Challenging the Westphalian view of international relations, which focuses on the sovereignty of states and the inevitable potential for conflict, the authors from the Borderlands Study Group reconceive borders as capillaries enabling the flow of material, cultural, and social benefits through local communities, nation-states, and entire regions. By emphasizing local agency and regional interdependencies, this metaphor reconfigures current narratives about the China India border and opens a new perspective on the long history of the Silk Roads, the modern BCIM Initiative, and dam construction along the Nu River in China and the Teesta River in India.
Together, the authors show that positive interaction among people on both sides of a border generates larger, cross-border communities, which can pressure for cooperation and development. India China offers the hope that people divided by arbitrary geo-political boundaries can circumvent race, gender, class, religion, and other social barriers, to form more inclusive institutions and forms of governance.
A 2012 CHOICE “Outstanding Academic Title“
A new historical approach to Indian English literature
Mary Ellis Gibson shows that poetry, not fiction, was the dominant literary genre of Indian writing in English until 1860 and that poetry written in colonial situations can tell us as much or even more about figuration, multilingual literacies, and histories of nationalism than novels can. Gibson re-creates the historical webs of affiliation and resistance that were experienced by writers in colonial India—writers of British, Indian, and mixed ethnicities.
Advancing new theoretical and historical paradigms for reading colonial literatures, Indian Angles makes accessible many writers heretofore neglected or virtually unknown. Gibson recovers texts by British women, by nonelite British men, and by persons who would, in the nineteenth century, have been called Eurasian. Her work traces the mutually constitutive history of English-language poets from Sir William Jones to Toru Dutt and Rabindranath Tagore. Drawing on contemporary postcolonial theory, her work also provides new ways of thinking about British internal colonialism as its results were exported to South Asia.
In lucid and accessible prose, Gibson presents a new theoretical approach to colonial and postcolonial literatures.
The rich and diverse cultures of India are represented in exquisite detail in this book, which begins with a simple question: what is Indian art? The answer is as complex as the history of a nation that is only sixty years old and a civilization that is one of the oldest in the world. The vocabulary of Indian art is syncretic and is shaped by a variety of religious influences such as Hindu, Muslim, and Buddhist. Persian, Turkish, Central Asian, Chinese, Japanese, as well as a host of European artistic traditions have also left their imprint on India. And the stunning topography of the subcontinent--the majestic Himalayas in the north, the dramatic deserts of Rajasthan, the fertile Gangetic plain, a southern coastline washed by the waves of the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Bay of Bengal--continues to shape the Indian artistic imagination.
Each thematically organized chapter in this book delves into such topics as religion and myth, epics, festivals, courtly and village life, and the natural world. The gorgeous close-ups of paintings, textiles, and sculptures in metal, ivory, and wood illuminate the aesthetics and workmanship, as well as recurrent motifs that are distinctly Indian. The objects are all part of the extraordinary Indian Art collection in the British Museum. The beauty of the smallest details are magnified and contextualized through the accompanying essays written by an expert on Indian art and culture.
In 1758 Peter Williamson appeared on the streets of Aberdeen, Scotland, dressed as a Native American and telling a remarkable tale. He claimed that as a young boy he had been kidnapped from the city and sold into slavery in America. In performances and in a printed narrative he peddled to his audiences, Williamson described his tribulations as an indentured servant, Indian captive, soldier, and prisoner of war. Aberdeen’s magistrates called him a liar and banished him from the city, but Williamson defended his story.
Separating fact from fiction, Timothy J. Shannon explains what Williamson’s tale says about how working people of eighteenth-century Britain, so often depicted as victims of empire, found ways to create lives and exploit opportunities within it. Exiled from Aberdeen, Williamson settled in Edinburgh, where he cultivated enduring celebrity as the self-proclaimed “king of the Indians.” His performances and publications capitalized on the curiosity the Seven Years’ War had ignited among the public for news and information about America and its native inhabitants. As a coffeehouse proprietor and printer, he gave audiences a plebeian perspective on Britain’s rise to imperial power in North America.
