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Books > History > History of other lands
In 1909, young William F. Buckley Sr. (1881-1958), who grew up in
the dusty South Texas town of San Diego, graduated from the
University of Texas law school and headed for Mexico City. Fluent
in Spanish, familiar with Mexican traditions, and soon fit to
practice law south of the border, Buckley was headed up the aisle
to vast wealth and cultural power. On the way, he took a front-row
seat at the Mexican Revolution and played a key role in steering
the nascent oil industry through tumultuous and dangerous times.
This book for the first time tells the story of the man behind the
family that would become nothing short of a conservative
institution, reaching its apogee in the career of William F.
Buckley Jr., arguably the most prominent conservative commentator
of the twentieth century. Buckley witnessed the overthrow and exit
of President Porfirio DIaz, the rise of Madero, and the coup of
General Victoriano Huerta, all while building the Pantepec Oil
Company, the most profitable small petroleum producer in Mexico. He
faced down Pancho Villa, survived encounters with hired assassins,
evaded snipers in the streets of Veracruz, gambled and won in many
a business venture-and ultimately was expelled from the country. As
the narrative follows Buckley from his small-town Texas beginnings
to the founding of a family dynasty, the streak of independence and
distrust of government that would become the Buckley hallmark can
be seen in the making. An eventful chapter in the life and career
of a singular character, this dramatic account of a man and his
moment is a document of political and historical significance-but
it is also a remarkable story, told with irresistible brio.
"There is no comprehensive study of the Canadian reaction to the
famine in the English or Ukrainian language, [...] so this is a
major contribution. It is an interesting story and an important one
for Canadian and Ukrainian history." -- Roman Serbyn In 1932-33, a
famine -- the Holomodor ("extermination by hunger") -- raged
through Ukraine, killing millions. Although the Soviet government
denied it, news about the catastrophe got out. Through an extensive
analysis of the newspapers, political speeches, and protests,
Starving Ukraine examines both Canada's reporting of the famine and
the country's response to it, highlighting the importance of
journalists and protestors. "Cipko has assembled a rich collection
of documents about the dissemination in Canada of news about the
Great Ukrainian Famine and how Canadians ... reacted to this
information. He has also compiled a bibliography of historical
literature on that tragedy presented as famine, genocide and
Holodomor. ... The work [makes] an important contribution to the
study of Canadian mainstream and ethnic newspapers, how they
handled information on foreign catastrophes, and how the two
domains of journalism interacted." - Roman Serbyn, editor of Famine
in Ukraine, 1932-1933 "[A]n important contribution." - Thomas M.
Prymak, author of Gathering a Heritage: Ukrainian, Slavonic, and
Ethnic Canada and the USA
The Homesteaders covers the whole settler experience, beginning the
year Canada was founded and the first sodbusters appeared in what
is now Saskatchewan, right through the immigration boom years
preceding the First World War. In their own words, settlers recount
their lives from the moment they registered for their "home
quarter" -- 160 acres of land given to them, so long as they could
cultivate it. Homesteaders describe the formidable task of building
the family home from sod or logs, the back-breaking labour of
cropping and harvesting the fields, the patience needed when
working with draught animals, and the misery of dealing with the
pests which threatened their livelihood. Their reminiscences extend
further as they discuss the type of food that was available, the
medical practices they had to endure, and the educational
experiences of their children in one-room schoolhouses, as well as
their hobbies, the books that they read, the songs they sang, the
pets that they owned, the games that they played, and the local
dances, picnics, weddings, and chivarees that they attended during
these early years.
The Texas state constitution of 1876 set aside three million acres
of public land in the Texas Panhandle in exchange for construction
of the state's monumental red-granite capitol in Austin. That land
became the XIT Ranch, briefly one of the most productive cattle
operations in the West. The story behind the legendary XIT Ranch,
told in full in this book, is a tale of Gilded Age business and
politics at the very foundation of the American cattle industry.
