Taking Land, Breaking Land
Author: Glenda Riley
Publisher: UNM Press
Published: 2003
Total Pages: 388
ISBN-13: 9780826331113
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The Gendered West
Author: Gordon Morris Bakken
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-09-13
Total Pages: 433
ISBN-13: 1135694265
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFirst Published in 2001. This anthology of western history articles emphasizes the New Western History that emerged in the 1980s and adds to it a heavy dose of legal history, a field frequently ignored or misunderstood by the New Western historians. From first contact, American Indians knew that Europeans did not understand the gendered nature of America. Confusion regarding the role of women within tribes and bands continued from first contact well into the late nineteenth century. The journal articles that follow give readers a true sense of the gendered West. Racial and ethnic heritage played a role in female experience whether Hispanic, Japanese or Irish. Women's work was part western history, but women did not confine themselves to plow handles or brothels. Women were very much a part of most occupations or in the process of breaking down barriers of access. They worked in the fields for wages as well as for family welfare and prosperity. Women demanded access to the professions whether teaching or law, accounting or medicine. The process of eliminating barriers varied in time and space, but the struggle was constant. Yet the story of women in polygamous Utah or Idaho was different and an integral part of the fabric of western history. Because of their beliefs and practices these women suffered at the hands of the federal government and persevered.
Presidents Who Shaped the American West
Author: Glenda Riley
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 2018-02-08
Total Pages: 388
ISBN-13: 0806160853
DOWNLOAD EBOOKGenerations of Americans have seen the West as beyond federal control and direction. But the national government’s presence in the West dates to before Lewis and Clark, and since 1789 a number of U.S. presidents have had a penetrating and long-lasting impact on the region. In Presidents Who Shaped the American West, noted historians Glenda Riley and Richard W. Etulain present startling analyses of chief executives and their policies, illuminating the long reach of presidential power. The authors begin each chapter by sketching a particular president’s biography and explaining the political context in which he operated while in office. They then consider overarching actions and policies that affected both the nation and the region during the president’s administration, such as Thomas Jefferson’s augmentation of the West via the Louisiana Purchase, and Andrew Jackson’s removal of American Indians from the Southeast to “Indian Country” in the West. Abraham Lincoln’s promotion of the Homestead Act, a transcontinental railroad, and western territories and states free of slavery marked further extensions of presidential power in the region. Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation efforts and Jimmy Carter’s expansion of earlier policies reflected growing public concern with the West’s finite natural resources and fragile natural environment. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s highway program, and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society funneled federal funding into the West. In return for this largesse, some argued, the West paid the price of increased federal hegemony, and Ronald Reagan’s presidency arguably curbed that power. Riley and Etulain also discuss the most recent presidential terms and the region’s growing political power in Congress and the federal bureaucracy. With an accessible approach, Presidents Who Shaped the American West establishes the crucial and formative nature of the relationship between the White House and the West—and will encourage readers to continue examining this relationship.
A Companion to 19th-Century America
Author: William Barney
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2008-04-15
Total Pages: 432
ISBN-13: 0470998466
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA Companion to 19th-Century America is an authoritative overview of current historiographical developments and major themes in the history of nineteenth-century America. Twenty-seven scholars, all specialists in their own thematic areas, examine the key debates and historiography. A thematic and chronological organization brings together the major time periods, politics, the Civil War, economy, and social and cultural history of the nineteenth century. Written with the general reader in mind, each essay surveys the historical research, the emerging concerns, and assesses the future direction of scholarship. Complete coverage of all the major themes and current debates in nineteenth-century US history assessing the state of the scholarship and future concerns. 24 original essays by leading experts in nineteenth-century American history complete with up-to-date bibliographies. Chronological and thematic organization covers both traditional and contemporary fields of research - politics, periods, economy, class formation, ethnicity, gender roles, regions, culture and ideas.
Western Lives
Author: Richard W. Etulain
Publisher: UNM Press
Published: 2004
Total Pages: 468
ISBN-13: 9780826334725
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe life stories of many individuals are woven together to tell the history of the American West from the earliest days of westward expansion to the twentieth century.
Race and the Wild West
Author: Laura J. Arata
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 2020-07-02
Total Pages: 305
ISBN-13: 080616817X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWinner of the Western Writers of America “SPUR Award” and the Western Association of Women Historians “Gita Chaudhuri Prize”! Born a slave in eastern Tennessee, Sarah Blair Bickford (1852–1931) made her way while still a teenager to Montana Territory, where she settled in the mining boomtown of Virginia City. Race and the Wild West is the first full-length biography of this remarkable woman, whose life story affords new insight into race and belonging in the American West around the turn of the twentieth century. For many years, Sarah Bickford’s known biography fit into a single paragraph. By examining her life in all its complexity, Arata fills in what were long believed to be unrecoverable “silent spaces” in her story. Before establishing herself as a successful business owner, we learn, she was twice married, both times to white men. Her first husband, an Irish immigrant, physically abused her until she divorced him in 1881. Their three children all died before the age of ten. In 1883, she married Stephen Bickford and gave birth to four more children. Upon his death, she inherited his shares of the Virginia City Water Company, acquiring sole ownership in 1917. For the final decade of her life, Bickford actively preserved and promoted a historic Virginia City building best known as the site of the brutal lynching in 1864 of five men. Her conspicuous role in developing an early form of heritage tourism challenges long-standing narratives that place white men at the center of the “Wild West” myth and its promotion. Bickford’s story offers a window into the dynamics of race in the rural West. Although her experiences defy easy categorization, what is clear is that her navigation of social norms and racial barriers did not hinge on exceptionalism or tokenism. Instead, she built a life that deserves to be understood on its own terms. Through exhaustive research and nuanced analysis, Laura J. Arata advances our understanding of a woman whose life embodied the contradictory intersections of hope and disappointment that characterized life in the early-twentieth-century American West for brave pioneers of many races.
