The Searchers

The Searchers PDF

Author: Glenn Frankel

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2013-02-19

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 1608191052

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Traces the making of the influential 1950s film inspired by the story of Cynthia Ann Parker, sharing details of Parker's 1836 abduction by the Comanche and her return to white culture twenty-four years later.

War and Peace on the Rio Grande Frontier, 1830–1880

War and Peace on the Rio Grande Frontier, 1830–1880 PDF

Author: Miguel Ángel González-Quiroga

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2020-03-05

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 0806166800

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The historical record of the Rio Grande valley through much of the nineteenth century reveals well-documented violence fueled by racial hatred, national rivalries, lack of governmental authority, competition for resources, and an international border that offered refuge to lawless men. Less noted is the region’s other everyday reality, one based on coexistence and cooperation among Mexicans, Anglo-Americans, and the Native Americans, African Americans, and Europeans who also inhabited the borderlands. War and Peace on the Rio Grande Frontier, 1830–1880 is a history of these parallel worlds focusing on a border that gave rise not only to violent conflict but also cooperation and economic and social advancement. Meeting here are the Anglo-Americans who came to the border region to trade, spread Christianity, and settle; Mexicans seeking opportunity in el norte; Native Americans who raided American and Mexican settlements alike for plunder and captives; and Europeans who crisscrossed the borderlands seeking new futures in a fluid frontier space. Historian Miguel Ángel González-Quiroga draws on national archives, letters, consular records, periodicals, and a host of other sources to give voice to borderlanders’ perspectives as he weaves their many, varied stories into one sweeping narrative. The tale he tells is one of economic connections and territorial disputes, of refugees and bounty hunters, speculation and stakeholding, smuggling and theft and other activities in which economic considerations often carried more weight than racial prejudice. Spanning the Anglo settlement of Texas in the 1830s, the Texas Revolution, the Republic of Texas , the US-Mexican War, various Indian wars, the US Civil War, the French intervention into Mexico, and the final subjugation of borderlands Indians by the combined forces of the US and Mexican armies, this is a magisterial work that forever alters, complicates, and enriches borderlands history. Published in association with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas

Trails

Trails PDF

Author: Patricia Nelson Limerick

Publisher:

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13:

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Reexamination of the role of the West in U.S. history and of the field of western history itself told by ten historians.

Historical Archaeology Through a Western Lens

Historical Archaeology Through a Western Lens PDF

Author: Mark Warner

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2017-06

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 1496200373

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The mythic American West, with its perilous frontiers, big skies, and vast resources, is frequently perceived as unchanging and timeless. The work of many western-based historical archaeologists over the past decade, however, has revealed narratives that often sharply challenge that timelessness. Historical Archaeology Through a Western Lens reveals an archaeological past that is distinct to the region—but not in ways that popular imagination might suggest. Instead, this volume highlights a western past characterized by rapid and ever-changing interactions between diverse groups of people across a wide range of environmental and economic situations. The dynamic and unpredictable lives of western communities have prompted a constant challenging and reimagining of both individual identities and collective understandings of their position within a broader national experience. Indeed, the archaeological West is one clearly characterized by mobility rather than stasis. The archaeologies presented in this volume explore the impact of that pervasive human mobility on the West—a world of transience, impermanence, seasonal migration, and accelerated trade and technology at scales ranging from the local to the global. By documenting the challenges of both local community-building and global networking, they provide an archaeology of the West that is ultimately from the West.

Heartland Blues

Heartland Blues PDF

Author: Marc Dixon

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 0190917032

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Back to the Future -- The Capital-Labor Accord in Action -- Union Discord in Indiana -- Flipping the Script in Ohio -- The Insider Route in Wisconsin -- A Holding Pattern in the Midwest -- Labor Rights in the Era of Union Decline.

Dodge City and the Birth of the Wild West

Dodge City and the Birth of the Wild West PDF

Author: Robert R. Dykstra

Publisher: University Press of Kansas

Published: 2017-07-15

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 0700624767

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Raised on Gunsmoke, Bat Masterson, and The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, we know what it means to “get outta Dodge”—to make a hasty escape from a dangerous place, like the Dodge City of Wild West lore. But why, of all the notorious, violent cities of old, did Dodge win this distinction? And what does this tenacious cultural metaphor have to do with the real Dodge City? In a book as much about the making of cultural myths as it is about Dodge City itself, authors Robert Dykstra and Jo Ann Manfra take us back into the history of Dodge to trace the growth of the city and its legend side-by-side. An exploration of murder statistics, court cases, and contemporary accounts reveals the historical Dodge to be neither as violent nor as lawless as legend has it—but every bit as intriguing. In a style that captures the charm and chicanery of storytelling in the Old West, Dodge City and the Birth of the Wild West finds a culprit in a local attorney, Harry Gryden, who fed sensational accounts to the national media during the so-called "Dodge City War" of 1883. Once launched, the legend leads the authors through the cultural landscape of twentieth-century America, as Dodge City became a useful metaphor in more and more television series and movies. Meanwhile, back in the actual Dodge, struggling on a lost frontier, a mirror image of the mythical city began to emerge, as residents increasingly embraced tourism as an economic necessity. Dodge City and the Birth of the Wild West maps a metaphor for belligerent individualism and social freedom through the cultural imagination, from a historical starting point to its mythical reflection. In this, the book restores both the reality of Dodge and its legend to their rightful place in the continuum of American culture.