The capitol construction project, along with the acres that would
become XIT, went to an Illinois syndicate led by men influential in
politics and business. Unable to sell the land, the Illinois group,
backed by British capital, turned to cattle ranching to satisfy
investors. In tracing their efforts, which expanded to include a
satellite ranch in Montana, historian Michael M. Miller
demythologizes the cattle business that flourished in the
late-nineteenth-century American West, paralleling the United
States' first industrial revolution. The XIT Ranch came into being
and succeeded, Miller shows, only because of the work of
accountants, lawyers, and managers, overseen by officers and a
board of seasoned international capitalists. In turn, the ranch
created wealth for some and promoted the expansion of railroads,
new towns, farms, and jobs. Though it existed only from 1885 to
1912, from Texas to Montana the operation left a deep imprint on
community culture and historical memory. Describing the Texas
capitol project in its full scope and gritty detail, XIT cuts
through the popular portrayal of great western ranches to reveal a
more nuanced and far-reaching reality in the business and politics
of the beef industry at the close of America's Gilded Age.
Liz Skilton's innovative study tracks the naming of hurricanes over
six decades, exploring the interplay between naming practice and
wider American culture. In 1953, the U.S. Weather Bureau adopted
female names to identify hurricanes and other tropical storms.
Within two years, that convention came into question, and by 1978 a
new system was introduced, including alternating male and female
names in a pattern that continues today. In Tempest: Hurricane
Naming and American Culture, Skilton blends gender studies with
environmental history to analyze this often controversial
tradition. Focusing on the Gulf South-the nation's "hurricane
coast"-Skilton closely examines select storms, including Betsy,
Camille, Andrew, Katrina, and Harvey, while referencing dozens of
others. Through print and online media sources, government reports,
scientific data, and ephemera, she reveals how language and images
portray hurricanes as gendered objects: masculine-named storms are
generally characterized as stronger and more serious, while
feminine-named storms are described as "unladylike" and in need of
taming. Further, Skilton shows how the hypersexualized rhetoric
surrounding Katrina and Sandy and the effeminate depictions of
Georges represent evolving methods to define and explain extreme
weather events. As she chronicles the evolution of gendered storm
naming in the United States, Skilton delves into many other aspects
of hurricane history. She describes attempts at scientific control
of storms through hurricane seeding during the Cold War arms race
of the 1950s and relates how Roxcy Bolton, a member of the National
Organization for Women, led the crusade against feminizing
hurricanes from her home in Miami near the National Hurricane
Center in the 1970s. Skilton also discusses the skyrocketing
interest in extreme weather events that accompanied the
introduction of 24-hour news coverage of storms, as well as the
impact of social media networks on Americans' tracking and
understanding of hurricanes and other disasters. The debate over
hurricane naming continues, as Skilton demonstrates, and many
Americans question the merit and purpose of the gendered naming
system. What is clear is that hurricane names matter, and that they
fundamentally shape our impressions of storms, for good and bad.
Few women have had a more significant impact on the development and
growth of Lawrence, Kansas, and the University of Kansas than
Elizabeth Miller Watkins. Elizabeth Josephine Miller was born in
Ohio in 1861 and moved with her family to Lawrence when she was a
child. She attended the University of Kansas's preparatory school
in the 1870s but could not complete her education when a family
financial crisis forced her to seek employment. She started working
at the J. B. Watkins Land and Mortgage Company in 1887 as a
secretary and in 1909 she married the company's founder and owner,
Jabez Watkins. Together the Watkinses dedicated themselves to
philanthropy and were committed to giving all their wealth, as
Elizabeth said, "for the good of humanity, chiefly here in
Lawrence." Jabez died in 1921, leaving Elizabeth to manage the
family fortune alone. Elizabeth wished to give women the
opportunity for higher education that she herself had never
received. In 1925, the Kansas Board of Regents approved her request
to have a women's scholarship hall built at KU. Watkins Hall, named
in memory of her late husband, was constructed close to Elizabeth's
home-now the Chancellor's residence-and was followed a decade later
by the construction Miller Hall in 1936. As two of the twelve
scholarship halls at the University of Kansas today, Watkins and
Miller Halls are home to a vibrant cohort of young female scholars
and an active alumnae community who continue the philanthropic
vision of Elizabeth Miller Watkins. In 1929, Elizabeth donated
$200,000 for the new Lawrence Memorial Hospital to be built at 3rd
and Maine, where it remains today. She also established the first
on-campus healthcare provider, Watkins Memorial Hospital at the
University of Kansas (now Twente Hall) in 1931. In this charming
biography, Mary Dresser Burchill and Norma Decker Hoagland's
extensive research successfully paints a portrait of a remarkable
woman whose generosity endures at KU and in Lawrence brings to
light the astonishing legacy of one of the city's leading
philanthropists.
