Search results for ""university of oklahoma press""

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains practiced an archival art - narrating war exploits in large-scale paintings executed on animal hide robes, shirts, tipi covers, and tipi liners. This book offers the first comprehensive look at this important North American art form.

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By the time Abraham Lincoln asserted in 1858 that the nation could not “endure permanently half slave and half free,” the rift that would split the country in civil war was well defined. The origins and evolution of the coming conflict between North and South can in fact be traced back to the early years of the American Republic, as Stephen G. Hyslop demonstrates in Building a House Divided, an exploration of how the incipient fissure between the Union’s initial slave states and free states—or those where slaves were gradually being emancipated—lengthened and deepened as the nation advanced westward. Hyslop focuses on four prominent slaveholding expansionists who were intent on preserving the Union but nonetheless helped build what Lincoln called a house divided: Presidents Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and James K. Polk and Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, who managed a plantation in Mississippi bequeathed by his father-in-law. Hyslop examines what these men did, collectively and individually, to further what Jefferson called an “empire of liberty,” though it kept millions of Black people in bondage. Along with these major figures, in all their conflicts and contradictions, he considers other American expansionists who engaged in and helped extend slavery—among them William Clark, Stephen Austin, and President John Tyler—as well as examples of principled opposition to the extension of slavery by northerners such as John Quincy Adams and southerners like Henry Clay and Thomas Hart Benton, who held slaves but placed preserving the Union above extending slavery across the continent. The long view of the path to the Civil War, as charted through the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian eras in this book, reveals the critical fault in the nation’s foundation, exacerbated by slaveholding expansionists like Jefferson, Jackson, Polk, and Douglas, until the house they built upon it could no longer stand for two opposite ideas at once.

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In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, with U.S.-Russia relations approaching a breaking point, this book provides a key to understanding how we got here. Specifically, Stephen P. Friot asks, how do Russians and Americans think about each other, and why do they see the world so differently? The answers, Friot suggests, lie in the historical events surrounding the Cold War and their divergent influence on politics and popular consciousness. Cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural in its scope, Containing History employs the tools and insights of history, political science, and international relations to explain how twenty-first-century public attitudes in Russia are the product of a thousand years of history, including searing experiences in the twentieth century that have no counterparts in U.S. history. At the same time, Friot explores how—in ways incomprehensible to Russians—U.S. politics are driven by American society’s ethnic and religious diversity and by the robust political competition that often, for better or worse, puts international issues to work in the service of domestic political gain. Looking at history, culture, and politics in both the United States and Russia, Friot shows how the forty-five years of the Cold War and the seventy years of the Soviet era have shaped both the Russia we know in the twenty-first century and American attitudes toward Russia—in ways that drive social and political behavior, with profound consequences for the post–Cold War world. Amid the wreckage of the high hopes that accompanied the end of the Cold War, and as faith in a rules-based international order wanes, Friot’s work provides a historical, cultural, and political framework for understanding the geopolitics of the moment and, arguably, for navigating a way forward.

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Growing up in Shawnee, Oklahoma, among a host of grandmothers and aunties, Loretta Barrett Oden learned the lessons and lore of Potawatomi cooking, along with those of her father’s family, whose ancestors arrived on the Mayflower. This rich cultural blend came to bear in the iconic restaurant she opened in Santa Fe, the Corn Dance CafÉ, where many of the dishes in this book had their debut, setting Loretta on her path to fame as one of the most influential Native chefs in the nation, a leader in the new Indigenous food movement, and, with her Emmy Award–winning PBS series, Seasoned with Spirit: A Native Cook’s Journey, a cross-cultural ambassador for First American cuisine.Corn Dance: Inspired First American Cuisine tells the story of Loretta’s journey and of the dishes she created along the way. Alongside recipes that combine the flavors of her Oklahoma upbringing and Indigenous heritage with the Southwest flair of her Santa Fe restaurant, Loretta offers entertaining and edifying observations about ingredients and cooking culture. What kind of quail might turn up in your vicinity, for instance; what to do with piñon nuts, sumac, or nopales (cactus paddles); when to add a bundle of pine needles or a small branch of cedar to your braise: these and many practical words of wisdom about using the fruits of the forest, stream, or plain, accompany Loretta’s insights on everything from the dubious provenance of fry bread to the Potawatomi legend behind the Three Sisters—corn, beans, and squash, the namesake ingredients of Three Sisters and Friends Salad, served at Corn Dance CafÉ and now at Thirty Nine Restaurant at First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City, where Oden is the Chef Consultant. Amply illustrated and adapted to bring the taste of Native tradition into the home kitchen, Corn Dance invites readers to join Loretta Oden on her inspiring journey into the Indigenous heritage, and the exhilarating culinary future, of North America.

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William F. ""Buffalo Bill"" Cody, star of the American West, began his journey to fame at age twenty-three, when he met writer Ned Buntline. The pulp novels Buntline later penned were loosely based on Cody's scouting and bison-hunting adventures and sparked a national sensation. Other writers picked up the living legend of ""Buffalo Bill"" for their own pulp novels, and in 1872 Buntline produced a theatrical show starring Cody himself. In 1883, Cody opened his own show, Buffalo Bill's Wild West, which ultimately became the foundation for the world's image of the American frontier. After the Civil War, new transcontinental railroads aided rapid westward expansion, fostering Americans' long-held fascination with their western frontier. The railroads enabled traveling shows to move farther and faster, and improved printing technologies allowed those shows to print in large sizes and quantities lively color posters and advertisements. Cody's show team partnered with printers, lithographers, photographers, and iconic western American artists, such as Frederic Remington and Charles Schreyvogel, to create posters and advertisements for Buffalo Bill's Wild West. Circuses and other shows used similar techniques, but Cody's team perfected them, creating unique posters that branded Buffalo Bill's Wild West as the true Wild West experience. They helped attract patrons from across the nation and ultimately from around the world at every stop the traveling show made. In Art and Advertising in Buffalo Bill's Wild West, Michelle Delaney showcases these numerous posters in full color, many of which have never before been reproduced, pairing them with new research into previously inaccessible manuscript and photograph collections. Her study also includes Cody's correspondence with his staff, revealing the showman's friendships with notable American and European artists and his show's complex, modern publicity model. Beautifully designed, Art and Advertising in Buffalo Bill's Wild West presents a new perspective on the art, innovation, and advertising acumen that created the international frontier experience of Buffalo Bill's Wild West.

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Centuries of colonization and other factors have disrupted indigenous communities' ability to control their own food systems. This volume explores the meaning and importance of food sovereignty for Native peoples in the United States, and asks whether and how it might be achieved and sustained. Unprecedented in its focus and scope, this collection addresses nearly every aspect of indigenous food sovereignty, from revitalizing ancestral gardens and traditional ways of hunting, gathering, and seed saving to the difficult realities of racism, treaty abrogation, tribal sociopolitical factionalism, and the entrenched beliefs that processed foods are superior to traditional tribal fare. The contributors include scholar-activists in the fields of ethnobotany, history, anthropology, nutrition, insect ecology, biology, marine environmentalism, and federal Indian law, as well as indigenous seed savers and keepers, cooks, farmers, spearfishers, and community activists. After identifying the challenges involved in revitalizing and maintaining traditional food systems, these writers offer advice and encouragement to those concerned about tribal health, environmental destruction, loss of species habitat, and governmental food control.

