Everyone knows the name Calamity Jane. Scores of dime novels and movie and TV Westerns have portrayed this original Wild West woman as an adventuresome, gun-toting hellion. Although Calamity Jane has probably been written about more than any other woman of the nineteenth-century American West, fiction and legend have largely obscured the facts of her life. This lively, concise, and exhaustively researched biography traces the real person from the Missouri farm where she was born in 1856 through the development of her notorious persona as a Wild West heroine.
Before Calamity Jane became a legend, she was Martha Canary, orphaned when she was only eleven years old. From a young age she traveled fearlessly, worked with men, smoked, chewed tobacco, and drank. By the time she arrived in the boomtown of Deadwood, South Dakota, in 1876, she had become Calamity Jane, and the real Martha Canary had disappeared under a landslide of purple prose.
Calamity became a hostess and dancer in Deadwood's saloons and theaters. She imbibed heavily, and she might have been a prostitute, but she had other qualities, as well, including those of an angel of mercy who ministered to the sick and the down-and-out. Journalists and dime novelists couldn't get enough of either version, nor, in the following century, could filmmakers.
Sorting through the stories, veteran western historian Richard W. Etulain's account begins with a biography that offers new information on Calamity's several "husbands" (including one she legally married), her two children, and a woman who claimed to be the daughter of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity, a story Etulain discredits. In the second half of the book, Etulain traces the stories that have shaped Calamity Jane's reputation. Some Calamity portraits, he says, suggest that she aspired to a quiet life with a husband and family. As the 2004-2006 HBO series "Deadwood" makes clear, well more than a century after her first appearance as a heroine in the Deadwood Dick dime novels, Calamity Jane lives on--raunchy, unabashed, contradictory, and ambiguous as ever.""

'Beautifully written, sumptuously illustrated, constantly fascinating' The Times On 26 November 1922 Howard Carter first peered into the newly opened tomb of an ancient Egyptian boy-king. When asked if he could see anything, he replied: 'Yes, yes, wonderful things.' In Tutankhamun's Trumpet, acclaimed Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson takes a unique approach to that tomb and its contents. Instead of concentrating on the oft-told story of the discovery, or speculating on the brief life and politically fractious reign of the boy king, Wilkinson takes the objects buried with him as the source material for a wide-ranging, detailed portrait of ancient Egypt - its geography, history, culture and legacy. One hundred artefacts from the tomb, arranged in ten thematic groups, are allowed to speak again - not only for themselves, but as witnesses of the civilization that created them. Never before have the treasures of Tutankhamun been analysed and presented for what they can tell us about ancient Egyptian culture, its development, its remarkable flourishing, and its lasting impact. Filled with surprising insights, unusual details, vivid descriptions and, above all, remarkable objects, Tutankhamun's Trumpet will appeal to all lovers of history, archaeology, art and culture, as well as all those fascinated by the Egypt of the pharaohs. 'I've read many books on ancient Egypt, but I've never felt closer to its people' The Sunday Times

This book illuminates the interconnections between politics and religion through the lens of artistic production, exploring how art inspired by religion functioned as a form of resistance, directed against both Romanian national communism (1960-1989) and, latterly, consumerist society and its global market. It investigates the critical, tactical and subversive employments of religious motifs and themes in contemporary art pieces that confront the religious 'affair' in post-communist Romania. In doing so, it addresses a key gap in previous scholarship, which has paid little attention to the relationship between religious art and political resistance in communist Central and South-East Europe.

Since 2004, the Baby Doll Mardi Gras tradition in New Orleans has gone from an obscure, almost forgotten practice to a flourishing cultural force. The original Baby Dolls were groups of black women, and some men, in the early Jim Crow era who adopted New Orleans street masking tradition as a unique form of fun and self-expression against a backdrop of racial discrimination. Wearing short dresses, bloomers, bonnets, and garters with money tucked tight, they strutted, sang ribald songs, chanted, and danced on Mardi Gras Day and on St. Joseph feast night. Today's Baby Dolls continue the tradition of one of the first street women's masking and marching groups in the United States. They joyfully and unabashedly defy gender roles, claiming public space and proclaiming through their performance their right to social citizenship. Essayists draw on interviews, theoretical perspectives, archival material, and historical assessments to describe women's cultural performances that take place on the streets of New Orleans. They recount the history and contemporary resurgence of the Baby Dolls while delving into the larger cultural meaning of the phenomenon. Over 140 color photographs and personal narratives of immersive experiences provide passionate testimony of the impact of the Baby Dolls on their audiences. Fifteen artists offer statements regarding their work documenting and inspired by the tradition as it stimulates their imagination to present a practice that revitalizes the spirit.