Indian Captive, Indian King is a history of empire from the bottom up, showing how Williamson’s American odyssey illuminates the real-life experiences of everyday people on the margins of the British Empire and how those experiences, when repackaged in travel narratives and captivity tales, shaped popular perceptions about the empire’s racial and cultural geography.
Victoria Bricker shows that "history" sometimes rests on mythological foundations and that "myth" can contain valid historical information. Her book, which is a highly original critique of postconquest historiography about the Maya, challenges major assumptions about the relationship between myth and history implicit in structuralist interpretations. The focus of the book is ethnic conflict, a theme that pervades Maya folklore and is also well documented historically.
The book begins with the Spanish conquest of the Maya. In chapters on the postconquest history of the Maya, five ethnic conflicts are treated in depth: the Cancuc revolt of 1712, the Quisteil uprising of 1761, the Totonicapan rebellion of 1820, the Caste War of Yucatan (1847-1901), and the Chamulan uprising in 1869. Analytical chapters consider the relationship between historical events and modern folklore about ethnic conflict. Bricker demonstrates that myths and rituals emphasize structure at the expense of temporal and geographical provenience, treating events separated by centuries or thousands of miles as equivalent and interchangeable.
An unexpected result of Bricker's research is the finding that many seemingly aboriginal elements in Maya folklore are actually of postconquest origin, and she shows that it is possible to determine precisely when and, more important, why they become part of myth and ritual. Furthermore, she finds that the patterning of the accretion of events in folklore over time provides clues to the function, or meaning, of myth and ritual for the Maya.
Bricker has made use of many unpublished documents in Spanish, English, and Maya, as well as standard synthetic historical works. The appendices contain extensive samples of the oral traditions that are explained by her analysis.
Illustrating her argument with images culled from late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century publications, Hutchinson revises the standard history of the mainstream interest in Native American material culture as “art.” While many locate the development of this cross-cultural interest in the Southwest after the First World War, Hutchinson reveals that it began earlier and spread across the nation from west to east and from reservation to metropolis. She demonstrates that artists, teachers, and critics associated with the development of American modernism, including Arthur Wesley Dow and Gertrude Käsebier, were inspired by Native art. Native artists were also able to achieve some recognition as modern artists, as Hutchinson shows through her discussion of the Winnebago painter and educator Angel DeCora. By taking a transcultural approach, Hutchinson transforms our understanding of the role of Native Americans in modernist culture.
A commercial company established in 1600 to monopolize trade between England and the Far East, the East India Company grew to govern an Indian empire. Exploring the relationship between power and knowledge in European engagement with Asia, Indian Ink examines the Company at work and reveals how writing and print shaped authority on a global scale in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Tracing the history of the Company from its first tentative trading voyages in the early seventeenth century to the foundation of an empire in Bengal in the late eighteenth century, Miles Ogborn takes readers into the scriptoria, ships, offices, print shops, coffeehouses, and palaces to investigate the forms of writing needed to exert power and extract profit in the mercantile and imperial worlds. Interpreting the making and use of a variety of forms of writing in script and print, Ogborn argues that material and political circumstances always undermined attempts at domination through the power of the written word.
Navigating the juncture of imperial history and the history of the book, Indian Ink uncovers the intellectual and political legacies of early modern trade and empire and charts a new understanding of the geography of print culture.
Containing advice on curing rattlesnake bites with amethysts and making saltpeter for gunpowder from concentrated human urine, The Indian Militia is a manual in four parts, the first of which outlines the ideal qualities of the militia commander. Addressing the organization and outfitting of conquest expeditions, Book Two includes extended discussions of arms and medicine. Book Three covers the proper behavior of soldiers, providing advice on marching through peaceful and bellicose territories, crossing rivers, bivouacking in foul weather, and carrying out night raids and ambushes. Book Four deals with peacemaking, town-founding, and the proper treatment of conquered peoples. Appended to these four sections is a brief geographical description of all of Spanish America, with special emphasis on the indigenous peoples of New Granada (roughly modern-day Colombia), followed by a short guide to the southern coasts and heavens. This first English-language edition of The Indian Militia includes an extensive introduction, a posthumous report on Vargas Machuca’s military service, and a selection from his unpublished attack on the writings of Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas.