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After immigrants flooded into central Oklahoma during the land rush of 1889 and the future capital of Oklahoma City sprang up ""within a fortnight,"" the city's residents adopted the slogan ""born grown"" to describe their new home. But the territory's creation was never so simple or straightforward. The real story, steeped in the politics of the Gilded Age, unfolds in 1889, Michael J. Hightower's revealing look at a moment in history that, in all its turmoil and complexity, transcends the myth. Hightower frames his story within the larger history of Old Oklahoma, beginning in Indian Territory, where displaced tribes and freedmen, wealthy cattlemen, and prospective homesteaders became embroiled in disputes over public land and federal government policies. Against this fraught background, 1889 travels back and forth between Washington, D.C., and the Oklahoma frontier to describe the politics of settlement, public land use, and the first stirrings of urban development. Drawing on eyewitness accounts, Hightower captures the drama of the Boomer incursions and the Run of '89, as well as the nascent urbanization of the townsite that would become Oklahoma City. All of these events played out in a political vacuum until Congress officially created Oklahoma Territory in the Organic Act of May 1890. The story of central Oklahoma is profoundly American, showing the region to have been a crucible for melding competing national interests and visions of the future. Boomers, businessmen, cattlemen, soldiers, politicians, pundits, and African and Native Americans squared off - sometimes peacefully, often not - in disagreements over public lands that would resonate in western history long after 1889.

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Between 1880 and 1940, Navajo and Ute families and westward-trending Anglos met in the ""bullpens"" of southwestern trading posts to barter for material goods. As the products of the livestock economy of Navajo culture were exchanged for the merchandise of an industrialized nation, a wealth of cultural knowledge also changed hands. In Both Sides of the Bullpen, Robert S. McPherson reveals the ways that Navajo tradition fundamentally reshaped and defined trading practices in the Four Corners area of southeastern Utah and southwestern Colorado. Drawing on oral histories of Native peoples and traders collected over thirty years of research, McPherson explores these interactions from both perspectives, as wool, blankets, and silver crossed the counter in exchange for flour, coffee, and hardware. To succeed, traders had to meet the needs and expectations of their customers, often interpreted through Navajo cultural standards. From the organization of the post building to gift giving, health care and burial services, and a credit system tailored to the Navajo calendar, every feature of the trading post served trader and customer alike. Over time, these posts evolved from ad hoc business ventures or profitable cooperative stores into institutions with a clearly defined set of expectations that followed Navajo traditional practices. Traders spent their days evaluating craft work, learning the financial circumstances of each Native family, following economic trends in the wool and livestock industry back east, and avoiding conflict. In detail and depth, the many voices woven throughout Both Sides of the Bullpen restore an underappreciated era to the history of the American Southwest. They show us that for American Indians and white traders alike in the Four Corners region during the late 1800s and early 1900s, barter was as much a cultural expression as it was an economic necessity.

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Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano has described U.S. and Latin American culture as continually hobbled by amnesia - unable, or unwilling, to remember the influence of mestizos and indigenous populations. In Mestizos Come Home! author Robert Con Davis-Undiano documents the great awakening of Mexican American and Latino culture since the 1960s that has challenged this omission in collective memory. He maps a new awareness of the United States as intrinsically connected to the broader context of the Americas. At once native and new to the American Southwest, Mexican Americans have ""come home"" in a profound sense: they have reasserted their right to claim that land and U.S. culture as their own.Mestizos Come Home! explores key areas of change that Mexican Americans have brought to the United States. These areas include the recognition of mestizo identity, especially its historical development across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the re-emergence of indigenous relationships to land; and the promotion of Mesoamerican conceptions of the human body. Clarifying and bridging critical gaps in cultural history, Davis-Undiano considers important artifacts from the past and present, connecting the casta (caste) paintings of eighteenth-century Mexico to modern-day artists including John Valadez, Alma López, and Luis A. Jiménez Jr. He also examines such community celebrations as Day of the Dead, Cinco de Mayo, and lowrider car culture as examples of mestizo influence on mainstream American culture. Woven throughout is the search for meaning and understanding of mestizo identity. A large-scale landmark account of Mexican American culture, Mestizos Come Home! shows that mestizos are essential to U.S. national culture. As an argument for social justice and a renewal of America's democratic ideals, this book marks a historic cultural homecoming.

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Canadian-born flying ace Raymond Collishaw (1893-1976) served in Britain's air forces for twenty-eight years. As a pilot in World War I he was credited with sixty-one confirmed kills on the Western Front. When World War II began in 1939, Air Commodore Collishaw commanded a Royal Air Force group in Egypt. It was in Egypt and Libya in 1940-41, during the Britain's Western Desert campaign, that he demonstrated the tenets of an effective air-ground cooperation system. Flying to Victory examines Raymond Collishaw's contribution to the British system of tactical air support - a pattern of operations that eventually became standard in the Allied air forces and proved to be a key factor in the Allied victory. The British Army and Royal Air Force entered the war with conflicting views on the issue of air support that hindered the success of early operations. It was only after the chastening failure of Operation Battleaxe in June 1941, fought according to army doctrine, that Winston Churchill shifted strategy on the direction of future air campaigns - ultimately endorsing the RAF's view of mission and target selection. This view adopted principles of air-ground cooperation that Collishaw had demonstrated in combat. Author Mike Bechthold traces the emergence of this strategy in the RAF air campaign in Operation Compass, the first British offensive in the Western Desert, in which Air Commodore Collishaw's small force overwhelmed its Italian counterpart and disrupted enemy logistics.Flying to Victory details the experiences that prepared Collishaw so well for this campaign and that taught him much about the application of air power, especially how to work effectively with the army and Royal Navy. As Bechthold shows, these lessons learned altered the Allied approach to tactical air support and, ultimately, changed the course of the Second World War.

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Emory Upton (1839-1881) is widely recognized as one of America's most influential military thinkers. His works - The Armies of Asia and Europe and The Military Policy of the United States - fueled the army's intellectual ferment in the late nineteenth century and guided Secretary of War Elihu Root's reforms in the early 1900s. Yet as David J. Fitzpatrick contends, Upton is also widely misunderstood as an antidemocratic militaristic zealot whose ideas were ""too Prussian"" for America. In this first full biography in nearly half a century, Fitzpatrick, the leading authority on Upton, radically revises our view of this important figure in American military thought. A devout Methodist farm boy from upstate New York, Upton attended the United States Military Academy at West Point and served in the Civil War. His use of a mass infantry attack to break the Confederate lines at Spotsylvania Courthouse in 1864 identified him as a rising figure in the U.S. Army. Upton's subsequent work on military organizations in Asia and Europe, commissioned by Commanding General William T. Sherman, influenced the army's turn toward a European, largely German ideal of soldiering as a profession. Yet it was this same text, along with Upton's Military Policy of the United States, that also propelled the misinterpretations of Upton - first by some contemporaries, and more recently by noted historians Stephen Ambrose and Russell Weigley. By showing Upton's dedication to the ideal of the citizen-soldier and placing him within the context of contemporary military, political, and intellectual discourse, Fitzpatrick shows how Upton's ideas clearly grew out of an American military-political tradition.Emory Upton: Misunderstood Reformer clarifies Upton's influence on the army by offering a new and necessary understanding of the military's intellectual direction at a critical juncture in American history.