In late-nineteenth-century Boston, battles over black party loyalty were fights over the place of African Americans in the post-Civil War nation. In his fresh in-depth study of black partisanship and politics, Millington Bergeson-Lockwood demonstrates that party politics became the terrain upon which black Bostonians tested the promise of equality in America's democracy. Most African Americans remained loyal Republicans, but Race over Party highlights the actions and aspirations of a cadre of those who argued that the GOP took black votes for granted and offered little meaningful reward for black support. These activists branded themselves ""independents,"" forging new alliances and advocating support of whichever candidate would support black freedom regardless of party. By the end of the century, however, it became clear that partisan politics offered little hope for the protection of black rights and lives in the face of white supremacy and racial violence. Even so, Bergeson-Lockwood shows how black Bostonians' faith in self-reliance, political autonomy, and dedicated organizing inspired future generations of activists who would carry these legacies into the foundation of the twentieth-century civil rights movement.

M. K. Beauchamp's Instruments of Empire examines the challenges that resulted from U.S. territorial expansion through the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. With the acquisition of this vast region, the United States gained a colonial European population whose birthplace, language, and religion often differed from those of their U.S. counterparts. This population exhibited multiple ethnic tensions and possessed little experience with republican government. Consequently, administration of the territory proved a trial-and-error endeavor involving incremental cooperation between federal officials and local elites. As Beauchamp demonstrates, this process of gradual accommodation served as an essential nationalizing experience for the people of Louisiana. After the acquisition, federal officials who doubted the loyalty of the local French population and their capacity for self-governance denied the territory of Orleans-easily the region's most populated and economically robust area-a quick path to statehood. Instead, U.S. officials looked to groups including free people of color, Native Americans, and recent immigrants, all of whom found themselves ideally placed to negotiate for greater privileges from the new territorial government. Beauchamp argues that U.S. administrators, despite claims of impartiality and equality before the law, regularly acted as fickle agents of imperial power and frequently co-opted local elites with prominent positions within the parishes. Overall, the methods utilized by the United States in governing Louisiana shared much in common with European colonial practices implemented elsewhere in North America during the early nineteenth century. While historians have previously focused on Washington policy makers in investigating the relationship between the United States and the newly acquired territory, Beauchamp emphasizes the integral role played by territorial elites who wielded enormous power and enabled government to function. His work offers profound insights into the interplay of class, ethnicity, and race, as well as an understanding of colonialism, the nature of republics, democracy, and empire. By placing the territorial period of early national Louisiana in an imperial context, this study reshapes perceptions of American expansion and manifest destiny in the nineteenth century and beyond. Instruments of Empire serves as a rich resource for specialists studying Louisiana and the U.S. South, as well as scholars of slavery and free people of color, nineteenth-century American history, Atlantic World and border studies, U.S. foreign relations, and the history of colonialism and empire.

From Catherine Hayes, the "Irish prima donna," and Maude Adams, "the most popular actress in America," to the legendary Sarah Bernhardt, Gilded Girls profiles fourteen of the liveliest, wildest, and most talented female entertainers ever to light up the boards of the western frontier. You'll meet "the Jersey Lily," who was wildly admired by men as various Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, Diamond Jim Brady, and Judge Roy Bean; Mrs. Leslie Carter, a scandal-plagued society women who became a famous actress as an act of revenge against her patrician ex-husband; a French-Creole beauty known as the "Frenzy of Frisco" who took up the Zionist and feminist causes in between her daring acting roles; and "Klondike Kate," a flame-haired entertainer who took Alaska's gold rush country by storm but suffered a very public heartbreak.
Some of the fascinating women are renowned even to this day, others are remembered only in the pages of history, but all personified the daring, colorful, and independent spirit of the Old West.

