Search results for ""University of Oklahoma Press""

The creation story of the Sahniš, or Arikara, people begins with a terrible flood, sent by the Great Chief Above to renew the world. This book tells the story of this Great Plains nation from its mythic origins to the modern era, tracing the path of the Arikaras through the oral traditions and oral histories that preserve and illuminate their past.

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Of the three physicians at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, Doctor George Edwin Lord (184676) was the lone commissioned medical officer, an assistant surgeonone more soldier caught up in the U.S. government's efforts to fulfill what many people believed was the young country's Manifest Destiny. This book tells Lord's story for the first time.

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In 1857, the Meskwaki (Red Earth People) Nation purchased an eighty-acre parcel of land along the Iowa River. Red Earth Nation explores the long history of #Landback through the Meskwaki Nation's story, one of the oldest and clearest examples of direct-purchase Indigenous land reclamation in American history.

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Oklahoma is home to nearly forty American Indian tribes and includes the largest Native population of any state. As a result, many Americans think of the state as 'Indian Country.' In 2009, Blue Clark, an enrolled member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, produced an invaluable reference for information on the state's Native peoples. Now, building on the success of the first edition, this revised guide offers an up-to-date survey of the diverse nations that make up Oklahoma's Indian Country. Since the publication of the first edition more than a decade ago, much has changed across Indian Country - and more is known about its history and culture. Drawing from both scholarly literature and Native oral sources, Clark incorporates the most recent archaeological and anthropological research to provide insights into each individual tribe dating back to prehistoric times. Today, the thirty-nine federally recognized tribes of Oklahoma continue to make advances in the areas of tribal governance, commerce, and all forms of arts and literature. This new edition encompasses the expansive range of tribal actions and interests in the state, including the rise of Native nation casino operations and nongaming industries, and the establishment of new museums and cultural attractions. In keeping with the user-friendly format of the original edition, this book provides readers with the unique story of each tribe, presented in alphabetical order, from the Alabama-Quassartes to the Yuchis. Each entry contains a complete statistical and narrative summary of the tribe, covering everything from origin tales to contemporary ceremonies and tribal businesses. The entries also include tribal websites, suggested readings, and photographs depicting visitor sites, events, and prominent tribal personages.

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Human rights activist and historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has been described as ""a force of nature on the page and off."" That force is fully present in Blood on the Border, the third in her acclaimed series of memoirs. Seamlessly blending the personal and the political, Blood on the Border is Dunbar-Ortiz's firsthand account of the decade-long dirty war pursued by the Contras and the United States against the people of Nicaragua. With the 1981 bombing of a Nicaraguan plane in Mexico City - a plane Dunbar-Ortiz herself would have been on if not for a delay - the US-backed Contras (short for los contrarrevolucionarios) launched a major offensive against Nicaragua's Sandinista regime, which the Reagan administration labeled as communist. While her rich political analysis of the US-Nicaraguan relationship bears the mark of a trained historian, Dunbar-Ortiz also writes from her perspective as an intrepid activist who spent months at a time throughout the 1980s in the war-torn country, especially in the remote northeastern region, where the Indigenous Miskitu people were relentlessly assailed and nearly wiped out by CIA-trained Contra mercenaries. She makes painfully clear the connections between what many US Americans today remember only vaguely as the Iran-Contra ""affair"" and ongoing US aggression in the Americas, the Middle East, and around the world - connections made even more explicit in a new afterword written for this edition. A compelling, important, and sobering story on its own, Blood on the Border offers a deeply informed, closely observed, and heartfelt view of history in the making.

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Mining in the western United States entered its great era after 1860 through use of the double-jack, black powder, hand steel, Bickford fuse, wire rope, and the steam engine. Those were the years of bonanza strikes: Henry Wickenburg's Vulture Mine in Arizona Territory; the main hard-rock gold strike in the desert Southwest; Ed Schieffelin's discovery of vast silver deposits in Tombstone, Arizona; and the Tonopah-Goldfield strike in Nevada, which netted over one hundred million dollars.Black Powder and Hand Steel describes the miners and the machinery they used. Otis E. Young, Jr., gives an account of the miners, particularly the Cornish and Irish, their origins, character, social life, pleasures, and, most important, their labors. The miner's lot depended on the tools he used, and the author traces the evolution of the miner's most important tools: from hoisting bucket to mine elevator, cold mining to dynamite, ore car to skip, hemp to wire rope, and slow match to Bickford fuse. Young reveals the difficulties of prospecting and mining two of the West's most valuable ores, gold and silver, and gives readers a firsthand look at the challenges of working even the most successful strikes. A companion volume to Young's Western Mining, Black Powder and Hand Steel is written in the same lively style - informative and entertaining for general readers and scholars. It is also well illustrated, with drawings by Buck O'Donnell.