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The modern effort to locate American liberties, it turns out, began in the mud at the bottom of Baltimore harbor. John Barron Jr. and John Craig sued the city for damages after Baltimore's rebuilt drainage system diverted water and sediment into the harbor, preventing large ships from tying up at Barron and Craig's wharf. By the time the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1833, the issue had become whether the city's actions constituted a taking of property by the state without just compensation, a violation of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The high court's decision in Barron v. Baltimore marked a critical step in the rapid evolution of law and constitutional rights during the first half of the nineteenth century.Diminishing the Bill of Rights examines the backstory and context of this decision as a turning point in the development of our current conception of individual rights. Since the colonial period, Americans had viewed their rights as springing from multiple sources, including the common law, natural right, and English legal tradition. Despite this rich heritage and a prohibition grounded in the Magna Carta against uncompensated state takings of property, the Court ruled against Barron's claim. The Bill of Rights, Chief Justice John Marshall declared in his opinion for the majority, restrained only the federal government, not the states. The Fifth Amendment, accordingly, did not apply to Maryland or any of the cities it chartered. In explaining how the Court came to reject a multisourced view of human liberties - a position seemingly inconsistent with its previous decisions - William Davenport Mercer helps explain why we now envision the Constitution as essential to guaranteeing our rights. Marshall's view of rights in Barron, Mercer argues, helped him navigate the Court through the precarious political currents of the time. While the chief justice may have effected a shrewd political maneuver, the decision helped hasten a reconceptualization of rights as located in documents. Its legacy, as Mercer's work makes clear, is among the Jacksonian era's significant democratic reforms and marks the emergence of a distinctly American constitutionalism.

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Andrés Canché became the cacique, or indigenous leader, of Cenotillo, Yucatán, in January 1834. By his retirement in 1864, he had become an expert politician, balancing powerful local alliances with his community's interests as early national Yucatán underwent major political and social shifts. In Maya Caciques in Early National Yucatán, Rajeshwari Dutt uses Canché's story as a compelling microhistory to open a new perspective on the role of the cacique in post-independence Yucatán. In most of the literature on Yucatán, caciques are seen as remnants of Spanish colonial rule, intermediaries whose importance declined over the early national period. Dutt instead shows that at the individual level, caciques became more politicized and, in some cases, gained power. Rather than focusing on the rebellion and violence that inform most scholarship on post-independence Yucatán, Dutt traces the more quotidian ways in which figures like Canché held onto power. In the process, she presents an alternative perspective on a tumultuous period in Yucatán's history, a view that emphasizes negotiation and alliance-making at the local level. At the same time, Dutt's exploration of the caciques' life stories reveals a larger narrative about the emergence, evolution, and normalization of particular forms of national political conduct in the decades following independence. Over time, caciques fashioned a new political repertoire, forming strategic local alliances with villagers, priests, Spanish and Creole officials, and other caciques. As state policies made political participation increasingly difficult, Maya caciques turned clientelism, or the use of patronage relationships, into the new modus operandi of local politics. Dutt's engaging exploration of the life and career of Andrés Canché, and of his fellow Maya caciques, illuminates the realities of politics in Yucatán, revealing that seemingly ordinary political relationships were carefully negotiated by indigenous leaders. Theirs is a story not of failure and decline, but of survival and empowerment.

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Some of the legendary gunmen of the Old West were lawmen, but more, like Billy the Kid and Jesse James, were outlaws. Tom Horn (1860-1903) was both. Lawman, soldier, hired gunman, detective, outlaw, and assassin, this darkly enigmatic figure has fascinated Americans ever since his death by hanging the day before his forty-third birthday. In this masterful historical biography, Larry Ball, a distinguished historian of western lawmen and outlaws, presents the definitive account of Horn's career.Horn became a civilian in the Apache wars when he was still in his early twenties. He fought in the last major battle with the Apaches on U.S. soil and chased the Indians into Mexico with General George Crook. He bragged about murdering renegades, and the brutality of his approach to law and order foreshadows his controversial career as a Pinkerton detective and his trial for murder in Wyoming. Having worked as a hired gun and a range detective in the years after the Johnson County War, he was eventually tried and hanged for killing a fourteen-year-old boy. Horn's guilt is still debated.To an extent no previous scholar has managed to achieve, Ball distinguishes the truth about Horn from the numerous legends. Both the facts and their distortions are revealing, especially since so many of the untruths come from Horn's own autobiography. As a teller of tall tales, Horn burnished his own reputation throughout his life. In spite of his services as a civilian scout and packer, his behavior frightened even his lawless companions. Although some writers have tried to elevate him to the top rung of frontier gun wielders, questions still shadow Horn's reputation.Ball's study concludes with a survey of Horn as described by historians, novelists, and screenwriters since his own time. These portrayals, as mixed as the facts on which they are based, show a continuing fascination with the life and legend of Tom Horn.

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Travelers and traders taking the Santa Fe Trail's routes from Missouri to New Mexico wrote vivid eyewitness accounts of the diverse and abundant wildlife encountered as they crossed arid plains, high desert, and rugged mountains. Most astonishing to these observers were the incredible numbers of animals, many they had not seen before - buffalo, antelope (pronghorn), prairie dogs, roadrunners, mustangs, grizzlies, and others. They also wrote about the domesticated animals they brought with them, including oxen, mules, horses, and dogs. Their letters, diaries, and memoirs open a window onto an animal world on the plains seen by few people other than the Plains Indians who had lived there for thousands of years. Phyllis S. Morgan has gleaned accounts from numerous primary sources and assembled them into a delightfully informative narrative. She has also explored the lives of the various species, and in this book tells about their behaviors and characteristics, the social relations within and between species, their relationships with humans, and their contributions to the environment and humankind. With skillful prose and a keen eye for a priceless tale, Morgan reanimates the story of life on the Santa Fe Trail's well-worn routes, and its sometimes violent intersection with human life. She provides a stirring view of the land and of the animals visible ""as far as the eye could reach,"" as more than one memoirist described. She also champions the many contributions animals made to the Trail's success and to the opening of the American West.