Sandoz Studies, Volume 1
Author: Renée M. Laegreid
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Published: 2019-07-01
Total Pages: 176
ISBN-13: 1496216083
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMari Sandoz, born on Mirage Flats, south of Hay Springs, Nebraska, on May 11, 1896, was the eldest daughter of Swiss immigrants. She experienced firsthand the difficulties and pleasures of the family's remote plains existence and early on developed a strong desire to write. Her keen eye for detail combined with meticulous research enabled her to become one of the most valued authorities of her time on the history of the plains and the culture of Native Americans. Women in the Writings of Mari Sandoz is the first volume of the Sandoz Studies series, a collection of thematically grouped essays that feature writing by and about Mari Sandoz and her work. When Sandoz wrote about the women she knew and studied, she did not shy away from drawing attention to the sacrifices, hardships, and disappointments they endured to forge a life in the harsh plains environment. But she also wrote about moments of joy, friendship, and--for some--a connection to the land that encouraged them to carry on. The scholarly essays and writings of Sandoz contained in this book help place her work into broader contexts, enriching our understanding of her as an author and as a woman deeply connected to the Sandhills of Nebraska.
A Companion to 20th-Century America
Author: Stephen J. Whitfield
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2008-04-15
Total Pages: 584
ISBN-13: 0470998520
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA Companion to 20th-Century America is an authoritative survey of the most important topics and themes of twentieth-century American history and historiography. Contains 29 original essays by leading scholars, each assessing the past and current state of American scholarship Includes thematic essays covering topics such as religion, ethnicity, conservatism, foreign policy, and the media, as well as essays covering major time periods Identifies and discusses the most influential literature in the field, and suggests new avenues of research, as the century has drawn to a close
Doing the Works of Abraham
Author: B. Carmon Hardy
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 2017-08-30
Total Pages: 449
ISBN-13: 0806159138
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCelestial Marriage—the “doctrine of the plurality of wives”—polygamy. No issue in the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (popularly known as the Mormon Church) has attracted more attention. From its contentious and secretive beginnings in the 1830s to its public proclamation in 1852, and through almost four decades of bitter conflict with the federal government to Church renunciation of the practice in 1890, this belief helped define a new religious identity and unify the Mormon people, just as it scandalized their neighbors and handed their enemies the most effective weapon they wielded in their battle against Mormon theocracy. This newest addition to the Kingdom in the West Series provides the basic documents supporting and challenging Mormon polygamy, supported by the concise commentary and documentation of editor B. Carmon Hardy. Plural marriage is everywhere at hand in Mormon history. However, despite its omnipresence, including a broad and continuing stream of publications devoted to it, few attempts have been made to assemble a documentary history of the topic. Hardy has drawn on years of research and writing on the controversial and complex subject to make this narrative collection of documents illuminating and myth-shattering. The second “relic of barbarism,” as the Republican Party platform of 1856 characterized polygamy, was believed by the Saints to be God’s law, trumping the laws of a mere republic. The long struggle for what was, and for some fundamentalists remains, religious freedom still resonates in American religious law. Throughout the West, thousands of families continue the practice, even In the face of LDS Church opposition. The book includes a bibliography and an index. It is bound in rich blue linen cloth, two-color foil stamped spine and front cover.
Westerns
Author: Victoria Lamont
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Published: 2016-08
Total Pages: 237
ISBN-13: 0803290314
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAt every turn in the development of what we now know as the western, women writers have been instrumental in its formation. Yet the myth that the western is male-authored persists. Westerns: A Women's History debunks this myth once and for all by recovering the women writers of popular westerns who were active during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the western genre as we now know it emerged. Victoria Lamont offers detailed studies of some of the many women who helped shape the western. Their novels bear the classic hallmarks of the western--cowboys, schoolmarms, gun violence, lynchings, cattle branding--while also placing female characters at the center of their western adventures and improvising with western conventions in surprising and ingenious ways. In Emma Ghent Curtis's The Administratrix a widow disguises herself as a cowboy and infiltrates the cowboy gang responsible for lynching her husband. Muriel Newhall's pulp serial character, Sheriff Minnie, comes to the rescue of a steady stream of defenseless female victims. B. M. Bower, Katharine Newlin Burt, and Frances McElrath use cattle branding as a metaphor for their feminist critiques of patriarchy. In addition to recovering the work of these and other women authors of popular westerns, Lamont uses original archival analysis of the western-fiction publishing scene to overturn the long-standing myth of the western as a male-dominated genre.