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Well before the creation of the United States, the Cherokee people administered their own social policy - a form of what today might be called social welfare - based on matrilineal descent, egalitarian relations, kinship obligations, and communal landholding. The ethic of gadugi, or work coordinated for the social good, was at the heart of this system. Serving the Nation explores the role of such traditions in shaping the alternative social welfare system of the Cherokee Nation, as well as their influence on the U.S. government's social policies. Faced with removal and civil war in the early and mid-nineteenth century, the Cherokee Nation asserted its right to build institutions administered by Cherokee people, both as an affirmation of their national sovereignty and as a community imperative. The Cherokee Nation protected and defended key features of its traditional social service policy, extended social welfare protections to those deemed Cherokee according to citizenship laws, and modified its policies over time to continue fulfilling its people's expectations. Julie L. Reed examines these policies alongside public health concerns, medical practices, and legislation defining care and education for orphans, the mentally ill, the differently abled, the incarcerated, the sick, and the poor. Changing federal and state policies and practices exacerbated divisions based on class, language, and education, and challenged the ability of Cherokees individually and collectively to meet the social welfare needs of their kin and communities. The Cherokee response led to more centralized national government solutions for upholding social welfare and justice, as well as to the continuation of older cultural norms. Offering insights gleaned from reconsidered and overlooked historical sources, this book enhances our understanding of the history and workings of social welfare policy and services, not only in the Cherokee Nation but also in the United States.Serving the Nation is published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.

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Three times the Democratic Party's nominee for president (1896, 1900, and 1908) and secretary of state under Woodrow Wilson, William Jennings Bryan voiced the concerns of many Americans left out of the post-Civil War economic growth. In A Righteous Cause: The Life of Williams Jennings Bryan, Robert W. Cherny presents Bryan's key role in the Democratic Party's transformation from the conservatism of Grover Cleveland to the progressivism of Woodrow Wilson. Cherny draws on Bryan's writings and correspondence to trace his major political crusades for a new currency policy, prohibition, and women's suffrage, and against colonialism, monopolies, America's entry into World War I, and the teaching of evolution in the public schools.

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The War of 1812 has been regarded by many historians as a ""small naval war"" of little importance. Not so to the Indian tribes of the Old Northwest, who joined the British attempt to hold off the expansionist American armies in a desperate effort to retain their tribal lands, promised to them by the British in return for their alliance. The Indian force numbered some sixteen hundred warriors-Shawnees, Winnebagoes, Kickapoos, Potawatomis, Sacs, Ottawas, Muncey Delawares, Ojibwas, and Senecas among them.In September and October of 1813, after holding the frontier against the United States for more than a year, a small force of British and Indians under General Henry Procter and the Shawnee chief Tecumseh was driven from Amherstburg after the Battle of Lake Erie. They retreated to the River Thames. The succeeding engagement at Moraviantown, on October 5, 1813, was the most decisive American victory won on British soil in this war. The death of Tecumseh, who was killed while valiantly defending the field after the British had fled, cost the British-Indian alliance its most effective leader.The story of the campaign has never been fully told from the point of view of the Indians and the British, but innumerable legends have persisted about it, many of them contrasting the courage of the Shawnee chief with the alleged cowardice of Procter. In attempting to dispel the myths, John Sugden searched for surviving records in Britain, Canada, and the United States. He found a major source of information in the little-known minutes of General Procter's court-martial, filed in the Public Record Office at Kew, England.From this and many other sources, both published and unpublished, the author has comprehensively reconstructed the retreat and tackled the major questions: why was Procter compelled to withdraw from Amherstburg after the loss of his squadron on Lake Erie; why and how did Procter and Tecumseh fight at Moraviantown; how was Tecumseh killed; and how did the engagement affect the fortunes of the British, the Indians, and the Americans in the remaining months of the war.Sugden further enhances our knowledge about the great Chief Tecumseh in the definitive account of the circumstances surrounding his death.

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De Religione, the longest-surviving text in the Huron, or Wendat, language, was written in the seventeenth century to explain the nature of Christianity to the Iroquois people, as well as to justify the Jesuits' missionary work among American Indians. In this first annotated edition of De Religione, linguist and anthropologist John L. Steckley presents the original Huron text side by side with an English translation.The Huron language, now extinct, was spoken originally by Huron Indians, who were settled in present-day southern Ontario. One group went to Quebec and another was later removed to the western United States, first to Kansas and then to Oklahoma. In the early 1670s, the author of De Religione, likely a Jesuit priest named Phillipe Pierson, chose to write his doctrine in Huron because it was a language understood by all five Iroquois nations: Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca. For today's readers, the text offers valuable insight into how the missionaries actually communicated with American Indians.Amplified by Steckley's in-depth introduction and his fully annotated translation, De Religione provides a firsthand account of Catholic missionization among the Iroquois during the colonial period.