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Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, and Joaquín Murrieta are fixed in the American imagination as towering legends of the Old West. But that has not always been the case. There was a time when these men were largely forgotten relics of a bygone era. Then, in the early twentieth century, an obscure Chicago newspaperman changed all that. Walter Noble Burns (1872-1932) served with the First Kentucky Infantry during the Spanish-American War and covered General John J. Pershing's pursuit of Pancho Villa in Mexico as a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. However history-making these forays may seem, they were only the beginning. In the last six years of his life, Burns wrote three books that propelled New Mexico outlaw Billy the Kid, Tombstone marshal Wyatt Earp, and California bandit Joaquín Murrieta into the realm of legend. Despite Burns's remarkable command of his subjects - based on exhaustive research and interviews - he has been largely ignored by scholars because of the popular, even occasionally fictional, approach he employed. In American Mythmaker, the first literary biography of Burns, Mark J. Dworkin brings Burns out of the shadows. Through careful analysis of The Saga of Billy the Kid (1926), Tombstone: An Iliad of the Southwest (1927), and The Robin Hood of Eldorado: The Saga of Joaquín Murrieta (1932) and their reception, Dworkin shows how Burns used his journalistic training to introduce the history of the American West to his era's general readership. In the process, Burns made his subjects household names. Are Burns's books fact or fiction? Was he a historian or a novelist? Dworkin considers these questions as he uncovers the story behind Burns's mythmaking works. A long-overdue biography of a writer who shaped our idea of western history, American Mythmaker documents in fascinating detail the fashioning of some of the greatest American legends.

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Comezón: It's more than an itch. It's a long-standing desire that will never be fulfilled. And, in this novel by award-winning author Denise Chávez, it is also a border town in New Mexico whose denizens' longings are as powerful as they are, all too often, impossible.But in the feverish dance of life that seizes Comezón during its two annual fiestas, all things seem possible. As the townspeople revel in the freedom of the fiestas, their stories unfold in all manner of mystery, drama, and comic charm. In the middle of it all is Arnulfo P. Olivárez, master of ceremonies and befuddled patriarch of a less-than-tractable family. At the moment, he is calculating his chances of becoming mayor, as well as pondering the fate of his beautiful disabled daughter, Juliana.Arnulfo's daughters (""the half and the whole,"" he deems them) are the Fiesta Queen, Lucinda, a lovely, lost and wild girl, and Juliana, her half sister, wheelchair-bound but with soaring dreams of love for the local priest, El Padre Manolito. Their mother, the saintly Doña Emilia, attends to all her children, including Arnulfo, with grace. Lucinda's unsuitable suitor, Ruley Terrazas, a tall, bumpy-skinned boy, is not to be trusted, nor is his father, Cuco ""Matamosca"" Terrazas, the local chief of police. And Rey Suárez, owner of the Mil Recuerdos Lounge, is haunted by his former incarnation as an immigration officer, an expert in spotting fake IDs.Between New Mexico and México, between Cinco de Mayo and the 16th of September, between the dreams and the realities of Comezón's characters, something has to give. Each character is attempting to find love in this feverish fiesta called Life. And in the deft hands of Denise Chávez this tragicomic novel gives unerringly: pleasure, surprise, and the satisfaction of a tale well told.

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According to a dichotomy commonly found in studies of American Indians, some noble Native people defiantly defend their pristine indigenous traditions in honor of their ancestors, while others in weakness or greed surrender their culture and identities to white American economies and institutions. This traditionalist-versus-assimilationist divide is, Joshua B. Nelson argues, a false one. To make his case that American Indians rarely if ever conform to such simplistic identifications, Nelson considers the literature and culture of many Cherokee people.Exploring a range of linked cultural practices and beliefs through the works of Cherokee thinkers and writers from the nineteenth century to today, Nelson finds ample evidence that tradition can survive through times of radical change: Cherokees do their cultural work both in progressively traditional and traditionally progressive ways. Studying individuals previously deemed either ""traditional"" or ""assimilationist,"" Nelson presents a more nuanced interpretation. Among the works he examines are the political rhetoric of Elias Boudinot, a forefather of American Indian literature, and of John Ross, the principal chief during the Removal years; the understudied memoirs of Catharine Brown, a nineteenth-century Cherokee convert to Christianity; and the novel Kholvn, by contemporary traditionalist Sequoyah Guess, a writer of peculiarly Cherokee science fiction.Across several genres - including autobiography, fiction, speeches, laws, and letters - Progressive Traditions identifies an ""indigenous anarchism,"" a pluralist, community-centered political philosophy that looks to practices that preceded and surpass the nation-state as ways of helping Cherokee people prosper. This critique of the common call for expansion of tribal nations' sovereignty over their citizens represents a profound shift in American Indian critical theory and challenges contemporary indigenous people to rethink power among nations, communities, and individuals.

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German Impressionist artist Julius Seyler had already made a name for himself in Europe when America beckoned. While in St. Paul, Minnesota, he encountered Louis Hill, head of the Great Northern Railroad, who wanted to encourage travel to Montana's newly created Glacier National Park. To that end, Hill enticed the adventuresome Seyler to visit this majestic landscape and to see the Blackfeet Indians who lived there. This book marks both an appreciation of Seyler's unique art and a fascinating glimpse into the promotion of a national park in its early years.William E. Farr has written the first biographical portrait of Seyler, focusing on his two summers at Glacier in 1913 and 1914, his special relationship with the Blackfeet, and the magnificent art he created in the Northern Rockies. The book features more than one hundred images - many in color - including Seyler's major works from Glacier, other paintings from his European years, and historic photographs from the park.Seyler enjoyed wide recognition in Europe in his day, but the wartime destruction of his European works has since relegated him to obscurity. This lavish volume shows the stunning visual impact of his art and secures his place as one of the paramount portrayers of a place we still call the Crown of the Continent.

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A love story about Dust Bowl heroes who didn't leave for CaliforniaHarlan Singer, a harmonica-playing troubadour, shows up in the Thompson family's yard one morning. He steals their hearts with his music, and their daughter with his charm. Soon he and his fourteen-year-old bride, Sharon, are on the road, two more hobos of the Great Depression, hitchhiking and hopping freights across the Great Plains in search of an old man and the settlement of Harlan's long-standing debt.Finding shelter in hobo jungles and Hoovervilles, the newlyweds careen across the 1930s landscape in a giant figure eight with Oklahoma in the middle. Sharon's growing doubts about her husband's quest set in motion events that turn Harlan Singer into a hero while blinding her to the dark secret of his journey. A love story infused with history and folk tradition, Harpsong shows what happened to the friends and neighbors Steinbeck's Joads left behind.In this moving, redemptive tale inspired by Oklahoma folk heroes, Rilla Askew continues her exploration of the American story. Harpsong is a novel of love and loss, of adventure and renewal, and of a wayfaring orphan's search for home - all set to the sounds of Harlan's harmonica. It shows us the strength and resilience of a people who, in the face of unending despair, maintain their faith in the land.

