Founding the Far West

Founding the Far West PDF

Author: David Alan Johnson

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-12-22

Total Pages: 467

ISBN-13: 0520910982

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Founding the Far West is an ambitious and vividly written narrative of the early years of statehood and statesmanship in three pivotal western territories. Johnson offers a model example of a new approach to history that is transforming our ideas of how America moved west, one that breaks the mold of "regional" and "frontier" histories to show why Western history is also American history. Johnson explores the conquest, immigration, and settlement of the first three states of the western region. He also investigates the building of local political customs, habits, and institutions, as well as the socioeconomic development of the region. While momentous changes marked the Far West in the later nineteenth century, distinctive local political cultures persisted. These were a legacy of the pre-Civil War conquest and settlement of the regions but no less a reflection of the struggles for political definition that took place during constitutional conventions in each of the three states. At the center of the book are the men who wrote the original constitutions of these states and shaped distinctive political cultures out of the common materials of antebellum American culture. Founding the Far West maintains a focus on the individual experience of the constitution writers—on their motives and ambitions as pioneers, their ideological intentions as authors of constitutions, and the successes and failures, after statehood, of their attempts to give meaning to the constitutions they had produced.

The Far West and the Great Plains in Transition, 1859-1900

The Far West and the Great Plains in Transition, 1859-1900 PDF

Author: Rodman Wilson Paul

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 9780060158361

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In this book, his final work, Rodman W. Paul explores the settlement of the American West in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Lured by stories of open spaces, fertile farming, & grazing lands & by the attraction of gold & silver, people from many nations traveled westward by the thousands. Early migrants rode in stagecoaches & Conestoga wagons; their successors, on the transcontinental railroads, which linked western cities with their eastern counterparts. This comprehensive history describes not only population movement & mining development but also banking, farming, ranching, & other economic ventures. In a new foreword, Martin Ridge places Paul's history in the context of contemporary scholarship. "Paul has given us an authoritative, indeed a brilliant, history of the Far West & the Great Plains as he saw it, through the lens of miners, businessmen, & immigrants." - JOURNAL OF AMERICAN HISTORY. Rodman W. Paul was Professor of History at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena & the foremost historian of mining in the West. Among his many books are CALIFORNIA GOLD, MINING FRONTIERS OF THE FAR WEST, 1848-1880, & THE FRONTIER & THE AMERICAN WEST. Martin Ridge, who originally saw Paul's work through the press, is also a Professor of History at the California Institute of Technology & the author of WESTWARD EXPANSION: A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER.

Californio Lancers

Californio Lancers PDF

Author: Tom Prezelski

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2015-08-19

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 0806153083

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More than 16,000 Californians served as soldiers in the Union Army during the Civil War. One California unit, the 1st Battalion of Native Cavalry, consisted largely of Californio Hispanic volunteers from the “Cow Counties” of Southern California and the Central Coast. Out-of-work vaqueros who enlisted after drought decimated the herds they worked, the Native Cavalrymen lent the army their legendary horsemanship and carried lances that evoked both the romance of the Californios and the Spanish military tradition. Californio Lancers, the first detailed history of the 1st Battalion, illuminates their role in the conflict and brings new diversity to Civil War history. Author Tom Prezelski notes that the Californios, less than a generation removed from the U.S.-Mexican War, were ambivalent about serving in the Union Army, but poverty trumped their misgivings. Based on his extensive research in the service records of individual officers and enlisted men, Prezelski describes both the problems and the accomplishments of the 1st Battalion. Despite a desertion rate among enlisted men that exceeded 50 percent for some companies, and despite the feuds among its officers, the Native Cavalry was the face of federal authority in the region, and their presence helped retain the West for the Union during the rebellion. The battalion pursued bandits, fought an Indian insurrection in northern California, garrisoned Confederate-leaning southern California, patrolled desert trails, guarded the border, and attempted to control the Chiricahua Apaches in southern Arizona. Although some ten thousand Spanish-surnamed Americans served during the Civil War, their support of the Union is almost unknown in the popular imagination. Californio Lancers contributes to our understanding of the Civil War in the Far West and how it transformed the Mexican-American community.

Pioneer Photographers of the Far West

Pioneer Photographers of the Far West PDF

Author: Peter E. Palmquist

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 716

ISBN-13: 9780804738835

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This extraordinarily comprehensive, well-documented, biographical dictionary of some 1,500 photographers (and workers engaged in photographically related pursuits) active in western North America before 1865 is enriched by some 250 illustrations. Far from being simply a reference tool, the book provides a rich trove of fascinating narratives that cover both the professional and personal lives of a colorful cast of characters.

Mining Frontiers of the Far West, 1848-1880

Mining Frontiers of the Far West, 1848-1880 PDF

Author: Rodman Wilson Paul

Publisher:

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13:

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"Long out of print, this study of western mining is now available with three new chapters by Elliott West. When originally published in 1963, Professor Paul's book offered the first comprehensive view of western mining as an integral part of the settlement process. In his supplemental chapters, Professor West presents a social history of mining camps - encompassing discussions of gender, class, race, labor, and the environment. The combined scholarship of Paul and West makes a strong case for the transforming effects of the mining frontier on western society in particular and American society in general. This revised, expanded edition continues to offer a distinctively vivid voice and an unusually keen eye for telling detail."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The American Far West in the Twentieth Century

The American Far West in the Twentieth Century PDF

Author: Earl Spencer Pomeroy

Publisher:

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780300158526

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"A leading western specialist argues that the history of the American West did not end in the year 1900 and was shaped as much by events and innovations in the twentieth century, in a study that describes a modern West." -- annotation from Book Index with Reviews.

Gender and Generation on the Far Western Frontier

Gender and Generation on the Far Western Frontier PDF

Author: Cynthia Culver Prescott

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2022-05-10

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 0816549451

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As her family traveled the Oregon Trail in 1852, Mary Ellen Todd taught herself to crack the ox whip. Though gender roles often blurred on the trail, families quickly tried to re-establish separate roles for men and women once they had staked their claims. For Mary Ellen Todd, who found a “secret joy in having the power to set things moving,” this meant trading in the ox whip for the more feminine butter churn. In Gender and Generation on the Far Western Frontier, Cynthia Culver Prescott expertly explores the shifting gender roles and ideologies that countless Anglo-American settlers struggled with in Oregon’s Willamette Valley between 1845 and 1900. Drawing on traditional social history sources as well as divorce records, married women’s property records, period photographs, and material culture, Prescott reveals that Oregon settlers pursued a moving target of middle-class identity in the second half of the nineteenth century. Prescott traces long-term ideological changes, arguing that favorable farming conditions enabled Oregon families to progress from accepting flexible frontier roles to participating in a national consumer culture in only one generation. As settlers’ children came of age, participation in this new culture of consumption and refined leisure became the marker of the middle class. Middle-class culture shifted from the first generation’s emphasis on genteel behavior to a newer genteel consumption. This absorbing volume reveals the shifting boundaries of traditional women’s spheres, the complicated relationships between fathers and sons, and the second generation’s struggle to balance their parents’ ideology with a changing national sense of class consciousness.

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