From origin stories to contemporary struggles over treaty rights and sovereignty issues, Indian Nations of Wisconsin explores Wisconsin's rich Native tradition. This unique volume—based on the historical perspectives of the state’s Native peoples—includes compact tribal histories of the Ojibwe, Potawatomi, Oneida, Menominee, Mohican, Ho-Chunk, and Brothertown Indians. Author Patty Loew focuses on oral tradition—stories, songs, the recorded words of Indian treaty negotiators, and interviews—along with other untapped Native sources, such as tribal newspapers, to present a distinctly different view of history. Lavishly illustrated with maps and photographs, Indian Nations of Wisconsin is indispensable to anyone interested in the region's history and its Native peoples.
The first edition of Indian Nations of Wisconsin: Histories of Endurance and Renewal, won the Wisconsin Library Association's 2002 Outstanding Book Award.
The Indian Ocean, with its critical routes for global commerce, is a potentially volatile location for geopolitical strife. Even as the region’s role in the international economy and as a highway to conflict zones increases, the US has failed to advance a coherent strategy for protecting its interests in the Indian Ocean or for managing complex diplomatic relationships across the region. The Indian Ocean and US Grand Strategy presents a range of viewpoints about whether and how the US should alter its diplomatic and military strategies for this region.
Contributors examine US interests in the Indian Ocean, assess the relative critical importance or imperiled nature of these interests, and propose solutions for American strategy ranging from minimal change to maximum engagement. The book concludes with a comparative assessment of these options and a discussion of their implications for US policymakers. This volume’s perspectives and analysis of the Indian Ocean region will be valued by scholars and students of US foreign policy, South Asia, and security studies as well as by diplomats, military officers, and other practitioners.
This book provides an introduction to the main schools of Indian philosophy within both the Hindu and Buddhist traditions. Richard King analyzes the schools' different doctrines and compares their approaches to specific philosophical topics — ontology, epistemology, perception, consciousness, and creation and causality.
While King's main focus is on the ideas as professed by the major schools of thought, he also takes into account the important contributions made by individual thinkers. Among these are Bhartrhari, who helped introduce linguistic analysis into Indian philosophy; Nagarjuna, the reputed founder of the Mahayana or "Middle Way" school; and Asanga, the believed founder of the Yogacara or "Practice of Yoga" school.
This is the first introduction to Indian philosophy written for a western audience to assess Indian thought in its own context and to examine its relationship with the West. King discusses the nature of philosophy in general, examining the shifting usage of the term throughout history. He examines western perceptions of Indian philosophy, exploring the reasons why it has not made substantial inroads into western intellectual discourse.
King argues that western scholars will remain tied to a Eurocentric perspective as long as they continue to ignore the possibility of philosophical thought "East of the Suez." This, he argues, highlights the need for a post-colonial and global approach to philosophy.
Written in a clear and accessible style, the book can be used for courses in religion, theology, and philosophy.
"What is the 'meaning' of names like Coosa and Tallapoosa? Who named the Alabama and Tombigbee and Tennessee rivers? How are Cheaha and Conecuh and Talladega pronounced? How did Opelika and Tuscaloosa get their names? Questions like these, which are asked by laymen as well as by historians, geographers, and students of the English language, can be answered only by study of the origins and history of the Indian names that dot the map of Alabama.—from the Foreword
Originally published by Professor Read in 1937, this volume was revised, updated, and annotated in 1984 by James B. McMillan and remains the single best compedium on the topic.
A thorough anthropological study of a distinct religious cult of the Indian tribes of the Pacific Northwest. The book traces the Shaker cult’s development, its ceremonies, ritual elements, faiths, and doctrine.