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Originally published in 1967, William H. Leckie's The Buffalo Soldiers was the first book of its kind to recognize the importance of African American units in the conquest of the West. Decades later, with sales of more than 75,000 copies, The Buffalo Soldiers has become a classic. Now, in a newly revised edition, the authors have expanded the original research to explore more deeply the lives of buffalo soldiers in the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry Regiments.Written in accessible prose that includes a synthesis of recent scholarship, this edition delves further into the life of an African American soldier in the nineteenth century. It also explores the experiences of soldiers' families at frontier posts. In a new epilogue, the authors summarize developments in the lives of buffalo soldiers after the Indian Wars and discuss contemporary efforts to memorialize them in film, art, and architecture.

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The Battle of the Little Bighorn has long held an eminent position among the chronicles of the mythic West. None of the men who rode with Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer to his ""Last Stand"" survived to tell the tale, but this stunning photography book provides a view of the battlefield as it must have existed in 1876.To create Where Custer Fell, authors James S. Brust, Brian C. Pohanka, and Sandy Barnard searched for elusive documents and photographs, made countless trips to the battlefield, and scrutinized all available sources. Each chapter begins with a concise, lively description of an episode in the battle. The narratives are graphically illustrated by historical photos, which are presented alongside modern photos of the same location on the battlefield. The book also features detailed maps and photographs of battle participants and the early photographers who attempted to tell their story.

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This classic text, which contains the complete Greek text of the Apology and of Crito with other selections, offers an introduction to Plato's language as well as an introduction to Socrates as presented by Plato. These two goals determined Lewis Leaming Forman's ample selection of passages from the writings of Plato.Forman's detailed and helpful notes enhance appreciation of how Greek prose - particularly Plato's - produces its effects. They include helpful discussions of syntax, the uses of particles, the effects of word order, and rhetorical devices. Forman also includes an appendix with an additional set of notes containing information chiefly on various syntactic patterns in the Greek language. Particularly suitable for second-, third-, or fourth-year students of Greek, this volume is also a useful resource for the Platonic scholar.

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The Historical Atlas of Oklahoma has been an indispensable reference for longer than four decades. Issued on the eve of the Oklahoma Centennial, this fourth edition of the atlas is much more than an updated version. Oklahoma authors Charles Robert Goins and Danney Goble are joined by seventeen contributing scholars (including natural and physical scientists) and other professionals to present 119 topics. To explore each, one or more maps with explanatory legends, tables, and graphs are paired with an interpretive essay.Created by cartographer James H. Anderson, more than 170 new maps - in full color - chart Oklahoma's rich and varied history and current population trends.Like earlier editions, the Atlas describes Oklahoma's landforms and natural resources and traces the state's geographic history from the earliest hunter-gatherer bands to today's mostly urban inhabitants. New to this edition are maps exploring additional aspects of the state's economy and its diverse society, politics, and culture, such as black history, women's experiences, and the musicians, writers, and other artists identified with the state. Reflecting the most up-to-date information as of 2005 from the U.S. Census Bureau and other sources, this new edition of the Historical Atlas of Oklahoma will be an invaluable resource for scholars, teachers, students, and any reader who wants to know more about the history of Oklahoma.

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Enriched by over 200 vintage photographs, Frontier Children is a visual and verbal montage of childhood in the nineteenth-century West. From a wide range of primary and secondary sources, Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith, well known for their books on western women, have brought together stories and images that erase the stereotypes and bring to life the infinite variety of the experience of growing up in the American West.

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In this first major work on the muskox, Peter C. Lent presents a comprehensive account of how its fortunes have been intertwined with our own since the glaciations of the Pleistocene era.Drawing from paleontology, archaeology, anthropology, and Indian and Inuit lore, Lent examines muskoxen in prehistory. Changing concepts in biology, conservation and management, animal husbandry, and contemporary arctic economics complete the picture. In uniting these themes, Lent refutes the idea that the muskox is an ""ice age relict,"" arguing that it was never numerous, even during the glacial era. Once considered an endangered species, the muskox today has an expanding economic role in northern lands.

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For many people the Sioux, as warriors and as buffalo hunters, have become the symbol of all that is Indian colorful figures endowed with great fortitude and powerful vision. They were the heroes of the Great Plains, and they were the villains, too.Royal B. Hassrick here attempts to describe the ways of the people, the patterns of their behavior, and the concepts of their imagination. Uniquely, he has approached the subject from the Sioux's own point of view, giving their own interpretation of their world in the era of its greatest vigor and renown -the brief span of years from about 1830 to 1870.In addition to printed sources, the author has drawn from the observation and records of a number of Sioux who were still living when this book was projected, and were anxious to serve as links to the vanished world of their forebears.Because it is true that men become in great measure what they think and want themselves to be, it is important to gain this insight into Sioux thought of a century ago. Apparently, the most significant theme in their universe was that man was a minute but integral part of that universe. The dual themes of self-expression and self-denial reached through their lives, helping to explain their utter defeat soon after the Battle of the Little Big Horn. When the opportunity to resolve the conflict with the white man in their own way was lost, their very reason for living was lost, too.There are chapters on the family and the sexes, fun, the scheme of war, production, the structure of the nation, the way to status, and other aspects of Sioux life.

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When the first edition of this book was published in 1957, the art of making a tipi was almost lost, even among American Indians. Since that time a tremendous resurgence of interest in the Indian way of life has occurred, resurgence due in part, at least, to the Laubins' life-long efforts at preservation and interpretation of Indian culture.As The Indian Tipi makes obvious, the American Indian is both a practical person and a natural artist. Indian inventions are commonly both serviceable and beautiful. Other tents are hard to pitch, hot in summer, cold in winter, poorly lighted, unventilated, easily blown down, and ugly to boot. The conical tipi of the Plains Indian has none of these faults. It can be pitched by one person. It is roomy, well ventilated at all times, cool in summer, well lighted, proof against high winds and heavy downpours, and, with its cheerful fire inside, snug in the severest winter weather. Moreover, its tilted cone, trim smoke flaps, and crown of poles, presenting a different silhouette from every angle, form a shapely, stately dwelling even without decoration.In this new edition the Laubins have retained all the invaluable aspects of the first edition, and have added a tremendous amount of new material on day-to-day living in the tipi: the section on Indian cooking has been expanded to include a large number and range of Indian foods and recipes, as well as methods of cooking over an open fire, with a reflector oven, and with a ground oven; there are new sections on making buckskin, making moccasins, and making cradle boards; there is a whole new section on child care and general household hints. Shoshoni, Cree, and Assiniboine designs have been added to the long list of tribal tipi types discussed.This new edition is richly illustrated with color and black and white photographs, and drawings to aid in constructing and living in the tipi. It is written primarily for the interested amateur, and will appeal to anyone who likes camping, the out-of-doors, and American Indian lore.