During the Great Depression, the Los Angeles area was rife with radical movements. Although many observers thought their ideas unworkable, even dangerous, Southern Californians voted for them by the tens of thousands. This book asks why. To find answers, author Errol Wayne Stevens takes readers through the history of such movements as the Utopian Society, Dr. Francis Townsend's old-age revolving pension plan, Upton Sinclair's End Poverty in California gubernatorial campaign, and Retirement Life Payments, known as Ham and Eggs. The book also examines the Los Angeles Communists and the free-market capitalists, both quasi-religious movements with large followings, as well as the self-help cooperatives, a spontaneous upsurge of neighbors who came together to help one another in a time of desperate need. As to these movements' extraordinary popularity, Stevens finds the standard explanations unpersuasive. He debunks the idea that naIve, unsophisticated Southern Californians, living aimless, empty lives, suffering from ennui, and longing for community, readily supported charismatic leaders who promised a way out of the Great Depression. In Stevens's telling, Southern Californians supported these movements because they spoke to their needs. Fearful or desperate, some elderly and hopeless, Angelenos cared less about the programs' feasibility than about their promise of relief. As one Ham and Eggs supporter succinctly explained: "It may be a racket and maybe it won't work more than a couple of weeks, but that will be $60 more than I ever got before for one vote." Finding parallels between past and present, readers might wonder why people remain loyal to programs that prove unrealistic, or why voters continue to support leaders who reveal, time and again, their ignorance or dishonesty. In its illumination of a troubled time in American history not so long ago, this book offers insight into our own.

History at the intersection of healthcare, labor, and civil rights. The union of hospital workers usually referred to as the 1199 sits at the intersection of three of the most important topics in US history: organized labor, health care, and civil rights. John Hennen's book explores the union's history in Appalachia, a region that is generally associated with extractive industries but has seen health care grow as a share of the overall economy. With a multiracial, largely female, and notably militant membership, 1199 was at labor's vanguard in the 1970s, and Hennen traces its efforts in hospitals, nursing homes, and healthcare centers in West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and Appalachian Ohio. He places these stories of mainly low-wage women workers within the framework of shake-ups in the late industrial and early postindustrial United States, relying in part on the words of Local 1199 workers and organizers themselves. Both a sophisticated account of an overlooked aspect of Appalachia's labor history and a key piece of context for Americans' current concern with the status of "essential workers," Hennen's book is a timely contribution to the fields of history and Appalachian studies and to the study of social movements.

This book analyzes the central vision of three student movements organized by different generations of Kosovo Albanian students in 1968, 1981 and 1997. By examining the dynamics of the demonstrations, the author explores the dimensions, forms and implications of student uprisings and resistance, as well as the struggles for dominance by local (Kosovo), federal (SFRY), regional (Albania and Serbia) and international actors (outside the Balkans). While these demonstrations were organized by students, the book shows that these were not necessarily academic but political, highlighting the impact that students had on society to demonstrate. It examines how the vision for "Republic" status or independence impacted the first and subsequent student movements. Moreover, due to the richness of the empirical data included, this book contributes toward further discussions on social movements, nationalism and state theories.

As the long boom of post-World War II economic expansion spread across the globe, dreams of white picket fences, democratic ideals, and endless opportunities flourished within the United States. Middle America experienced a period of affluent stability built upon a modern age of industrialization. Yet for the people of Appalachia, this new era brought economic, social, and environmental devastation, preventing many from realizing the American Dream. Some families suffered in silence; some joined a mass exodus from the mountains; while others, trapped by unemployment, poverty, illness, and injury became dependent upon welfare. As the one state most completely Appalachian, West Virginia symbolized the region's dilemma, even as it provided much of the labor and natural resources that fueled the nation's prosperity. An Appalachian Reawakening: West Virginia and the Perils of the New Machine Age, 1945-1972 recounts the difficulties the state of West Virginia faced during the post-World War II period. While documenting this turmoil, this valuable analysis also traces the efforts of the New Frontier and Great Society programs, which stimulated maximum feasible participation and lead to the ultimate rise of grass roots activities and organizations that improved life and labor in the region and undermined the notion of Appalachian fatalism.

This book represents the first comprehensive historical treatment of sociology in Russia from the mid-nineteenth century through the pre-revolutionary and Soviet eras to the present day. It sheds new light on the dramatic history of sociology in the Russian context; dramatic both in its relationship with state power, and in the large-scale societal transformations it has had to grapple with. The authors highlight several particularities including the late institutionalization of sociology in the Soviet period, the breaks in continuity between its main historical periods and the relationship between sociology and power throughout its history. This valuable work will appeal to social science and history scholars, as well as readers interested in the history of contemporary Russia.

This book presents key works of Boris Hessen, outstanding Soviet philosopher of science, available here in English for the first time. Quality translations are accompanied by an editors' introduction and annotations. Boris Hessen is known in history of science circles for his "Social and Economic Roots of Newton's Principia" presented in London (1931), which inspired new approaches in the West. As a philosopher and a physicist, he was tasked with developing a Marxist approach to science in the 1920s. He studied the history of physics to clarify issues such as reductionism and causality as they applied to new developments. With the philosophers called the "Dialecticians", his debates with the opposing "Mechanists" on the issue of emergence are still worth studying and largely ignored in the many recent works on this subject. Taken as a whole, the book is a goldmine of insights into both the foundations of physics and Soviet history.

