imperial power, conquest, and hegemony. Indeed, though the stories of indigenous people and women can be found in these documents, it may be fair to assume that not a single one of them was actually scripted by a woman or an American Indian during that time period. But there is another silence in this particular collection and series that is telling. Few pre-Revolt (1680) documents are contained in this collection. While the original colonial archive may well have contained thousands of documents that predate the European settlement of New Mexico in 1598, with the Pueblo Indian Revolt of 1680, all but four of those documents were destroyed. For historians, the tragedy cannot be calculated. Nevertheless, this absence and silence is important in its own right and is a part of the story, told and imagined. Let this effort and the key provided by Twitchell in his two volumes open the doors wide for knowledge to be useful today and tomorrow. --From the Foreword by Estevan Rael-Gálvez, New Mexico State Historian
Artists and filmmakers in the early twentieth century reshaped our vision of the American West. In particular, the Taos Society of Artists and the California-based artist Maynard Dixon departed from the legendary depiction of the “Wild West” and fostered new images, or brands, for western art. This volume, illustrated with more than 150 images, examines select paintings and films to demonstrate how these artists both enhanced and contradicted earlier representations of the West. Prior to this period, American art tended to portray the West as a wild frontier with untamed lands and peoples. Renowned artists such as Henry Farny and Frederic Remington set their work in the past, invoking an environment immersed in conflict and violence. This trademark perspective began to change, however, when artists enamored with the Southwest stamped a new imprint on their paintings. The contributors to this volume illuminate the complex ways in which early-twentieth-century artists, as well as filmmakers, evoked a southwestern environment not just suspended in time but also permanent rather than transient. Yet, as the authors also reveal, these artists were not entirely immune to the siren call of the vanishing West, and their portrayal of peaceful yet “exotic” Native Americans was an expansion rather than a dismissal of earlier tropes. Both brands cast a romantic spell on the West, and both have been seared into public consciousness. Branding the American West is published in association with the Brigham Young University Museum of Art, Provo, Utah, and the Stark Museum of Art, Orange, Texas.
Since the earliest days of Spanish exploration and settlement, New Mexico has been known for lying off the beaten track. But this new history reminds readers that the world has been beating paths to New Mexico for hundreds of years, via the Camino Real, the Santa Fe Trail, several railroads, Route 66, the interstate highway system, and now the Internet. This first complete history of New Mexico in more than thirty years begins with the prehistoric cultures of the earliest inhabitants. The authors then trace the state’s growth from the arrival of Spanish explorers and colonizers in the sixteenth century to the centennial of statehood in 2012. Most historians have made the territory’s admission to the Union in 1912 as the starting point for the state’s modernization. As this book shows, however, the transformation from frontier province to modern state began with World War II. The technological advancements of the Atomic Era, spawned during wartime, propelled New Mexico to the forefront of scientific research and pointed it toward the twenty-first century. The authors discuss the state’s historical and cultural geography, the economics of mining and ranching, irrigation’s crucial role in agriculture, and the impact of Native political activism and tribe-owned gambling casinos. New Mexico: A History will be a vital source for anyone seeking to understand the complex interactions of the indigenous inhabitants, Spanish settlers, immigrants, and their descendants who have created New Mexico and who shape its future.