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While political history has plenty to say about the impact of Ronald Reagan's election to the presidency in 1980, four Senate races that same year have garnered far less attention - despite their similarly profound political effect. Tuesday Night Massacre looks at those races. In examining the defeat in 1980 of Idaho's Frank Church, South Dakota's George McGovern, John Culver of Iowa, and Birch Bayh of Indiana, Marc C. Johnson tells the story of the beginnings of the divisive partisanship that has become a constant feature of American politics. The turnover of these seats not only allowed Republicans to gain control of the Senate for the first time since 1954 but also fundamentally altered the conduct of American politics. The incumbents were politicians of national reputation who often worked with members of the other party to accomplish significant legislative objectives - but they were, Johnson suggests, unprepared and ill-equipped to counter nakedly negative emotional appeals to the 'politically passive voter.' Such was the campaign of the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC), the organization founded by several young conservative political activists who targeted these four senators for defeat. Johnson describes how such groups, amassing a great amount of money, could make outrageous and devastating claims about incumbents - 'baby killers' who were 'soft on communism,' for example - on behalf of a candidate who remained above the fray. Among the key players in this sordid drama are NCPAC chairman Terry Dolan; Washington lobbyist Charles Black, a top GOP advisor to several presidential campaigns and one-time business partner of Paul Manafort; and Roger Stone, self-described 'dirty trickster' for Richard Nixon and confidant of Donald Trump. Connecting the dots between the Goldwater era of the 1960s and the ascent of Trump, Tuesday Night Massacre charts the radicalization of the Republican Party and the rise of the independent expenditure campaign, with its divisive, negative techniques, a change that has deeply - and perhaps permanently - warped the culture of bipartisanship that once prevailed in American politics.

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Euripides' Hippolytus is a fascinating play about passion, innocence, rejection, betrayal, and the tragic breakdown of a family. This commentary, designed for intermediate and advanced students of ancient Greek, helps readers understand and fully appreciate this classic tragedy in all its rich complexity.

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Covering all facets of the biology of a little-known genus, Peter V. Lindeman's lavishly illustrated Map Turtle and Sawback Atlas is both a scientific treatise and an engaging introduction to a striking group of turtles. Map turtles and sawbacks, found in and along rivers from Texas to Florida and north to the Great Lakes, fascinate ecologists and evolutionary biologists. Over a short geologic time span, these turtles achieved exceptional biological diversification. Their diets are also exceptionally diverse, and a significant difference in size distinguishes males from females. Adult males are typically half or less the shell length of adult females, making map turtles and sawbacks the champions of sexual dimorphism among not only turtles but all four-legged vertebrates. Aesthetics also draw biologists and hobbyists to map turtles and sawbacks. While the male Sabine map turtle may look to some like a ""pencil-necked geek,"" as the author puts it, markings on the shell, limbs, head, and neck make map turtles among the most attractive turtles on earth. Sawbacks feature a striking ridge down their shell. Few turtles show themselves off to such advantage. Photographs included here of Graptemys basking poses reveal to what improbable heights these turtles can scale, the spread-eagle sunning stances they adopt, the stacking of individuals on a crowded site, and the heads that warily watch the world above the waterline. In lively prose, Lindeman details the habitat, diet, reproduction and life history, natural history, and population abundance of each species. A section on conservation status summarizes official state, federal, and international designations for each species, along with efforts toward population management and recovery as well as habitat preservation. The author also outlines promising avenues for future research, ranging from the effects of global climate change on populations to strategies for combating expansion of the pet trade.

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The first biography of this important American Indian artistArtist, teacher, and Red Progressive, Angel De Cora (1869-1919) painted Fire Light to capture warm memories of her Nebraska Winnebago childhood. In this biography, Linda M. Waggoner draws on that glowing image to illuminate De Cora's life and artistry, which until now have been largely overlooked by scholars.One of the first American Indian artists to be accepted within the mainstream art world, De Cora left her childhood home on the Winnebago reservation to find success in the urban Northeast at the turn of the twentieth century. Despite scant documentary sources that elucidate De Cora's private life, Waggoner has rendered a complete picture of the woman known in her time as the first ""real Indian artist."" She depicts De Cora as a multifaceted individual who as a young girl took pride in her traditions, forged a bond with the land that would sustain her over great distances, and learned the role of cultural broker from her mother's Métis family.After studying with famed illustrator Howard Pyle at his first Brandywine summer school, De Cora eventually succeeded in establishing the first ""Native Indian"" art department at Carlisle Indian School. A founding member of the Society of American Indians, she made a significant impact on the American Arts and Crafts movement by promoting indigenous arts throughout her career.Waggoner brings her broad knowledge of Winnebago culture and history to this gracefully written book, which features more than forty illustrations. Fire Light shows us both a consummate artist and a fully realized woman, who learned how to traverse the borders of Red identity in a white man's world.