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Before the development of the first self-governing windmill, settlement of the upland areas of the American West was almost impossible. Windmills were needed to pump underground water to the surface. As soon as their design and manufacture had been perfected, the mills became the most prominent feature of the American landscape, not only in the western two-thirds of the nation but also in the East and particularly in the Middle East. Besides supplying the needs of farmers and ranchers, windmills performed such tasks as pumping water to the roofs of New York tenements, cleaning our mine shafts and ships' bilges, and providing water for the boilers of locomotives.This guide to America's windmills is both a complete general history of turbine-wheel mills and an identification guide to the 112 most common models, which still dot the landscape today. With this guide a traveler or enthusiast crossing the plains and prairies of North American can identify virtually every farm-style windmill that he or she can see with a good pair of binoculars. The guide also serves as a handbook for the restoration of antique mills.In his lively narrative T. Lindsay Baker clearly explains the technical evolution of the mills and shares a wealth of windmill folklore. Among the 376 illustrations are unpublished historical photographs, long-lost engravings, field photographs by the author, and detailed India-ink drawings of the 112 most popular designs. Appendices identify all the known windmill manufacturers in the United States, Canada, and Mexico and all the known windmill models from the 1850s to the present day. The comprehensive bibliography is the first published list of source materials on the history of wind-power utilization.

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In 1872, Isabella Bird, daughter of a clergyman, set off alone to the Antipodes 'in search of health' and found she had embarked on a life of adventurous travel. In 1873, wearing Hawaiian riding dress, she rode her horse through the American Wild West, a terrain only newly opened to pioneer settlement. The letters that make up this volume were first published in 1879. They tell of magnificent, unspoiled landscapes and abundant wildlife, of encounters with rattlesnakes, wolves, pumas and grizzly bears, and her reactions to the volatile passions of the miners and pioneer settlers. A classic account of a truly astounding journey.

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The bone picker is just one of many entities, scary and mysterious, who lurk behind every page of this spine-tingling collection of Native fiction, written by award-winning Choctaw author Devon A. Mihesuah. Choctaw lore features a large pantheon of deities. These beings created the first people, taught them how to hunt, and warned them of danger.

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Despite centuries of intertribal contact, the American Indian peoples of northwestern California have continued to speak a variety of distinct languages. At the same time, they have come to embrace a common way of life based on salmon fishing and shared religious practices. In this thought-provoking re-examination of the hypothesis of linguistic relativity, Sean O'Neill looks closely at the Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk peoples to explore the striking juxtaposition between linguistic diversity and relative cultural uniformity among their communities.O'Neill examines intertribal contact, multilingualism, storytelling, and historical change among the three tribes, focusing on the traditional culture of the region as it existed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He asks important historical questions at the heart of the linguistic relativity hypothesis: Have the languages in fact grown more similar as a result of contact, multilingualism, and cultural convergence? Or have they instead maintained some of their striking grammatical and semantic differences? Through comparison of the three languages, O'Neill shows that long-term contact among the tribes intensified their linguistic differences, creating unique Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk identities.If language encapsulates worldview, as the principle of linguistic relativity suggests, then this region's linguistic diversity is puzzling. Analyzing patterns of linguistic accommodation as seen in the semantics of space and time, grammatical classification, and specialized cultural vocabularies, O'Neill resolves the apparent paradox by assessing long-term effects of contact.

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In 1875, a team of cartographers, geologists, and scientists under the direction of Ferdinand V. Hayden entered the Four Corners area for what they thought would be a calm summer’s work completing a previous survey. Their accomplishments would go down in history as one of the great American surveying expeditions of the nineteenth century. By skillfully weaving the surveyors’ diary entries, field notes, and correspondence with newspaper accounts, historians Robert S. McPherson and Susan Rhoades Neel bring the Hayden Survey to life. Mapping the Four Corners provides an entertaining, engaging narrative of the team’s experiences, contextualized with a thoughtful introduction and conclusion. Accompanied by the great photographer William Henry Jackson, Hayden’s team quickly found their trip to be more challenging than expected. The travelers describe wrangling half-wild pack mules, trying to sleep in rain-soaked blankets, and making tea from muddy, alkaline water. Along the way, they encountered diverse peoples, evidence of prehistoric civilizations, and spectacular scenery-Hispanic villages in Colorado and New Mexico; Mesa Verde, Hovenweep, and other Anasazi sites; and the Hopi mesas. Not everyone they met was glad to see them: in southeastern Utah surveyors fought and escaped a band of Utes and Paiutes who recognized that the survey meant dispossession from their homeland. Hayden saw his expedition as a scientific endeavor focused on geology, geographic description, cartographic accuracy, and even ethnography, but the search for economic potential was a significant underlying motive. As this book shows, these pragmatic scientists were on the lookout for gold beneath every rock, grazing lands in every valley, and economic opportunity around each bend in the trail. The Hayden Survey ultimately shaped the American imagination in contradictory ways, solidifying the idea of “progress”-and government funding of its pursuit-while also revealing, via Jackson’s photographs, a landscape with a beauty hitherto unknown and unimagined.

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As George Armstrong Custer's aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Edward Granger was in an ideal position to record the inner workings of the Michigan Brigade's command echelon. With a keen eye and occasional humour, Granger describes the brigade's operations, including numerous battles and skirmishes.

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In the southwestern corner of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, on the border between Arizona and Mexico, one finds Quitobaquito, the second-largest oasis in the Sonoran Desert. There, with some effort, one might also find remnants of once-thriving O’odham communities and their predecessors with roots reaching back at least 12,000 years—along with evidence of their expulsion, the erasure of their past, attempts to recover that history, and the role of the National Park Service (NPS) at every layer. The outlines of the lost landscapes of Quitobaquito—now further threatened by the looming border wall—reemerge in Peoples of a Sonoran Desert Oasis as Jared Orsi tells the story of the land, its inhabitants ancient and recent, and the efforts of the NPS to “reclaim” Quitobaquito’s pristine natural form and to reverse the damage done to the O’odham community and culture, first by colonial incursions and then by proponents of “preservation.” Quitobaquito is ecologically and culturally rich, and this book summons both the natural and human history of this unique place to describe how people have made use of the land for some five hundred generations, subject to the shifting forces of subsistence and commerce, tradition and progress, cultural and biological preservation. Throughout, Orsi details the processes by which the NPS obliterated those cultural landscapes and then subsequently, as America began to reckon with its colonial legacy, worked with O’odham peoples to restore their rightful heritage. Tracing the building and erasing of past landscapes to make some of them more visible in the present, Peoples of a Sonoran Desert Oasis reveals how colonial legacies became embedded in national parks—and points to the possibility that such legacies might be undone and those lost landscapes remade.

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Party Wars is the first book to describe how the ideological gulf now separating the two major parties developed and how today's fierce partisan competition affects the political process and national policy.Barbara Sinclair traces the current ideological divide to changes in the Republican party in the 1970s and 1980s, including the rise of neoconservativism and the Religious Right. Because of these historical developments, Democratic and Republican voters today differ substantially in what they consider good public policy, and so do the politicians they elect.Polarization has produced institutional consequences in the House of Representatives and in the Senate - witness the majority party's threat in 2004-2005 to use the ""nuclear option"" of abolishing the filibuster. The president's strategies for dealing with Congress have also been affected, raising the price of compromise with the opposing party and allowing a Republican president to govern largely from the ideological right. Other players in the national policy community - interest groups, think tanks, and the media - have also joined one or the other partisan ""team.""Party Wars puts all the parts together to provide the first government-wide survey of the impact of polarization on national politics. Sinclair pinpoints weaknesses in the highly polarized system and offers several remedies.