In Forging Arizona Anita Huizar-Hernandez looks back at a bizarre
nineteenth-century land grant scheme that tests the limits of how
ideas about race, citizenship, and national expansion are forged.
During the aftermath of the U.S.-Mexico War and the creation of the
current border, a con artist named James Addison Reavis falsified
archives around the world to pass his wife off as the heiress to an
enormous Spanish land grant so that they could claim ownership of a
substantial portion of the newly-acquired Southwestern territories.
Drawing from a wide variety of sources including court records,
newspapers, fiction, and film, Anita Huizar-Hernandez argues that
the creation, collapse, and eventual forgetting of Reavis's scam
reveal the mechanisms by which narratives, real and imaginary,
forge borders. An important addition to extant scholarship on the
border U.S Southwest, Forging Arizona recovers a forgotten case
that reminds readers that the borders that divide nations,
identities, and even true from false are only as stable as the
narratives that define them.
More than 14,000 New Mexicans served in uniform during World War I,
and thousands more contributed to the American home front. Yet
today in New Mexico, as elsewhere, the Great War and the lives it
affected are scarcely remembered. Lest We Forget confronts that
amnesia. The first detailed study to describe New Mexico's wartime
mobilization, its soldiers' combat experiences, and its veterans'
postwar lives, the book offers a poignant account of the profound
changes these Americans underwent both during and after the war. By
focusing on New Mexico, historian David V. Holtby underscores the
challenges New Mexicans faced as they rallied support at home,
served in Europe, and came home as veterans. Income disparity,
gender divisions, political factionalism, and conflict between
rural and urban lifeways all affected the war and its aftermath.
Holtby shows how New Mexico responded to these problems even as it
coped with federal action and inaction. In more than 1,500
eyewitness statements collected in Spanish and English not long
after the war ended, New Mexicans described the murderous effects
of shrapnel and gas warfare, the impact of the Spanish influenza,
and the many other challenges they faced on the front as members of
the American Expeditionary Forces. Lest We Forget recounts the
background of these soldiers, but it also tells the
often-overlooked story of what happened to New Mexico's veterans
after the war. Theirs is a story of resilience in the face of
unfulfilled government promises, economic reversals, partisan
politicizing of the state's American Legion posts, and the
challenges the newly created Veterans Bureau faced as it was
overwhelmed by cases of shell shock (known today as PTSD). Although
New Mexicans' wartime efforts were in some ways unique, their story
ultimately provides a revealing glimpse of the experiences of all
Americans during World War I. A timely reminder of the courage and
tragedy that accompany full-scale modern warfare, Lest We Forget
reminds us of the enduring legacy of a vast international conflict
that had keenly felt and long-lasting repercussions back home.
First published in 1981, Harry W. Crosby's Last of the Californios
captured the history of the mountain people of Baja California
during a critical moment of transition, when the 1974 completion of
the transpeninsular highway increased the Californios' contact with
the outside world and profoundly affected their traditional way of
life. This updated and expanded version of that now-classic work
incorporates the fruits of further investigation into the
Californios' lives and history, by Crosby and others. The result is
the most thorough and extensive account of the people of Baja
California from the time of the peninsula's occupation by the
Spaniards in the seventeenth century to the present. Californio
Portraits combines history and sociology to provide an in-depth
view of a culture that has managed to survive dramatic changes.
Having ridden hundreds of miles by mule to visit with various
Californio families and gain their confidence, Crosby provides an
unparalleled view of their unique lifestyle. Beginning with the
story of the first Californios-the eighteenth-century presidio
soldiers who accompanied Jesuit missionaries, followed by miners
and independent ranchers-Crosby provides personal accounts of their
modern-day descendants and the ways they build their homes, prepare
their food, find their water, and tan their cowhides. Augmenting
his previous work with significant new sources, material, and
photographs, he draws a richly textured portrait of a people unlike
any other-families cultivating skills from an earlier century,
living in semi-isolation for decades and, even after completion of
the transpeninsular highway, reachable only by mule and horseback.
Combining a revised and updated text with a new foreword,
introduction, and updated bibliography, Californio Portraits offers
the clearest and most detailed portrait possible of a fascinating,
unique, and inaccessible people and culture.