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Elmer Thomas (1876-1965) represented the people of Oklahoma in the state's first legislature and in Congress. This memoir, written after he left the U.S. Senate in 1951 but never before published, chronicles his long career and offers a wealth of information on people and events that helped shape the development of the state and American history.

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A physicist at the Manhattan Project and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he was director of health physics from the 1940s until his retirement in 1972, Karl Z. Morgan collaborated with leading trial lawyer Ken M. Peterson to write this extraordinary memoir about the dawn of the nuclear age and the moral dilemmas associated with nuclear energy.

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Explores how, through multiple artistic forms, Woody Guthrie thought and felt about the scientific method, atomic power, and war technology, as well as the shifting dynamics of gender and race. Woody Guthrie emerges from these pages as a figure whose immense artistic output reflects the nation's conflicted engagement with modernity.

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He may be little known today, but Ben Daniels was a feared gunman who typified the journeyman gunfighter every bit as much as those whose names have become legend. Yet his story has eluded researchers and yarn-spinners alikeuntil now. Tracing his life from jailhouse to White House, DeArment and DeMattos present a full-length biography of Daniels.

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The Romans who established their rule on three continents as well as the Europeans who initially established new homes in North America interacted with communities of Indigenous peoples with their own histories and cultures. In this book, leading scholars examine the mutual perceptions of the Indigenous and the imperial actors.

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In 1857, the Meskwaki (Red Earth People) Nation purchased an eighty-acre parcel of land along the Iowa River. Red Earth Nation explores the long history of #Landback through the Meskwaki Nation's story, one of the oldest and clearest examples of direct-purchase Indigenous land reclamation in American history.

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Jacob Neptune, a wise-cracking, two-fisted Penacook private investigator with a checkered past, lives in upstate New York - four hundred miles from his tribal community on Abenaki Island. Then one night the phone rings. ""We . . . got . . . trouble,"" Neptune's cousin Dennis says from the other end. And trouble is where it all starts in this brilliant, often hilarious novel by acclaimed Abenaki storyteller Joseph Bruchac. Attacked by bikers before he can even board his plane, Neptune - ""Podjo"" to his friends - quickly begins to realize just how much trouble surrounds his people's ancestral home. Guided by his sense of duty to his homeland, he agrees to help protect Dennis and other Penacooks as they stage a takeover of a state campground on land that should have reverted to their tribe. But encroaching developers, government operators, and even fellow Penacooks eager to build a casino each pose a threat to the Abenaki lands - and all have reasons to want Neptune out of the picture. Podjo greets each challenge with self-deprecating humor - but it's difficult to shake his increasingly disturbing dreams, and an unsettled feeling when his return leads to a reunion with a long-ago love interest. As he and Dennis contend with hired guns, police, and security, a far greater threat appears: someone, or something, is brutally killing people in the woods. It will take all of Neptune's skills as a martial artist and the wisdom gained from tribal elders to battle the forces that threaten the sacred land - and his and his people's lives. Bruchac ratchets the tension from the first page to the last in this detective novel that pairs comedy and action with serious consideration of corporate greed, environmental destruction, cultural erosion, and other modern-day issues pressing Native peoples.

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Rising at 11,750 feet in the Sangre de Cristo range and snaking 926 miles through New Mexico and Texas to the Rio Grande, the Pecos River is one of the most storied waterways in the American West. It is also one of the most troubled. In 1942, the National Resources Planning Board observed that the Pecos River basin ""probably presents a greater aggregation of problems associated with land and water use than any other irrigated basin in the Western U.S."" In the twenty-first century, the river's problems have only multiplied. Bitter Waters, the first book-length study of the entire Pecos, traces the river's environmental history from the arrival of the first Europeans in the sixteenth century to today. Running clear at its source and turning salty in its middle reach, the Pecos River has served as both a magnet of veneration and an object of scorn. Patrick Dearen, who has written about the Pecos since the 1980s, draws on more than 150 interviews and a wealth of primary sources to trace the river's natural evolution and man's interaction with it. Irrigation projects, dams, invasive saltcedar, forest proliferation, fires, floods, flow decline, usage conflicts, water quality deterioration - Dearen offers a thorough and clearly written account of what each factor has meant to the river and its prospects. As fine-grained in detail as it is sweeping in breadth, the picture Bitter Waters presents is sobering but not without hope, as it also extends to potential solutions to the Pecos River's problems and the current efforts to undo decades of damage. Combining the research skills of an accomplished historian, the investigative techniques of a veteran journalist, and the engaging style of an award-winning novelist, this powerful and accessible work of environmental history may well mark a turning point in the Pecos's fortunes.

