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.
The product of two of Oklahoma’s foremost authorities on the history of the 46th state, Oklahoma: A History is the first comprehensive narrative to bring the story of the Sooner State to the threshold of its centennial. From the tectonic formation of Oklahoma’s varied landscape to the recovery and renewal following the Oklahoma City bombing, this readable book includes both the well-known and the not-so-familiar of the state’s people, events, and places. W. David Baird and Danney Goble offer fresh perspectives on such widely recognized history makers as Sequoyah, the 1889 Land Run, and the Glenn Pool oil strike. But they also give due attention to Black Seminole John Horse, Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Coach Bertha Frank Teague’s 40-year winning streak with the Byng Lady Pirates, and other lesser-known but equally important milestones. The result is a rousing, often surprising, and ever-fascinating story. Oklahoma history is an intricate tapestry of themes, stories, and perspectives, including those of the state’s diverse population of American Indians, the land’s original human occupants. An appendix provides suggestions for trips to Oklahoma’s historic places and for further reading. Enhanced by more than 40 illustrations, including 11 maps, this definitive history of the state ensures that experiences shared by Oklahomans of the past will be passed on to future generations.
A powerful work of historical fiction that dramatizes the romantic, brutal, and glorious life of Stonewall Jackson, one of the Civil War's greatest heroes.
You probably know the story of the late Wilma Mankiller, the first woman to serve as principal chief of the Cherokee Nation. You might not recognize the name of her husband, Charlie Soap, yet his role as a Native community organizer is no less significant. Combining memoir, history, and current affairs, Last One Walking charts for the first time the life and work of this influential Cherokee. In telling this story, author and former journalist Greg Shaw gives voice to his sources. As a longtime colleague and friend of the family, he draws on his many travels and interviews with Soap and on previously unpublished writings, including a Soap family history penned by Mankiller, included here as the book’s prologue. Shaw offers a rich profile of Soap’s singular career—particularly as a champion of water rights. In managing public infrastructure projects, housing assistance, and water development in the Cherokee Nation, Soap has exemplified ga-du-gi, the Cherokee word for community members working together for the collective good. Shaw portrays a dynamic partnership between Soap and Mankiller. Together they reignited community development for the Cherokee people by listening to everyone, including the poorest of the poor, and hearing their pleas for reliable water, a basic human need and a sacred element in Cherokee culture. Charlie Soap’s name in Cherokee, Ohni ai (ᎣᏂ ᎠᎢ), translates as “the last one walking.” In the Cherokee wolf clan, this is the member who trails the rest of the pack to watch for danger and opportunity. The last one walking forms a bond of trust with the pack’s leader. The Native American fight for land has been well chronicled, but the fight for water has not. Last One Walking helps to fill that void with a narrative that is also deeply moving, revealing on every page the spirit of ga-du-gi.
"Examines how inhabitants of the Oklahoma Panhandle throughout the 20th century used the semiarid lands that Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico did not want, and that Texas, after entering the Union as a slave state, could not have. Focuses particularly on agriculture and production of natural gas and helium"--Provided by publisher.
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.
“The hour has come to speak of troubled times. It is time we spoke of Skullyville.” Thus begins the House of Purple Cedar, Rose Goode’s telling of the year when she was eleven in Indian country, Oklahoma. The Indian schools boys and girls had been burned, stores too. By the time the railroad came, all of Skullyville had been burned.