On September 11, 1814, an American naval squadron under Master
Commandant Thomas Macdonough defeated a formidable British force on
Lake Champlain under the command of Captain George Downie,
effectively ending the British invasion of the Champlain Valley
during the War of 1812. This decisive battle had far-reaching
repercussions in Canada, the United States, England, and Ghent,
Belgium, where peace talks were under way. Examining the naval and
land campaign in strategic, political, and military terms, from
planning to execution to outcome, The Battle of Lake Champlain
offers the most thorough account written of this pivotal moment in
American history. For decades the Champlain corridor-a direct and
accessible invasion route between Lower Canada and the northern
United States-had been hotly contested in wars for control of the
region. In exploring the crucial issue of why it took two years for
the United States and Britain to confront each other on Lake
Champlain, historian John H. Schroeder recounts the war's early
years, the failed U.S. invasions of Canada in 1812 and 1813, and
the ensuing naval race for control of the lake in 1814. To explain
how the Americans achieved their unexpected victory, Schroeder
weighs the effects on both sides of preparations and planning,
personal valor and cowardice, command decisions both brilliant and
ill-conceived, and sheer luck both good and bad. Previous histories
have claimed that the War of 1812 ended with Andrew Jackson's
victory at the Battle of New Orleans. Schroeder demonstrates that
the United States really won the war four months before-at
Plattsburgh on Lake Champlain. Through a comprehensive analysis of
politics and diplomacy, Schroeder shows that the victory at Lake
Champlain prompted the British to moderate their demands at Ghent,
bringing the war directly and swiftly to an end before Jackson's
spectacular victory in January 1815.
Based on years of exhaustive and meticulous research, David C.
Keehn's study provides the first comprehensive analysis of the
Knights of the Golden Circle, a secret southern society that
initially sought to establish a slave-holding empire in the "Golden
Circle" region of Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America. Keehn
reveals the origins, rituals, structure, and complex history of
this mysterious group, including its later involvement in the
secession movement. Members supported southern governors in
precipitating disunion, filled the ranks of the nascent Confederate
Army, and organized rearguard actions during the Civil War. The
Knights of the Golden Circle emerged around 1858 when a secret
society formed by a Cincinnati businessman merged with the
pro-expansionist Order of the Lone Star, which already had 15,000
members. The following year, the Knights began publishing their own
newspaper and established their headquarters in Washington, D. C.
In 1860, during their first attempt to create the Golden Circle,
several thousand Knights assembled in southern Texas to "colonize"
northern Mexico. Due to insufficient resources and organizational
shortfalls, however, that filibuster failed. Later, the Knights
shifted their focus and began pushing for disunion, spearheading
pro-secession rallies, and intimidating Unionists in the South.
They appointed regional military commanders from the ranks of the
South's major political and military figures, including men such as
Elkanah Greer of Texas, Paul J. Semmes of Georgia, Robert C. Tyler
of Maryland, and Virginius D. Groner of Virginia. Followers also
established allies with the South's rabidly pro-secession
"fire-eaters," which included individuals such as Barnwell Rhett,
Louis Wigfall, Henry Wise, and William Yancey. According to Keehn,
the Knights likely carried out a variety of other clandestine
actions before the Civil War, including attempts by insurgents to
take over federal forts in Virginia and North Carolina, the
activation of pro-southern militia around Washington, D. C. and a
planned assassination of Abraham Lincoln as he passed through
Baltimore in early 1861 on the way to his inauguration. Once the
fighting began, the Knights helped build the emerging Confederate
Army and assisted with the pro-Confederate Copperhead movement in
northern states. With the war all but lost, various Knights
supported one of their members, John Wilkes Booth, in his plot to
abduct and assassinate President Lincoln. Keehn's fast-paced,
engaging narrative demonstrates that the Knights proved more
substantial than historians have traditionally assumed and provides
a new perspective on southern secession and the outbreak of the
Civil War.