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By the end of the 1960s, the Hollywood West of Tom Mix, Randolph Scott, and even John Wayne was passé - or so the story goes. Many film historians and critics have argued that movies portraying a mythic American West gave way to revisionist films that influential filmmakers such as Sam Peckinpah and Robert Altman made as violent critiques of the Western's ""golden years."" Yet rumors surrounding the death of the Western have been greatly exaggerated, says film historian Andrew Patrick Nelson. Even as the Wild Bunch and John McCabe rode forth, John Wayne remained the Western's number one box office draw. How, then, could there have been a revisionist reckoning at a time when the Duke was still in the saddle? In Still in the Saddle, Nelson offers readers a new history of the Hollywood Western in the 1970s, a time when filmmakers tried to revive the genre by appealing to a diverse audience that included a new generation of socially conscious viewers. Nelson considers a comprehensive filmography of releases from 1969 to 1980 in light of the visual tropes and narratives developed and reworked in the genre from the 1930s to the present. In so doing, he reveals the complexity of what is probably the most interesting period in Western movie history. His incisive reevaluations of such celebrated (or infamous) films as The Wild Bunch and Heaven's Gate and examinations of dozens of forgotten and neglected Westerns, including the final films of John Wayne, demonstrate that there was more to the 1970s Western than simple revision. Instead, we see not only important connections between canonical and lesser-known films of the period, but also continuities between these and older Westerns. Nelson believes an ongoing, cyclical process of regeneration thus transcends established divisions in the genre's history. Among the books currently challenging the prevailing ""evolutionary"" account of the Western, Still in the Saddle thoroughly revises our understanding of this exciting and misunderstood period in the Western's history and adds innovatively and substantially to our knowledge of the genre as a whole.

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Sherman Indian High School, as it is known today, began in 1892 as Perris Indian School on eighty acres south of Riverside, California, with nine students. Its mission, like that of other off-reservation Indian boarding schools, was to ""civilize"" Indian children, which meant stripping them of their Native culture and giving them vocational training. Today, the school on Magnolia Avenue in Riverside serves 350 students from 68 tribes, and its curricula are designed to both preserve Native languages and traditions and prepare students for life and work in mainstream American society. This book offers the first full history of Sherman Indian School's 100-plus years, a history that reflects federal Indian education policy since the late nineteenth century. Sherman Institute's historical trajectory features the abuse and exploitation familiar from other accounts of life at Indian boarding schools - children punished and humiliated for maintaining Native ways and put to work as manual laborers. But this book also brings to light the ways Native children managed to maintain their dignity, benefited from interacting with students from other tribes, and often even expressed appreciation for the experiences at Sherman. Alternating periods of assimilation and self-determination form a critical part of the story Diana Meyers Bahr tells, but her interpretation of the students' complex experiences is more subtle than that. From the accounts of students, educators, and administrators over the years, Bahr draws a picture of Sherman students successfully navigating a complicated middle course between total assimilation and total rejection of white education. The ambivalence of such a middle way has meant confronting painful moral choices - and ultimately it has deepened students' appreciation for the diverse cultures of Indian America and heightened their awareness of their own tribal identity. The ramifications can be seen in today's Sherman Indian High School, a repository of the living history so deftly and thoroughly chronicled here.

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The most comprehensive and up-to-date guide to Texas historiography of the past quarter-century, this volume of original essays will be an invaluable resource and definitive reference for teachers, students, and researchers of Texas history. Conceived as a follow-up to the award-winning A Guide to the History of Texas (1988), Discovering Texas History focuses on the major trends in the study of Texas history since 1990.In two sections, arranged topically and chronologically, some of the most prominent authors in the field survey the major works and most significant interpretations in the historical literature. Topical essays take up historical themes ranging from Native Americans, Mexican Americans, African Americans, and women in Texas to European immigrant history; literature, the visual arts, and music in the state; and urban and military history. Chronological essays cover the full span of Texas historiography from the Spanish era through the Civil War, to the Progressive Era and World Wars I and II, and finally to the early twenty-first century.Critical commentary on particular books and articles is the unifying purpose of these contributions, whose authors focus on analyzing and summarizing the subjects that have captured the attention of professional historians in recent years. Together the essays gathered here will constitute the standard reference on Texas historiography for years to come, guiding readers and researchers to future, ever deeper discoveries in the history of Texas.