Samar Sinha presents pioneering research into the grammatical properties of Indian Sign Language (ISL), a language used by members of the Deaf community in India. This detailed and well-illustrated study describes the grammar of ISL and is supplemented by comparative and theoretical analyses in the core areas of sublexical structure, morphology, and syntax. Sinha offers a field-based, comprehensive analysis that covers topics such as
o sign formation parameters
o syllable structure
o sonority hierarchy
o semantics of space
o pluralization strategies
o phi-features
o indexing and localization
o agreement
o word order
He provides a description of the Indian Deaf community that serves to frame his analysis of ISL and highlights the need for greater awareness and acknowledgment of the language and its users. The lack of research on ISL in Indian academia has slowed efforts toward the standardization of ISL and the development of pedagogical materials. This work adds to the growing understanding of natural human language in general and ISL in particular. It also contributes to the empowerment of the Deaf community in India and will strengthen the efforts carried out by d/Deaf activists and researchers.
According to an early 1990s study, 95 percent of what college students know about Native Americans was acquired through the media, leading to widespread misunderstandings of First Nations peoples. Sierra Adare contends that negative "Indian" stereotypes do physical, mental, emotional, and financial harm to First Nations individuals.
At its core, this book is a social study whose purpose is to explore the responses of First Nations peoples to representative "Indian" stereotypes portrayed within the TV science fiction genre. Participants in Adare's study viewed episodes from My Favorite Martian, Star Trek, Star Trek: Voyager, Quantum Leap, The Adventures of Superman, and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Reactions by viewers range from optimism to a deep-rooted sadness. The strongest responses came after viewing a Superman episode's depiction of an "evil medicine man" who uses a ceremonial pipe to kill a warrior. The significance of First Nations peoples' responses and reactions are both surprising and profound. After publication of "Indian" Stereotypes in TV Science Fiction, ignorance can no longer be used as an excuse for Hollywood's irresponsible depiction of First Nations peoples' culture, traditions, elders, religious beliefs, and sacred objects.
Returning to Nova Scotia every summer contributes to the illusion of smooth continuance, each summer not the first thread in a new fabric but another button on a cardigan, perhaps looser than buttons below but still familiar and comfortable. Every summer the songs of white-throated sparrows bounce from scrub like novelty tunes from the fifties. Early in the morning ravens grind woodenly. . . . No matter how slowly I jog, on the headland butterflies spring from my feet in clumps, first azures and orange crescents, then wood nymphs, and finally over the lowlands near the Beaver River outlet cabbage whites spiraling, dizzy with mating.
Indian Summer is the newest collection of personal essays by Sam Pickering. In typical Pickering fashion, he seeks to capture the gift of living. He brings to the page again his family, students, and a wealth of country characters who live in places that exist only in his imagination and who wander through the stories he tells.
The first work of fiction published in the MSU Press American Indian Studies Series, Indian Summers concerns issues of identity for Native Americans. Set against the backdrop of a contemporary reservation that has had its own losses to the dominant culture—a third of its total land mass taken earlier in the century for a New York State water reservoir, its only religious structures Christian churches—Indian Summers introduces these identity conflicts through the lives and circumstances of its major characters. This is a time when belonging to a tribe is difficult, when dominant societal forces encourage either the acts of abandoning a perceived anachronistic lifestyle or of embracing one of a number of simplistic, prescribed, false identities: warrior, environmentalist, crystal-carrying shaman. None of these options is real for the individuals who populate these pockets of different—not alternative—societies. The people who live these lives do not explore alternatives, nor do they necessarily have the desire to—inextricably entwined as they are with their families, culture, history, and land.
The anonymous pre-Gaṅgeśa Navya-Nyāya treatise Upādhidarpaṇa (UD) deals exclusively with the so-called upādhi, a key concept in the Navya-Nyāya theory of inference. The present volume contains the first published edition and translation of the only extant manuscript of the UD. Numerous notes have been added to the translation in order to elucidate the contents and to give a clue to the historical context, as regards authors, works, and philosophical doctrines that are referenced in the UD. Moreover, an extensive introductory chapter provides new insights into relations between the Navya-Nyāya doctrine of upādhi and modern logical theories such as John L. Pollock’s theory of defeasible reasoning and property theories, especially property adaptations of well-founded and non-well-founded set theories.