This book looks at the different ways in which Russian historians and authors have thought about their country's first Antarctic expedition (1819-21) over the past 200 years. It considers the effects their discussions have had on Russia's Antarctic policy and may yet have on Antarctica itself. In particular, it examines the Soviet decision in 1949, in line with the cultural policies of late Stalinism, to revise the traditional view of the expedition in order to claim that it was Russian seamen that first sighted the Antarctic mainland in January 1820; this claim remains the official position in Russia today. The author illustrates, however, that the case for such a claim has never been established, and that attempts to make it damaged the work of successive Russian historians. Providing a timely assessment of Russian historiography of the Bellingshausen expedition and examining the connections between the priority claim and national policy goals, this book represents an important contribution to the history of the Antarctic.

The lower Mississippi River winds past the City of New Orleans between enormous levees and a rim of sand, mud, and trees called "the batture." On this remote and ignored piece of land thrives a humanity unique to the region-ramblers, artists, drinkers, fishers, rabbit hunters, dog walkers, sunset watchers, and refugees from Immigration, alimony, and other aspects of modern life.

Author Oliver A. Houck has frequented this place for the past twenty-five years. "Down on the Batture" describes a life, pastoral, at times marginal, but remarkably fecund and surprising. From this place he meditates on Louisiana, the state of the waterway, and its larger environs. He describes all the actors that have played lead roles on the edge of the mightiest river of the continent, and includes in his narrative plantations, pollution, murder, land grabs, keelboat brawlers, slave rebellions, the Corps of Engineers, and the oil industry.

Houck draws from his experience in New Orleans since the early 1970s in the practice and teaching of law. He has been a player in many of the issues he describes, although he does not undertake to argue them here. Instead, story by story, he uses the batture to explore the forces that have shaped and spell out the future of the region. The picture emerges of a place that---for all its tangle of undergrowth, drifting humanity, shifting dimensions in the rise and fall of floodwater---provides respite and sanctuary for values that are original to America and ever at risk from the homogenizing forces of civilization.

After the United States purchased Louisiana, many inhabitants of the new American territory believed that Louisiana would quickly be incorporated into the Union and that they would soon enjoy rights as citizens. In March of 1804, however, Congress passed the Act for the Organization of Orleans Territory, which divided Louisiana into two sections: Orleans Territory, which lay southwest of the Mississippi Territory; and the Louisiana District. Under this act, President Jefferson possessed the power to appoint the government of Orleans Territory and its thirteen-man legislative council. The act also prohibited importation of most slaves. Anxieties about their livelihoods and an unrepresentative government drove some Louisiana merchants and planters to organize protests. At first this group used petitions and newspaper editorials to demand revisions; later they pressed for reforms as a political faction within the territorial government. Outside of Louisiana, the conflict became a harbinger for the obstacles to westward expansion and clashes ahead. American politicians became alarmed about the future of American governance, territorial expansion, and the growth of slavery, all issues raised by the Orleans protesters. John Quincy Adams, for example, worried that the government established for Louisianans violated the principles of the American Revolution. Federalist Fisher Ames believed that Jefferson's power over Louisiana would allow him to establish a western Republican empire ensuring the national demise of the Federalist Party. Slaveholders and supporters of slavery in the Congress attacked the restrictions on importation of slaves, using arguments in debates with opponents of slavery that were repeated until the outbreak of the Civil War. Because they caused politicians in the Congress to reconsider how people in areas acquired by the United States should be governed and because they reinvigorated the national discussion about the future of slavery in the United States, the Orleans protesters played a significant role in influencing the shape of American territorial expansion.

This book investigates marriage and divorce in the nineteenth-century European territories of the Russian Empire. It uncovers the way a peasant community employed unsanctioned marital behaviour, such as cohabitation and bigamy, among others, in order to respond to the external factors that had an impact on the family life, including transmission of inheritance and household structure. Lithuania was part of the Tsarist Empire until 1914. This case study reveals how under often restrictive laws and policies - serfdom up to 1861, and the pervasive role of the Church, in addition to deep-rooted customary practices - women and men manage to normalize their family life. The volume is based on a wide range of archival sources and uncovers familial behaviour both from an individual and community perspectives.