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From the late nineteenth century through the 1920s, the U.S. government sought to control practices of music on reservations and in Indian boarding schools. At the same time, Native singers, dancers, and musicians created new opportunities through musical performance to resist and manipulate those same policy initiatives. Why did the practice of music generate fear among government officials and opportunity for Native peoples?In this innovative study, John W. Troutman explores the politics of music at the turn of the twentieth century in three spheres: reservations, off-reservation boarding schools, and public venues such as concert halls and Chautauqua circuits. On their reservations, the Lakotas manipulated concepts of U.S. citizenship and patriotism to reinvigorate and adapt social dances, even while the federal government stepped up efforts to suppress them. At Carlisle Indian School, teachers and bandmasters taught music in hopes of imposing their ""civilization"" agenda, but students made their own meaning of their music. Finally, many former students, armed with saxophones, violins, or operatic vocal training, formed their own ""all-Indian"" and tribal bands and quartets and traversed the country, engaging the market economy and federal Indian policy initiatives on their own terms.While recent scholarship has offered new insights into the experiences of ""show Indians"" and evolving powwow traditions, Indian Blues is the first book to explore the polyphony of Native musical practices and their relationship to federal Indian policy in this important period of American Indian history.

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On a chilly January morning in 1872, a special visitor arrived by train in North Platte, Nebraska. Grand Duke Alexis of Russia had already seen the cities and sights of the East - New York, Washington, and Niagara Falls - and now the young nobleman was about to enjoy a western adventure: a grand buffalo hunt. His host would be General Philip Sheridan, and the excursion would include several of the West's most iconic characters: George Armstrong Custer, Buffalo Bill Cody, and Spotted Tail of the Brulé Sioux.The Royal Buffalo Hunt, as this event is now called, has become a staple of western lore. Yet incorrect information and misconceptions about the excursion have prevented a clear understanding of what really took place. In this fascinating book, Douglas D. Scott, Peter Bleed, and Stephen Damm combine archaeological and historical research to offer an expansive and accurate portrayal of this singular diplomatic event.The authors focus their investigation on the Red Willow Creek encampment site, now named Camp Alexis, the party's only stopping place along the hunt trail that can be located with certainty. In addition to physical artifacts, the authors examine a plethora of primary accounts - such as railroad timetables, invitations to balls and dinners, even sheet music commemorating the visit - to supplement the archaeological evidence. They also reference documents from the Russian State Archives previously unavailable to researchers, as well as recently discovered photographs that show the layout and organization of the camp. Weaving all these elements together, their account constitutes a valuable product of the interdisciplinary approach known as microhistory.

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A rediscovered novel portrays Cherokees in transitionJohn Milton Oskison was a mixed-blood Cherokee known for his writing and his activism on behalf of Indian causes. The Singing Bird, never before published, is quite possibly the first historical novel written by a Cherokee.Set in the 1840s and '50s, when conflict erupted between the Eastern and Western Cherokees after their removal to Indian Territory, The Singing Bird relates the adventures and tangled relationships of missionaries to the Cherokees, including the promiscuous, selfish Ellen, the ""Singing Bird"" of the title. The fictional characters mingle with such historical figures as Sequoyah and Sam Houston, embedding the novel in actual events.The Singing Bird is a vivid account of the Cherokees' genius for survival and celebrates Native American cultural complexity and revitalization.

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In language reminiscent of the wild beauty of Big Sky Country, Mary Clearman Blew gives us a glimpse into the lives of her family as she traces their connection to Montana's natural and human landscape. Beginning with her great-grandparents' arrival in 1882 in Montana--still a territory then--Blew relates the stories that make up her life.

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Colonel Moses Hazen's 2nd Canadian Regiment was one of the first 'national' regiments in the American army. Created by the Continental Congress, it drew members from Canada, eleven states, and foreign forces. 'Congress's Own' was among the most culturally, ethnically, and regionally diverse of the Continental Army's regiments - a distinction that makes it an apt reflection of the union that was struggling to create a nation. The 2nd Canadian, like the larger army, represented and pushed the transition from a colonial, continental alliance to a national association. The problems the regiment raised and encountered underscored the complications of managing a confederation of states and troops. In this enterprising study of an intriguing and at times 'infernal' regiment, Holly A. Mayer marshals personal and official accounts - from the letters and journals of Continentals and congressmen to the pension applications of veterans and their widows - to reveal what the personal passions, hardships, and accommodations of the 2nd Canadian can tell us about the greater military and civil dynamics of the American Revolution. Congress's Own follows congressmen, commanders, and soldiers through the Revolutionary War as the regiment's story shifts from tents and trenches to the halls of power and back. Interweaving insights from borderlands and community studies with military history, Mayer tracks key battles and traces debates that raged within the Revolution's military and political borderlands wherein subjects became rebels, soldiers, and citizens. Her book offers fresh, vivid accounts of the Revolution that disclose how 'Congress's Own' regiment embodied the dreams, diversity, and divisions within and between the Continental Army, Congress, and the emergent union of states during the War for American Independence.