Travel north from the upper Midwest's metropolises, and before long
you're "Up North"-a region that's hard to define but unmistakable
to any resident or tourist. Crops give way to forests, mines (or
their remains) mark the landscape, and lakes multiply, becoming
ever clearer until you reach the vastness of the Great Lakes. How
to characterize this region, as distinct from the agrarian Midwest,
is the question North Country seeks to answer, as a congenial group
of scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals explores the
distinctive landscape, culture, and history that define the
northern margins of the American Midwest. From the glacial past to
the present day, these essays range across the histories of the
Dakota and Ojibwe people, colonial imperial rivalries and
immigration, and conflicts between the economic imperatives of
resource extraction and the stewardship of nature. The book also
considers literary treatments of the area-and arguably makes its
own contributions to that literature, as some of the authors search
for the North Country through personal essays, while others
highlight individuals who are identified with the area, like Sigurd
Olson, John Barlow Martin, and Russell Kirk. From the fur trade to
tourism, fisheries to supper clubs, Finnish settlers to Native
treaty rights, the nature of the North Country emerges here in all
its variety and particularity: as clearly distinct from the greater
Midwest as it is part of the American heartland.
What does it mean to be a Nashvillian? A black Nashvillian? A white
Nashvillian? What does it mean to be an organizer, an ally, an
elected official, an agent for change? Deep Dish Conversations is a
running online interview series in which host Jerome Moore sits
down over pizza with prominent Nashville leaders and community
members to talk about the past, present, and future of the city and
what it means to live here. The result is honest conversation about
racism, housing, policing, poverty, and more in a safe, brave,
person-to-person environment that allows for disagreement. Deep
Dish Conversations is a curated collection of the most striking
interviews from the first few seasons, including a foreword by Dr.
Sekou Franklin, an introduction by Moore, and contextual
introductions to each interviewee. Figures like Judge Sheila
Calloway, comedian Josh Black, anti-racism speaker Tim Wise,
organizer Jorge Salles Diaz, and many more explore their
wide-ranging perspectives on social change in a city in the midst
of massive demographic and ideological shifts. For anyone in any
twenty-first-century city, Deep Dish Conversations offers a lot to
think about-and a lot of ways to think about it.
Like many western boomtowns at the turn of the twentieth century,
Spokane, Washington, enjoyed a lively theatrical scene, ranging
from plays, concerts, and operas to salacious variety and
vaudeville shows. Yet even as Spokanites took pride in their city's
reputation as a "good show town," the more genteel among them
worried about its "Wild West" atmosphere. In Show Town, historian
Holly George correlates the clash of tastes and sensibilities among
Spokane's theater patrons with a larger shift in values occurring
throughout the Inland West-and the nation-during a period of rapid
social change. George begins this multifaceted story in 1890, when
two Spokane developers built the lavish Auditorium Theater as a
kind of advertisement for the young city. The new venue catered to
a class of people made wealthy by speculation, railroads, and
mining. Yet the refined entertainment the Auditorium offered
conflicted with the rollicking shows that played in the town's
variety theaters, designed to draw in the migratory
workers-primarily single men-who provided labor for the same
industries that made the fortunes of Spokane's elite. As well-to-do
Spokanites attempted to clamp down on the variety theaters,
performances at even the city's more respectable, "legitimate"
playhouses began to reflect a movement away from Victorian
sensibilities to a more modern desire for
self-fulfillment-particularly among women. Theaters joined the
debate over modern femininity by presenting plays on issues ranging
from woman's suffrage to shifting marital expectations. At the same
time, national theater monopolies transmitted to the people of
Spokane new styles and tastes that mirrored larger cultural trends.
Lucidly written and meticulously researched, Show Town is a
groundbreaking work of cultural history. By examining one city's
theatrical scene in all its complex dimensions, this book expands
our understanding of the forces that shaped the urban American
West.
When the depression of the 1890s prompted unemployed workers from
Los Angeles to join a nationwide march on Washington, "Coxey's
Army" marked the birth of radicalism in that city. In this first
book to trace the subsequent struggle between the radical left and
L.A.'s power structure, Errol Wayne Stevens tells how both sides
shaped the city's character from the turn of the twentieth century
through the civil rights era. On the radical right, Los Angeles's
business elite, supported by the Los Angeles Times, sought the
destruction of the trade-union movement-defended on the left by
socialists, Wobblies, communists, and other groups. In portraying
the conflict between leftist and capitalist visions for the future,
Stevens brings to life colorful personalities such as Times
publisher Harrison Gray Otis and Socialist mayoral candidate Job
Harriman. He also re-creates events such as the 1910 bombing of the
Times building, the savage suppression of the 1923 longshoremen's
strike, and the 1965 Watts riots, which signaled that L.A. politics
had become divided less along class lines than by complex racial
and ethnic differences.The book takes stock of the rivalry between
right and left over the several decades in which it repeatedly
flared. Radical L.A. is a balanced work of meticulous scholarship
that pieces together a rich chronicle usually seen only in smaller
snippets or from a single vantage point. It will change the way we
see the history of the City of Angels.
