Main Street Oklahoma
Main Street Oklahoma

Author: Linda W. Reese

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2013-08-15

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 0806150564

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Oklahoma historian Angie Debo once observed that all the forces of United States history have come to bear in the development of the Sooner State. This collection of essays provides a series of snapshots reflecting both the singularity of the Oklahoma experience and the state’s connections to America’s broader history. Spanning the Civil War era and the present, this book develops historic themes as varied as the causes of Indian land dispossession, the Statehood Day wedding ceremony, the oil industry’s environmental impact, the Tulsa Race Riot, labor relations during the New Deal, the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment, the state’s unique Native artistic traditions, and its musical landscape. Oklahomans have always represented multiple races and cultures, lived in big cities or small towns or on farms, and promoted prosperity and cultural achievement while battling poverty and ignorance. The American Main Street has been the site not only of the best principles of community spirit and traditional values but also of shocking cases of prejudice and violence. Rather than shrinking from difficult subjects, Main Street Oklahoma describes the state’s abundant human, natural, and cultural resources, paying tribute to the true grit of Oklahomans, but also exploring some of the more troubling moments in Oklahoma’s past. The editors and contributors provide engaging perspectives on the state’s rich and diverse history.

American Outback
American Outback

Author: Richard Lowitt

Publisher: Texas Tech University Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 9780896725584

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"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.

Boom Town
Boom Town

Author: Sam Anderson

Publisher: Crown

Published: 2018-08-21

Total Pages: 455

ISBN-13: 0804137323

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.

Twentieth-Century Oklahoma
Twentieth-Century Oklahoma

Author: Richard Lowitt

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2016-02-18

Total Pages: 421

ISBN-13: 0806155256

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Few writers have written as thoughtfully and extensively on Oklahoma politics and culture as Richard Lowitt. His work of the past six decades moves with ease among historical topics as various as agriculture, health, industry, labor, and the environment, offering an informed and enlightened perspective. Collected for the first time in one volume, Lowitt’s articles on post–World War II Oklahoma and notable Oklahomans reveal a remarkable range of the state’s political, environmental, agricultural, civil rights, and Native American history in the Cold War era. Nowhere else, for example, is the controversy stirred up by Congressman Mike Synar recounted so well, and Lowitt’s analysis of the decades-long battle over grazing rights on federal land clarifies the issues surrounding a topic still in the news today. Likewise, Lowitt’s analysis of Oklahoma’s farm crisis in the 1970s and ’80s extends far beyond the state’s borders, illuminating significant and subtle aspects of an artificially engineered agricultural disaster whose consequences are still felt. His probing of the “enigma of Mike Monroney,” U.S. senator from Oklahoma during the McCarthy period, yields valuable insights into the political nature of the politician, the state, and the times. Other articles span decades, from the development of the Grand River Dam Authority (1935–1964) to the damming of the Arkansas River to create Kaw Reservoir (1957–1976) and efforts to improve Indian health in Oklahoma (1954–1980). Whether discussing environmental and cultural ecology or plumbing the politics of Fort Sill’s entry into the missile age, Lowitt’s articles are broad in scope and unsparing in detail. All based on the author’s research in the Western History Collections at the University of Oklahoma, these essays form an invaluable historical repository, put into clarifying context by one of Oklahoma’s most respected historians.

The Story of Oklahoma
The Story of Oklahoma

Author: W. David Baird

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 538

ISBN-13: 9780806126500

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Describes the people and events that have shaped the state's history

The Great Oklahoma Swindle
The Great Oklahoma Swindle

Author: Russell Cobb

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2022-03

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 149623040X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Russell Cobb’s The Great Oklahoma Swindle is a rousing and incisive examination of the regional culture and history of “Flyover Country” that demystifies the political conditions of the American Heartland.

Crossroads of Change
Crossroads of Change

Author: Cori Knudten

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2020-07-02

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 0806167777

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Encompassing nearly seven thousand acres amid the woodlands of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in northern New Mexico, the land that is now Pecos National Historical Park has witnessed thousands of years of cultural history stretching back to the Native peoples who long ago inhabited the pueblos of Pecos, then known as Cicuye. Once a trading center where Pueblo Indians, Spanish soldiers and settlers, and Plains Indians encountered one another, not always peacefully, Pecos was a stop on the Santa Fe Trail in the early 1800s and, later, on the first railroad in New Mexico. It was the site of a critical Civil War battle and in the twentieth century became a tourist destination. This book tells the story of how, over five centuries, cultures and peoples converged at Pecos and transformed its environment, ultimately shaping the landscape that greets park visitors today. Spanning the period from 1540, when Spaniards first arrived, into the twenty-first century, Crossroads of Change focuses on the history of the natural and historic resources Pecos National Historical Park now protects and interprets: the ruins of Pecos Pueblo and a Spanish mission church, a stage stop along the Santa Fe Trail, the Civil War battlefield of Glorieta Pass, a twentieth-century cattle ranch, and the national park itself. In an engaging style, authors Cori Knudten and Maren Bzdek detail the transformations of Pecos over time, often driven by the collision of different cultures, such as that between the Franciscan friars and Pecos Indians in the seventeenth century, and by the introduction of new animals, crops, and agricultural practices—but also by the natural forces of fire, drought, and erosion. Located on a natural trade route, Pecos has long served as a portal between different cultures and environments. Documenting this transformation over the ages, Crossroads of Change also, perhaps, shows us Pecos National Historical Park as a portal to the future.

The Black Towns
The Black Towns

Author: Norman L. Crockett

Publisher: University Press of Kansas

Published: 1979

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

From Appomattox to World War I, blacks continued their quest for a secure position in the American system. The problem was how to be both black and American -- how to find acceptance, or even toleration, in a society in which the boundaries of normative behavior, the values, and the very definition of what it meant to be an American were determined and enforced by whites. A few black leaders proposed self-segregation inside the United States within the protective confines of an all-black community as one possible solution. The black-town idea reached its peak in the fifty years after the Civil War; at least sixty black communities were settled between 1865 and 1915. Norman L. Crockett has focused on the formation, growth and failure of five such communities. These include Nicodemus, Kansas; Mound Bayou, Mississippi; Langston, Oklahoma; and Boley, Oklahoma. The last two offer opportunity to observe aspects of Indian-black relations in this area.

The Color of the Land
The Color of the Land

Author: David A. Chang

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2010-02-01

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 0807895768

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Color of the Land brings the histories of Creek Indians, African Americans, and whites in Oklahoma together into one story that explores the way races and nations were made and remade in conflicts over who would own land, who would farm it, and who would rule it. This story disrupts expected narratives of the American past, revealing how identities--race, nation, and class--took new forms in struggles over the creation of different systems of property. Conflicts were unleashed by a series of sweeping changes: the forced "removal" of the Creeks from their homeland to Oklahoma in the 1830s, the transformation of the Creeks' enslaved black population into landed black Creek citizens after the Civil War, the imposition of statehood and private landownership at the turn of the twentieth century, and the entrenchment of a sharecropping economy and white supremacy in the following decades. In struggles over land, wealth, and power, Oklahomans actively defined and redefined what it meant to be Native American, African American, or white. By telling this story, David Chang contributes to the history of racial construction and nationalism as well as to southern, western, and Native American history.