Search results for ""author richard lowitt""

Riding on the coat tails of Lyndon Johnson's 1964 landslide victory over Barry Goldwater, Fred Harris defeated former University of Oklahoma football coach Charles (Bud) Wilkinson to become, at age 33, the youngest senator elect in the history of the Sooner state. He quickly proved himself a most active senator—he was named chairman of a subcommittee during his first year, sought to bring accountability in federal research and development programs, and concerned himself with the plight of Native Americans and poverty stricken people throughout rural America. Later, as a result of his involvement with the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disobedience, his role as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and his work in the burgeoning peace movement, Fred Harris began to articulate his plans for New Populism—a program designed for millions of Americans who believed that government should serve the people and not its special interests. In 1972 and 1976, Harris launched New Populist campaigns for the presidency, but, in both instances, inadequate funding forced him to abandon his efforts. In Fred Harris: His Journey from Liberalism to Populism, historian Richard Lowitt traces the political career of Fred Harris and provides new insight into one senator's search for answers to the diverse, complex, and challenging issues confronting America during the turbulent 1960s and 1970s.

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In the spring of 1877 government officials forcibly removed members of the Ponca tribe from their homelands in the southeastern corner of Dakota territory, relocating them in the Indian Territory in Oklahoma. When Ponca Chief Standing Bear attempted to lead a group of his people home he was arrested, detained, and put on trial. In this book Valerie Sherer Mathes and Richard Lowitt examine how the national publicity surrounding the trial of Chief Standing Bear, as well as a speaking tour by the chief and others, brought the plight of his tribe, and of tribespeople across America, to the attention of the general public, serving as a catalyst for the nineteenth-century Indian reform movement. As the authors show, the eventual ramifications of the removal, flight, and trial of Standing Bear were extensive, and included the rise of an organized humanitarian reform movement, significant changes in the administration of Indian affairs, and the passage of the General Allotment Act in 1887. This is the first full-length study of the Standing Bear trial and its consequences, and Mathes and Lowitt draw on a vast array of manuscript, diary, and journalistic sources in order to chronicle the events of 1877, as well as the effect the trial had on broader American popular opinion, on the federal government, and finally on the Native American population as a whole.

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