While the Western was dying a slow death across the cultural
landscape, it was blazing back to life as a video game in the early
twenty-first century. Rockstar Games' Red Dead franchise, beginning
with Red Dead Revolver in 2004, has grown into one of the most
critically acclaimed video game franchises of the twenty-first
century. Red Dead Redemption: History, Myth, and Violence in the
Video Game West offers a critical, interdisciplinary look at this
cultural phenomenon at the intersection of game studies and
American history. Drawing on game studies, western history,
American studies, and cultural studies, the authors train a
wide-ranging, deeply informed analytic perspective on the Red Dead
franchise-from its earliest incarnation to the latest, Red Dead
Redemption 2 (2018). Their intersecting chapters put the series in
the context of American history, culture, and contemporary media,
with inquiries into issues of authenticity, realism, the meaning of
play and commercial promotion, and the relationship between the
game and the wider cultural iterations of the classic Western. The
contributors also delve into the role the series' development has
played in recent debates around working conditions in the gaming
industry and gaming culture. In its redeployment and reinvention of
the Western's myth and memes, the Red Dead franchise speaks to
broader aspects of American culture-the hold of the frontier myth
and the "Wild West" over the popular imagination, the role of gun
culture in society, depictions of gender and ethnicity in mass
media, and the increasing allure of digital escapism-all of which
come in for scrutiny here, making this volume a vital, sweeping,
and deeply revealing cultural intervention.
Pervasive myths of European domination and indigenous submission in
the Americas receive an overdue corrective in this far-reaching
revisionary work. Despite initial upheavals caused by the European
intrusion, Native people often thrived after contact, preserving
their sovereignty, territory, and culture and shaping indigenous
borderlands across the hemisphere. Borderlands, in this context,
are spaces where diverse populations interact, cross-cultural
exchanges are frequent and consequential, and no polity or
community holds dominion. Within the indigenous borderlands of the
Americas, as this volume shows, Native peoples exercised
considerable power, often retaining control of the land, and
remaining paramount agents of historical transformation after the
European incursion. Conversely, European conquest and colonialism
were typically slow and incomplete, as the newcomers struggled to
assert their authority and implement policies designed to subjugate
Native societies and change their beliefs and practices. Indigenous
Borderlands covers a wide chronological and geographical span, from
the sixteenth-century U.S. South to twentieth-century Bolivia, and
gathers leading scholars from the United States and Latin America.
Drawing on previously untapped or underutilized primary sources,
the original essays in this volume document the resilience and
relative success of indigenous communities commonly and wrongly
thought to have been subordinated by colonial forces, or even
vanished, as well as the persistence of indigenous borderlands
within territories claimed by people of European descent. Indeed,
numerous indigenous groups remain culturally distinct and
politically autonomous. Hemispheric in its scope, unique in its
approach, this work significantly recasts our understanding of the
important roles played by Native agents in constructing indigenous
borderlands in the era of European imperialism. Chapters 5, 6, 8,
and 9 are published with generous support from the Americas
Research Network.
As the population of the greater Las Vegas area grows and the
climate warms, the threat of a water shortage looms over southern
Nevada. But as Christian S. Harrison demonstrates in All the Water
the Law Allows, the threat of shortage arises not from the local
environment but from the American legal system, specifically the
Law of the River that governs water allocation from the Colorado
River. In this political and legal history of the Las Vegas water
supply, Harrison focuses on the creation and actions of the
Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA) to tell a story with
profound implications and important lessons for water politics and
natural resource policy in the twenty-first century. In the state
with the smallest allocation of the Colorado's water supply, Las
Vegas faces the twin challenges of aridity and federal law to
obtain water for its ever-expanding population. All the Water the
Law Allows describes how the impending threat of shortage in the
1980s compelled the five metropolitan water agencies of greater Las
Vegas to unify into a single entity. Harrison relates the
circumstances of the SNWA's evolution and reveals how the
unification of local, county, and state interests allowed the
compact to address regional water policy with greater force and
focus than any of its peers in the Colorado River Basin. Most
notably, the SNWA has mapped conservation plans that have
drastically reduced local water consumption; and, in the interstate
realm, it has been at the center of groundbreaking, water-sharing
agreements. Yet these achievements do not challenge the fundamental
primacy of the Law of the River. If current trends continue and the
Basin States are compelled to reassess the river's distribution,
the SNWA will be a force and a model for the Basin as a whole.