A very intriguing aspect of the UD is the author’s attempt to define all candidate upādhis by means of a “general defining characteristic” (sāmānyalakṣaṇa) which is a property of itself. He advocates a non-well-founded property concept and distances himself from what is communis opinio in Nyāya, viz. that self-dependence (ātmāśraya) is a kind of absurdity. No such discussion concerning the problem of foundation in the Navya-Nyāya logic of property and location is to be found in the later Upādhivāda of Gaṅgeśa’s Tattavacintāmaṇi.
In Indian Voices, Alison Owings takes readers on a fresh journey across America, east to west, north to south, and around again. Owings's most recent oral history—engagingly written in a style that entertains and informs—documents what Native Americans say about themselves, their daily lives, and the world around them.
Young and old from many tribal nations speak with candor, insight, and (unknown to many non-Natives) humor about what it is like to be a Native American in the twenty-first century. Through intimate interviews many also express their thoughts about the sometimes staggeringly ignorant, if often well-meaning, non-Natives they encounter—some who do not realize Native Americans still exist, much less that they speak English, have cell phones, use the Internet, and might attend powwows and power lunches.
Indian Voices, an inspiring and important contribution to the literature about the original Americans, will make every reader rethink the past—and present—of the United States.
A Chronicle of the Longest Military Action in American History
"Splendid. . . .a book that has the rare quality of being both an excellent reference work and a pleasure to read."—Wall Street Journal
"As complete and balanced an overview of nearly a century of fighting between the U.S. Army and dozens of Indian nations as there is." —Martin Naparsteck, Salt Lake Tribune
"Excellent. . . . Indian Wars is an outstanding introduction to the 'longest campaign ever waged by any of the United States armed forces.' It also has the virtue of speaking eloquently to the past while offering valuable guidance for the future."—Military.com
The Indian wars remain the most misunderstood campaign ever waged by the U. S. Army. From the first sustained skirmishes west of the Mississippi River in the 1850s to the sweeping clashes of hundreds of soldiers and warriors along the upper plains decades later, these wars consumed most of the active duty resources of the army for the greater part of the nineteenth century and resulted in the disruption of nearly all of the native cultures in the West. Yet the popular understanding of the Indian wars is marred by stereotypes and misinformation as well as a tendency to view these individual wars—the battles against the Sioux, the Cheyenne, the Nez Perce, the Apache, and other groups—as distinct incidents rather than parts of a single overarching campaign. Dispelling notions that American Indians were simply attempting to stop encroachment on their homelands or that they shared common views on how to approach the Europeans, Bill Yenne explains in Indian Wars: The Campaign for the American West, that these wars, fought for more than five decades across a landscape the size of continental Europe, were part of a general long-term strategy by the U. S. Army to control the West as well as extensions of conflicts among native peoples that predated European contact.
Complete with a general history of Indian and European relations from the earliest encounters to the opening of the west, and featuring legendary figures from both sides, including Crazy Horse, Chief Joseph, Sitting Bull, Geronimo, George Custer, Kit Carson, and George Crook, Indian Wars allows the reader to better understand the sequence of events that transformed the West and helped define the American temperament.Representations of Indian economic life have played an integral role in discourses about poverty, social policy, and cultural difference but have received surprisingly little attention. Daniel Usner dismantles ideological characterizations of Indian livelihood to reveal the intricacy of economic adaptations in American Indian history.
Officials, reformers, anthropologists, and artists produced images that exacerbated Indians’ economic uncertainty and vulnerability. From Jeffersonian agrarianism to Jazz Age primitivism, European American ideologies not only obscured Indian struggles for survival but also operated as obstacles to their success. Diversification and itinerancy became economic strategies for many Indians, but were generally maligned in the early United States. Indians repeatedly found themselves working in spaces that reinforced misrepresentation and exploitation. Taking advantage of narrow economic opportunities often meant risking cultural integrity and personal dignity: while sales of baskets made by Louisiana Indian women contributed to their identity and community, it encouraged white perceptions of passivity and dependence. When non-Indian consumption of Indian culture emerged in the early twentieth century, even this friendlier market posed challenges to Indian labor and enterprise. The consequences of this dilemma persist today.
Usner reveals that Indian engagement with commerce has consistently defied the narrow choices that observers insisted upon seeing.