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Boundaries - lines imposed on the landscape - shape our lives, dictating everything from which candidates we vote for to what schools our children attend to the communities with which we identify. In Creating the American West, historian Derek R. Everett examines the function of these internal lines in American history generally and in the West in particular. Drawing lines to create states in the trans-Mississippi West, he points out, imposed a specific form of political organization that made the West truly American.Everett examines how settlers lobbied for boundaries and how politicians imposed them. He examines the origins of boundary-making in the United States from the colonial era through the Louisiana Purchase. Case studies then explore the ethnic, sectional, political, and economic angles of boundaries. Everett first examines the boundaries between Arkansas and its neighboring Native cultures, and the pseudo war between Missouri and Iowa. He then traces the lines splitting the Oregon Country and the states of California and Nevada, and considers the ethnic and political consequences of the boundary between New Mexico and Colorado. He explains the evolution of the line splitting the Dakotas, and concludes with a discussion of ways in which state boundaries can contribute toward new interpretations of borderlands history.A major theme in the history of state boundaries is the question of whether to use geometric or geographic lines - in other words, lines corresponding to parallels and meridians or those fashioned by natural features. With the distribution of western land, Everett shows, geography gave way to geometry and transformed the West. The end of boundary-making in the late nineteenth century is not the end of the story, however. These lines continue to complicate a host of issues including water rights, taxes, political representation, and immigration. Creating the American West shows how the past continues to shape the present.

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Ideas defer to no border - least of all the idea of belonging. So where does one belong, and what does belonging even mean, when a border inscribes one's identity? This dilemma, so critical to the ethnic Mexican community, is at the heart of Homeland, an intellectual, cultural, and literary history of belonging in ethnic Mexican thought through the twentieth century. Belonging, as Aaron E. SÁnchez's sees it, is an interwoven collection of ideas that defines human connectedness and that shapes the contours of human responsibilities and our obligations to one another. In Homeland, SÁnchez traces these ideas of belonging to their global, national, and local origins, and shows how they have transformed over time. For pragmatic, ideological, and political reasons, ethnic Mexicans have adapted, adopted, and abandoned ideas about belonging as shifting conceptions of citizenship disrupted old and new ways of thinking about roots and shared identity around the global. From the Mexican Revolution to the Chicano Movement, in Texas and across the nation, journalists, poets, lawyers, labor activists, and people from all walks of life have reworked or rejected citizenship as a concept that explained the responsibilities of people to the state and to one another. A wealth of sources - poems, plays, protests, editorials, and manifestos - demonstrate how ethnic Mexicans responded to changes in the legitimate means of belonging in the twentieth century. With competing ideas from both sides of the border they expressed how they viewed their position in the region, the nation, and the world - in ways that sometimes united and often divided the community. A transnational history that reveals how ideas move across borders and between communities, Homeland offers welcome insight into the defining and changing concept of belonging in relation to citizenship. In the process, the book marks another step in a promising new direction for Mexican American intellectual history.

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In the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico, a large indigenous population lives in rural communities, many of which retain traditional forms of governance. In 1996, some 350 women of these communities formed a weavers' cooperative, which they called Jolom Mayaetik. Their goal was to join together to market textiles of high quality in both new and ancient designs. Weaving Chiapas offers a rare view of the daily lives, memories, and hopes of these rural Maya women as they strive to retain their ancient customs while adapting to a rapidly changing world. Originally published in Spanish in 2007, this book captures firsthand the voices of these Maya artisans, whose experiences, including the challenges of living in a highly patriarchal culture, often escape the attention of mainstream scholarship. Based on interviews conducted with members of the Jolom Mayaetik cooperative, the accounts gathered in this volume provide an intimate view of women's life in the Chiapas highlands, known locally as Los Altos. We learn about their experiences of childhood, marriage, and childbirth; about subsistence farming and food traditions; and about the particular styles of clothing and even hairstyles that vary from community to community. Restricted by custom from engaging in public occupations, Los Altos women are responsible for managing their households and caring for domestic animals. But many of them long for broader opportunities, and the Jolom Mayaetik cooperative represents a bold effort by its members to assume control over and build a wider market for their own work. This English-language edition features color photographs - published here for the first time - depicting many of the individual women and their stunning textiles. A new preface, chapter introductions, and a scholarly afterword frame the women's narratives and place their accounts within cultural and historical context.

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This timely study of how the Supreme Court building shapes Washington as a space and a place for political action and meaning yields a multidimensional view and deeper appreciation of the ways that our physical surroundings manifest who we are as a people and what we value as a society.