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This book, the first in a projected three-volume definitive history, traces the University's progress from territorial days to 1917. David W. Levy examines the people and events surrounding the school's formation and development, chronicling the determined ambition of pioneers to transform a seemingly barren landscape into a place where a worthy institution of higher education could thrive.The University of Oklahoma was established by the territorial legislature in 1890. With that act, Norman became the educational center of the future state. Levy captures the many factors - academic, political, financial, religious - that shaped the University. Drawing on a great depth of research in primary documents, he depicts the University's struggles to meet its goals as it confronted political interference, financial uncertainty, and troubles ranging from disastrous fires to populist witch hunts. Yet he also portrays determined teachers and optimistic students who understood the value of a college education.Written in an engaging style and enhanced by an array of historical photographs, this volume is a testimony to the citizens who overcame formidable obstacles to build a school that satisfied their ambitions and embodied their hopes for the future.

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One of America's most popular and influential American artists, Frederic Remington (1861-1909) is renowned for his depictions of the Old West. Through paintings, drawings, and sculptures, he immortalized a dynamic world of cowboys and American Indians, hunters and horses, landscapes and wildlife. Frederic Remington: A Catalogue Raisonné II is a comprehensive presentation of the artist's body of flat work, both in print and on this book's companion website. Beautifully illustrated with more than 150 figures and 100 color plates, this book offers insightful essays by notable art historians who explore Remington's experiences in Taos, New Mexico, and other parts of the West. The chapters include analyses of Remington's artistic development from an illustrator to a fine art painter, his search for and understanding of ""men with the bark on,"" his relationship with the famed illustrator Howard Pyle, and the shared imagery of Remington and ""Buffalo Bill"" Cody. A chapter considering Remington's enduring bond with the horse and its representation in his paintings follows an examination of Remington's ties to Theodore Roosevelt that reveals how the two men helped move the American conscience toward wildlife preservation. An assessment of the authentication process for evaluating Remington's works opens the collection: Remington is perhaps the most frequently faked American artist. The book features a unique keycode granting access to a companion website that brings together more than 3,000 reproductions of the artist's flat works, including the complete original 1996 edition of the Catalogue Raisonné and nearly 300 previously unknown or relocated pieces. Each entry includes the title, date, medium, size, inscriptions, provenance, and exhibition and publication history of the work, as well as select commentary. The online catalogue is fully searchable and will be continuously updated as new information becomes available. Based on decades of scholarship and research, the revised Remington Catalogue Raisonné is an essential resource for scholars, collectors, museum curators, historians of the American West, and anyone seeking definitive information on the art of Frederic Remington.Frederic Remington: A Catalogue Raisonné II is published in cooperation with the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody, Wyoming.

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The history of Oklahoma runs through the thousands of towns that sprang up in the wake of statehood and even before then - readable in the traces of bygone days, if you know what to look for. Jeffrey Schmidt conducts readers, armchair travellers and adventurers alike, through places that tell Oklahoma's story.

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The history of adoption is rarely told from an adoptee's perspective. Rebecca Wellington remedies this gap by framing the chronicle of adoption in America using her own life story. She describes growing up in a family with which she had no biological connection, giving birth to her own biological children, and then enduring the death of her sister.

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For five decades, as a singer, musician, songwriter, and producer, Tim O’Brien has ceaselessly explored the vast American musical landscape. While Appalachia and Ireland eventually became facets of the defining myth surrounding him and his music, he has digested a broad array of roots styles, reshaping them to his own purposes. Award-winning biographer Bobbie Malone and premier country music historian Bill C. Malone have teamed again, this time to chronicle O’Brien’s career and trace the ascent of Hot Rize and its broadening and enrichment of musical traditions. At the beginning of that career, O’Brien moved from his native West Virginia to the Rocky Mountain West. In just a few years, he became the lead singer, mandolin and fiddle player, and principal songwriter of beloved 1980s bluegrass band Hot Rize. Seeking to move beyond bluegrass, he next went to Nashville. O’Brien’s success in navigating the shoals of America’s vast reservoir of folk musical expressions took him into the realm of what is now called Americana. The core of Tim O’Brien’s virtuosity is his abiding and energetic pursuit of the next musical adventure. As a traveler, he has ranged widely in choosing the next instrument, song, style, fellow musicians, or venue. Written with O’Brien’s full cooperation and the input of family, friends, colleagues, and critics, Traveler provides the first complete, behind-the-scenes picture of a thoroughly American self-made musical genius—the boy who grew up listening to country artists at the WWVA Wheeling Jamboree and ended up charting a new course through American music.

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At the end of World War II, the top ten college football teams were largely the same as they are today-with one exception: Oklahoma. In 1947, Bud Wilkinson was named OU’s head football coach and became the architect of Oklahoma’s meteoric rise from mediocrity to its present status as a perennial powerhouse. Based on interviews with Wilkinson, former OU president George L. Cross, and numerous former players, author John Scott gives us the behind-the-scenes story of Wilkinson’s years at the University of Oklahoma. Scott takes us through the teams Wilkinson directed from 1947 to 1963, revealing the philosophies and tactics Wilkinson used to turn OU into one of college football’s elite programs. A close-up view of games-from strategy to execution-brings OU football and its cast of colorful characters to life. Scott details the Sooners’ 47-game winning streak as well as thrilling games against Notre Dame, Army, USC, and others. He also provides details of Wilkinson’s breaking of the color line in OU athletics and the infamous food-poisoning incident in Chicago in 1959. Before his death in 1994, Wilkinson reviewed the first draft of the book and wrote in a letter to the author, “The explanations of football strategies are concise and clear. They rank among the best I have ever read.” Including vignettes of Wilkinson’s closest coaching friends (Royal, Bryant, Leahy, Sanders, Blaik, Tatum), Bud Wilkinson and the Rise of Oklahoma Football captures all the drama of Oklahoma’s ascendance and serves as an authoritative and entertaining history of the sport that will appeal to all college football fans.