Outside In presents the newest scholarship that narrates and explains the history of the United States as part of a networked transnational past. This work tells the stories of Americans who inhabited the border-crossing circuitry of people, ideas, and institutions that have made the modern world a worldly place. Forsaking manifestos of transnational history and surveys of existing scholarship for fresh research, careful attention to concrete situations and transactions, and original interpretation, the vigorous, accomplished historians whose work is collected here show how the transnational history of the United States is actually being written. Ranging from high statecraft to political ferment from below, from the history of religion to the discourse of women's rights, from the political left to the political right, from conservative businessmen to African diaspora radicals, this set of original essays narrates U.S. history in new ways, emphasizing the period from 1870 to the present. The essays in Outside In demonstrate the inadequacy of any unidirectional concept of "the U.S. and the world," although they stress the worldly forces that have shaped Americans. At the same time, these essays disrupt and complicate the very idea of simple inward and outward flows of influence, showing how Americans lived within transnational circuits featuring impacts and influences running in multiple directions. Outside In also transcends the divide between work focusing on the international system of nation-states and transnational history that treats non-state actors exclusively. The essays assembled here show how to write transnational history that takes the nation-state seriously, explaining that governments and non-state actors were never sealed off from one another in the modern world. These essays point the way toward a more concrete and fully internationalized vision of modern American history.

This book reveals the primary causes of Habsburg defeat both in the Austro-Prussian War and the First World War. The choice of offensive strategy and tactics against an enemy possessing superior weaponry in the Austro-Prussian War, and opponents with superior numbers and weapons in the Great War, resulted in catastrophe. The inferiority of the Habsburg forces in both conflicts stemmed from imprudent spending decisions during peacetime, rather than conservatism or parliamentary stinginess. The desire to restore the sunken prestige of Austria-Hungary and prove Habsburg's great power status drove the military to waste money on an expensive fleet, and choose offensive tactics to win great victories. This study shows the civil-military interaction in regard to funding and procurement decisions as well as the deep intellectual debates within the army, which refute the idea that the Habsburg military remained opposed to technology or progress

As the year 1890 wound to a close, a band of more than three hundred Lakota Sioux Indians led by Chief Big Foot made their way toward South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation to join other Lakotas seeking peace. Fearing that Big Foot's band was headed instead to join "hostile" Lakotas, U.S. troops surrounded the group on Wounded Knee Creek. Tensions mounted, and on the morning of December 29, as the Lakotas prepared to give up their arms, disaster struck. Accounts vary on what triggered the violence as Indians and soldiers unleashed thunderous gunfire at each other, but the consequences were horrific: some 200 innocent Lakota men, women, and children were slaughtered. "American Carnage--"the first comprehensive account of Wounded Knee to appear in more than fifty years--explores the complex events preceding the tragedy, the killings, and their troubled legacy.

In this gripping tale, Jerome A. Greene--renowned specialist on the Indian wars--explores why the bloody engagement happened and demonstrates how it became a brutal massacre. Drawing on a wealth of sources, including previously unknown testimonies, Greene examines the events from both Native and non-Native perspectives, explaining the significance of treaties, white settlement, political disputes, and the Ghost Dance as influential factors in what eventually took place. He addresses controversial questions: Was the action premeditated? Was the Seventh Cavalry motivated by revenge after its humiliating defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn? Should soldiers have received Medals of Honor? He also recounts the futile efforts of Lakota survivors and their descendants to gain recognition for their terrible losses.

Epic in scope and poignant in its recounting of human suffering, "American Carnage" presents the reality--and denial--of our nation's last frontier massacre. It will leave an indelible mark on our understanding of American history.

This book is a study of the legal reckoning with the crimes of the Latvian Auxiliary Security Police and its political dimensions in the Soviet Union, West and East Germany, and the United States in the context of the Cold War. Decades of work by prosecutors have established the facts of Latvian collaboration with the Nazis during the Holocaust. No group made a deeper mark in the annals of atrocity than the men of the so-called 'Arajs Kommando' and their leader, Viktors Arajs, who killed tens of thousands of Jews on Latvian soil and participated in every aspect of the 'Holocaust by Bullets.' This study also has significance for coming to terms with Latvia's encounter with Nazism - a process that was stunted and distorted by Latvia's domination by the USSR until 1991. Examining the country's most notorious killers, their fates on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and contemporary Latvians' responses in different political contexts, this volume is a record of the earliest phases of this process, which must now continue and to which this book contributes.