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The Cherokees have the oldest and best-known Native American writing system in the United States. Invented by Sequoyah and made public in 1821, it was rapidly adopted, leading to nineteenth-century Cherokee literacy rates as high as 90 percent. This writing system, the Cherokee syllabary, is fully explained and used throughout this volume, the first and only complete published grammar of the Cherokee language. Although the Cherokee Reference Grammar focuses on the dialect spoken by the Cherokees in Oklahoma - the Cherokee Nation and the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians - it provides the grammatical foundation upon which all the dialects are based. In his introduction, author Brad Montgomery-Anderson offers a brief account of Cherokee history and language revitalization initiatives, as well as instructions for using this grammar. The book then delves into an explanation of Cherokee pronunciation, orthography, parts of speech, and syntax. While the book is intended as a reference grammar for experienced scholars, Montgomery-Anderson presents the information in accessible stages, moving from easier examples to more complex linguistic structures. Examples are taken from a variety of sources, including many from the Cherokee Phoenix. Audio clips of various text examples throughout can be found on the accompanying CDs. The volume also includes three appendices: a glossary keyed to the text; a typescript for the audio component; and a collection of literary texts: two traditional stories and a historical account of a search party traveling up the Arkansas River. The Cherokee Nation, as the second-largest tribe in the United States and the largest in Oklahoma, along with the United Keetoowah Band and the Eastern band of Cherokees, have a large number of people who speak their native language. Like other tribes, they have seen a sharp decline in the number of native speakers, particularly among the young, but they have responded with ambitious programs for preserving and revitalizing Cherokee culture and language. Cherokee Reference Grammar will serve as a vital resource in advancing these efforts to understand Cherokee history, language, and culture on their own terms.

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The California gold rush of 1849 created fortunes for San Francisco merchants, whose wealth depended on control of the city’s docks. But ownership of waterfront property was hotly contested. In an 1856 dispute over land titles, a county official shot an outspoken newspaperman, prompting a group of merchants to organize the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance. The committee, which met in secret, fed biased stories to the newspapers, depicting itself as a necessary substitute for incompetent law enforcement. But its actual purpose was quite different. In Dirty Deeds, historian Nancy J. Taniguchi draws on the 1856 Committee’s minutes—long lost until she unearthed them—to present the first clear picture of its actions and motivations. San Francisco’s real estate comprised a patchwork of land grants left from the Spanish and Mexican governments—grants that had been appropriated and sold over and over. Even after the establishment of a federal board in 1851 to settle the complicated California claims, land titles remained confused, and most of the land in the city belonged to no one. The acquisition of key waterfront properties in San Francisco by an ambitious politician motivated the thirty-odd merchants who called themselves “the Executives” of the Vigilance Committee to go directly after these parcels. Despite the organization’s assertion of working on behalf of law and order, its tactics—kidnapping, forced deportations, and even murder—went far beyond the bounds of law. For more than a century, scholars have accepted the vigilantes’ self-serving claims to honorable motives. Dirty Deeds tells the real story, in which a band of men took over a city in an attempt to control the most valuable land on the West Coast. Ranging far beyond San Francisco, the 1856 Vigilance Committee’s activities affected events on the East Coast, in Central America, and in courts throughout the United States even after the Civil War.

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This narrative history of the Caddo Indians creates a vivid picture of daily life in the Caddo Nation. Using archaeological data, oral histories, and descriptions by explorers and settlers, Cecile Carter introduces impressive Caddo leaders past and present. The book provides observations, stories, and vignettes on twentieth-century Caddos and invites the reader to recognize the strengths, rooted in ancient culture, that have enabled the Caddos to survive epidemics, enemy attacks, and displacement from their original homelands in Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, and Oklahoma.

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A reprint of the University of Oklahoma Press edition of 1980.This reliable text presents a clear and simple outline of Greek and Latin meters in order that the verse of the Greeks and Romans may be read as poetry.

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A testament to the ingenuity of scholarly presses, One Book/Five Ways is a fascinating experiment in comparative publishing. This book records the history of a single manuscript, entitled No Time for Houseplants, submitted to five different university presses—Chicago, MIT, North Carolina, Texas, and Toronto—and then actually published by the University of Oklahoma Press. Each of the five model publishers agreed to treat the book as a real project accepted for publication and to compile a log of procedures they followed. These logs include correspondence, budgets, forms, layouts, and specifications, providing an insider's look at the path a manuscript takes through the various departments of each press, from editorial to marketing. With a new Foreword discussing changes in publishing since 1978 and an Afterword commenting on the actual publication of No Time for Houseplants, One Book/Five Ways is a unique educational tool for anyone interested in the publishing process.

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