Non-Indians have amassed extensive records of Shawnee leaders
dating back to the era between the French and Indian War and the
War of 1812. But academia has largely ignored the stories of these
leaders' descendants-including accounts from the Shawnees' own
perspectives. The Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma focuses on the
nineteenth- and twentieth-century experiences of the Eastern
Shawnee Tribe, presenting a new brand of tribal history made
possible by the emergence of tribal communities' own research
centers and the resources afforded by the digital age. Offering
various perspectives on the history of the Eastern Shawnees, this
volume combines essays by leading and emerging scholars of Shawnee
history with contributions by Eastern Shawnee citizens and
interviews with tribal elders. Editor Stephen Warren introduces the
collection, acknowledging that the questions and concerns of
colonizers have dominated the themes of American Indian history for
far too long. The essays that follow introduce readers to the story
of the Eastern Shawnees and consider treaties with the U.S.
government, laws impacting the tribe, and tribal leadership. They
analyze the Eastern Shawnees' ways of telling the tribe's stories,
detail Shawnee experiences of federal boarding schools, and recount
stories of their chiefs. The book concludes with five tribal
members' life histories, told in their own words. The Eastern
Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma is the culmination of years of
collaboration between tribal citizens and Native as well as
non-Native scholars. Providing a fuller, more nuanced, and more
complete portrayal of Native American historical experiences, this
book serves as a resource for both future scholars and tribal
members to reconstruct the Eastern Shawnee past and thereby better
understand the present. This book was made possible through
generous funding from the Administration for Native Americans.
The image of western ranchers making a stand for their
"rights"-against developers, the government, "illegal"
immigrants-may be commonplace today, but the political power of the
cowboy was a long time in the making. In a book steeped in the
culture, traditions, and history of western range ranching,
Michelle K. Berry takes readers into the Cold War world of cattle
ranchers in the American West to show how that power, with its
implications for the lands and resources of the mountain states,
was built, shaped, and shored up between 1945 and 1965. After long
days working the ranch, battling human and nonhuman threats, and
wrestling with nature, ranchers got down to business of another
sort, which Berry calls "cow talk." Discussing the best new
machinery; sharing stories of drought, blizzards, and bugs; talking
money and management and strategy: these ranchers were building a
community specific to their time, place, and work and creating a
language that embodied their culture. Cow Talk explores how this
language and its iconography evolved and how it came to provide
both a context and a vehicle for political power. Using ranchers'
personal papers, publications, and cattle growers association
records, the book provides an inside view of how range cattle
ranchers in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana
created a culture and a shared identity that would frame and inform
their relationship with their environment and with society at large
in an increasingly challenging, modernizing world. A multifaceted
analysis of postwar ranch life, labor, and culture, this innovative
work offers unprecedented insight into the cohesive political and
cultural power of western ranchers in our day.
When her mother passed along a cookbook made and assembled by her
grandmother, Erica Abrams Locklear thought she knew what to expect.
But rather than finding a homemade cookbook full of apple stack
cake, leather britches, pickled watermelon, or other "traditional"
mountain recipes, Locklear discovered recipes for devil's food cake
with coconut icing, grape catsup, and fig pickles. Some recipes
even relied on food products like Bisquick, Swans Down flour, and
Calumet baking powder. Where, Locklear wondered, did her
Appalachian food script come from? And what implicit judgments had
she made about her grandmother based on the foods she imagined she
would have been interested in cooking? Appalachia on the Table
argues, in part, that since the conception of Appalachia as a
distinctly different region from the rest of the South and the
United States, the foods associated with the region and its people
have often been used to socially categorize and stigmatize mountain
people. Rather than investigate the actual foods consumed in
Appalachia, Locklear instead focuses on the representations of
foods consumed, implied moral judgments about those foods, and how
those judgments shape reader perceptions of those depicted. The
question at the core of Locklear's analysis asks, How did the
dominant culinary narrative of the region come into existence and
what consequences has that narrative had for people in the
mountains?
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