Border Citizens

Border Citizens PDF

Author: Eric V. Meeks

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2010-01-01

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 0292778457

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Borders cut through not just places but also relationships, politics, economics, and cultures. Eric V. Meeks examines how ethno-racial categories and identities such as Indian, Mexican, and Anglo crystallized in Arizona's borderlands between 1880 and 1980. South-central Arizona is home to many ethnic groups, including Mexican Americans, Mexican immigrants, and semi-Hispanicized indigenous groups such as Yaquis and Tohono O'odham. Kinship and cultural ties between these diverse groups were altered and ethnic boundaries were deepened by the influx of Euro-Americans, the development of an industrial economy, and incorporation into the U.S. nation-state. Old ethnic and interethnic ties changed and became more difficult to sustain when Euro-Americans arrived in the region and imposed ideologies and government policies that constructed starker racial boundaries. As Arizona began to take its place in the national economy of the United States, primarily through mining and industrial agriculture, ethnic Mexican and Native American communities struggled to define their own identities. They sometimes stressed their status as the region's original inhabitants, sometimes as workers, sometimes as U.S. citizens, and sometimes as members of their own separate nations. In the process, they often challenged the racial order imposed on them by the dominant class. Appealing to broad audiences, this book links the construction of racial categories and ethnic identities to the larger process of nation-state building along the U.S.-Mexico border, and illustrates how ethnicity can both bring people together and drive them apart.

Frontiers of Boyhood

Frontiers of Boyhood PDF

Author: Martin Woodside

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2020-02-27

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 0806166649

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When Horace Greeley published his famous imperative, “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country,” the frontier was already synonymous with a distinctive type of idealized American masculinity. But Greeley’s exhortation also captured popular sentiment surrounding changing ideas of American boyhood; for many educators, politicians, and parents, raising boys right seemed a pivotal step in securing the growing nation’s future. This book revisits these narratives of American boyhood and frontier mythology to show how they worked against and through one another—and how this interaction shaped ideas about national character, identity, and progress. The intersection of ideas about boyhood and the frontier, while complex and multifaceted, was dominated by one arresting notion: in the space of the West, boys would grow into men and the fledgling nation would expand to fulfill its promise. Frontiers of Boyhood explores this myth and its implications and ramifications through western history, childhood studies, and a rich cultural archive. Detailing surprising intersections between American frontier mythology and historical notions of child development, the book offers a new perspective on William “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s influence on children and childhood; on the phenomenon of “American Boy Books”; the agency of child performers, differentiated by race and gender, in Wild West exhibitions; and the cultural work of boys’ play, as witnessed in scouting organizations and the deployment of mass-produced toys. These mutually reinforcing and complicating strands, traced through a wide range of cultural modes, from social and scientific theorizing to mass entertainment, lead to a new understanding of how changing American ideas about boyhood and the western frontier have worked together to produce compelling stories about the nation’s past and its imagined future.

Massacre at Camp Grant

Massacre at Camp Grant PDF

Author: Chip Colwell

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2015-09-01

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 0816532656

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Winner of a National Council on Public History Book Award On April 30, 1871, an unlikely group of Anglo-Americans, Mexican Americans, and Tohono O’odham Indians massacred more than a hundred Apache men, women, and children who had surrendered to the U.S. Army at Camp Grant, near Tucson, Arizona. Thirty or more Apache children were stolen and either kept in Tucson homes or sold into slavery in Mexico. Planned and perpetrated by some of the most prominent men in Arizona’s territorial era, this organized slaughter has become a kind of “phantom history” lurking beneath the Southwest’s official history, strangely present and absent at the same time. Seeking to uncover the mislaid past, this powerful book begins by listening to those voices in the historical record that have long been silenced and disregarded. Massacre at Camp Grant fashions a multivocal narrative, interweaving the documentary record, Apache narratives, historical texts, and ethnographic research to provide new insights into the atrocity. Thus drawing from a range of sources, it demonstrates the ways in which painful histories continue to live on in the collective memories of the communities in which they occurred. Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh begins with the premise that every account of the past is suffused with cultural, historical, and political characteristics. By paying attention to all of these aspects of a contested event, he provides a nuanced interpretation of the cultural forces behind the massacre, illuminates how history becomes an instrument of politics, and contemplates why we must study events we might prefer to forget.