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For nearly half a century, celebrated historian Ron Tyler has researched, interpreted, and exhibited western American art. This splendid volume, gleaned from Tyler's extensive career of connoisseurship, brings together eight of the author's most notable essays, reworked especially for this volume. Beautifully illustrated with more than 150 images, Western Art, Western History tells the stories of key artists, both famous and obscure, whose provocative pictures document the people and places of the nineteenth-century American West. The artists depicted in these pages represent a variety of personalities and artistic styles. According to Tyler, each of them responded in unique ways to the compelling and exotic drama that unfolded in the West during the nineteenth century - an age of exploration, surveying, pleasure travel, and scientific discovery. In eloquent and engaging prose, Tyler unveils a fascinating cast of characters, including the little-known German-Russian artist Louis Choris, who served as a draftsman on the second Russian circumnavigation of the globe; the exacting and precise Swiss artist Karl Bodmer, who accompanied Prince Maximilian of Wied on his sojourn up the Missouri River; and the young American Alfred Jacob Miller, whose seemingly frivolous and romantic depictions of western mountain men and American Indians remained largely unknown until the mid-twentieth century. Other artists showcased in this volume are John James Audubon, George Caleb Bingham, Alfred E. Mathews, and, finally, Frederic Remington, who famously sought to capture the last glimmers of the ""old frontier."" A common thread throughout Western Art, Western History is the important role that technology - especially the development of lithography - played in the dissemination of images. As the author emphasizes, many works by western artists are valuable not only as illustrations but as scientific documents, imbued with cultural meaning. By placing works of western art within these broader contexts, Tyler enhances our understanding of their history and significance.

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John Joseph Mathews (1894-1979) is one of Oklahoma's most revered twentieth-century authors. An Osage Indian, he was also one of the first Indigenous authors to gain national renown. Yet fame did not come easily to Mathews, and his personality was full of contradictions. In this captivating biography, Michael Snyder provides the first book-length account of this fascinating figure. Known as ""Jo"" to all his friends, Mathews had a multifaceted identity. A novelist, naturalist, biographer, historian, and tribal preservationist, he was a true ""man of letters."" Snyder draws on a wealth of sources, many of them previously untapped, to narrate Mathews's story. Much of the writer's family life - especially his two marriages and his relationships with his two children and two stepchildren - is explored here for the first time. Born in the town of Pawhuska in Indian Territory, Mathews attended the University of Oklahoma before venturing abroad and earning a second degree from Oxford. He served as a flight instructor during World War I, traveled across Europe and northern Africa, and bought and sold land in California. A proud Osage who devoted himself to preserving Osage culture, Mathews also served as tribal councilman and cultural historian for the Osage Nation. Like many gifted artists, Mathews was not without flaws. And perhaps in the eyes of some critics, he occupies a nebulous space in literary history. Through insightful analysis of his major works, especially his semiautobiographical novel Sundown and his meditative Talking to the Moon, Snyder revises this impression. The story he tells, of one remarkable individual, is also the story of the Osage Nation, the state of Oklahoma, and Native America in the twentieth century.

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In 1629, Catholic priest Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón produced the Treatise on the Heathen Superstitions That Today Live among the Indians Native to This New Spain to aid the church in its abolishment of native Nahua religious practices. The bilingual Nahuatl-Spanish Treatise collected diverse incantations, or nahualtocaitl, used to conjure Mesoamerican deities for daily sustenance and medical activities. Today this work is recognized as one of the most significant firsthand records of indigenous religious practices in postconquest Mexico. Yet, as Viviana Díaz Balsera argues in Guardians of Idolatry, the selection process for the incantations recorded in the Treatise reflects two sites of agency: Ruiz de Alarcón's desire to present the most flagrant examples of Nahua ""demonic"" practices, and Nahua efforts to share benign nahualtocaitl in order to preserve their preconquest traditions while negotiating with colonial Christian hegemony.Guardians of Idolatry offers readers a rare, in-depth look at the nahualtocaitl and the native cosmogonies, beliefs, and medical practices they reveal. Through close reading of four incantations - for safe travel, maguey sap harvesting, bow-and-arrow deer hunting, and divination through maize kernels - Díaz Balsera shows the nuances of a Nahua spiritual world populated by intelligent superhuman and nonhuman entities that directly responded to human appeals for intercession. She also addresses Jacinto de la Serna's Manual for Ministers of These Indians (1656), an elaborate commentary on the Treatise.Guardians of Idolatry tells a compelling story of the robust presence of a unique form of Postclassic Mesoamerican ritual knowledge, fully operative one hundred years after the incursion of Christianity in south Central Mexico. Together, Ruiz de Alarcón's Treatise and de la Serna's Manual reveal the highly sophisticated language of the nahualtocaitl, and the disparate ways in which both colonizers and resilient indigenous agents contributed to the conservation of Mesoamerican epistemology.

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In centuries long past, a vast swath of grassland swept down the center of North America, from Canada's Prairie Provinces to central Texas. This once-plentiful prairie has now all but disappeared. Humans have grazed, mowed, and plowed the plains, dammed the rivers, and imposed their will on the land and its creatures. Fortunately, some remnants have survived, including the Joseph H. Williams Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in northeastern Oklahoma. In this visually stunning volume, wildlife photographer Harvey Payne and historian James P. Ronda offer an intimate look at and into one of America's Last Great Places. Spanning nearly 40,000 acres in Oklahoma's Osage County, the Preserve is a living witness to a world that once existed. But the Osage prairie is not a museum or theme park - and it is not frozen in time. Under the stewardship of The Nature Conservancy, which has overseen its restoration, the Preserve lives on as a fully functioning ecosystem. And for twenty-five years, Payne and Ronda have explored these lands, together and in solitude. Rendered here in brilliant color and paired with Ronda's informative yet deeply personal commentary, Payne's photographs open our eyes to the ever-changing world of the Tallgrass Preserve. In chapters focused on grass, sky, birds, bison, and fire, Ronda and Payne reveal that the ""Big Empty"" is, in fact, teeming with life. Through interwoven images and words, Visions of the Tallgrass shows that our nation's grasslands are sacred ground, a priceless piece of our American past - and future.

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As one of America's most prominent nineteenth-century painters, Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) is justly renowned for his majestic paintings of the western landscape. Yet Bierstadt was also a painter of history, and his figural works, replete with images of Plains Indians and the American bison, are an important part of his legacy as well. This splendid full-color volume highlights his achievements in chronicling a rapidly changing American West. Born in Germany, Bierstadt rose to prominence as an American artist in the late 1850s and enjoyed nearly two decades of critical success. His paintings propelled him to the forefront of the American art scene, but they also met with reproach from his peers and critics in the press who viewed his painting style as outmoded. Bierstadt's star has both risen and fallen as modern art historians have reconsidered his complex oeuvre. This volume takes a major step in reappraising Bierstadt's contributions by reexamining the artist through a new lens. It shows how Bierstadt conveyed moral messages through his paintings, often to preserve the dignity of Native peoples and call attention to the tragic slaughter of the American bison. More broadly, the book reconsiders the artist's engagement with contemporary political and social debates surrounding wildlife conservation in America, the creation and perpetuation of national parks, and the prospects for the West's indigenous peoples. Bierstadt's final history paintings, including his dual masterworks titled The Last of the Buffalo - a special focus of this volume - stand out as elegiac odes to an earlier era, giving voice to concerns about the intertwined fates of Native peoples and endangered wildlife, especially bison. Along with its rich sampling of Bierstadt's diverse artwork, Albert Bierstadt: Witness to a Changing West features informative essays by noted curators, scholars of art history, and historians of the American West.

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