Indiana’s War is a primary source collection featuring the writings of Indiana’s citizens during the Civil War era. Using private letters, official records, newspaper articles, and other original sources, the volume presents the varied experiences of Indiana’s participants in the war both on the battlefield and on the home front. Starting in the 1850s, the documents show the sharp political divisions over issues such as slavery, race, and secession in Indiana, divisions that boiled over into extraordinary strife and violence in the state during the rebellion. This conflict touched all levels and members of society, including men, women, and children, whites and African Americans, native-born citizens and immigrants, farmers and city and town dwellers.
Collecting the writings of Indiana’s peoples on a wide range of issues, chapters focus on the politics of race prior to the war, the secession crisis, war fever in 1861, the experiences of soldiers at the front, homefront hardships, political conflict between partisan foes and civil and military authorities, reactions to the Emancipation Proclamation, and antiwar dissent, violence, and conspiracy.
Indiana’s War is an excellent accompanying primary source text for undergraduate and graduate courses on the American Civil War. It documents the experiences of Indiana’s citizens, from the African American soldier to the antiwar dissenter, from the prewar politician to the postwar veteran, from the battle-scarred soldier to the impoverished soldier’s wife, all showing the harsh realities of the war.
Schiwy argues that instead of solely creating entertainment through their work indigenous media activists are building communication networks that encourage interaction between diverse cultures. As a result, mainstream images are retooled, permitting communities to strengthen their cultures and express their own visions of development and modernization. Indianizing Film encourages readers to consider how indigenous media contributes to a wider understanding of decolonization and anticolonial study against the universal backdrop of the twenty-first century.
This expanded edition of Indians and Archaeology of Missouri gives an excellent introduction to the cultural development of Missouri’s Indians during the past twelve thousand years. Providing a new chapter on the Hunter Foragers of the Dalton period and substantial revision of other chapters to incorporate recent discoveries, the Chapmans present knowledge based upon decades of experience with archaeological excavations in an understandable and fascinating form.
The first edition of Indians and Archaeology of Missouri has been recognized in Missouri and nationally as one of the best books of its kind. The Missouri Historical Review called it “simply indispensable.” The Plains Anthropologist added similar praise: “Clearly written and exceptionally well illustrated…it is the answer to the amateur’s prayers.” Archaeology described it as “a boon to Missouri’s many amateur archaeologists, a useful source of information for professionals and interesting reading for the layman.”
Becker explains how rural laborers and urban activists worked together in Ecuador, merging ethnic and class-based struggles for social justice. Socialists were often the first to defend Indigenous languages, cultures, and social organizations. They introduced rural activists to new tactics, including demonstrations and strikes. Drawing on leftist influences, Indigenous peoples became adept at reacting to immediate, local forms of exploitation while at the same time addressing broader underlying structural inequities. Through an examination of strike activity in the 1930s, the establishment of a national-level Ecuadorian Federation of Indians in 1944, and agitation for agrarian reform in the 1960s, Becker shows that the history of Indigenous mobilizations in Ecuador is longer and deeper than many contemporary observers have recognized.
Scholars have long assumed that Spanish rule remained largely undisputed in Peru between the 1570s and 1780s, but educated elite Indians and mestizos challenged the legitimacy of Spanish rule, criticized colonial injustice and exclusion, and articulated the ideas that would later be embraced in the Great Rebellion in 1781. Their movement extended across the Atlantic as the scholars visited the seat of the Spanish empire to negotiate with the king and his advisors for social reform, lobbied diverse networks of supporters in Madrid and Peru, and struggled for admission to religious orders, schools and universities, and positions in ecclesiastic and civil administration.
Indians and Mestizos in the "Lettered City" explores how scholars contributed to social change and transformation of colonial culture through legal, cultural, and political activism, and how, ultimately, their significant colonial critiques and campaigns redefined colonial public life and discourse. It will be of interest to scholars and students of colonial history, colonial literature, Hispanic studies, and Latin American studies.
Indian trader, rancher, harbor developer, oil impresario—these are the many worlds of one of the least chronicled but most fascinating characters of the American West. In the early, bustling years of the frontier, a brazen young man named William McDole Lee moved from Wisconsin to Kansas and then to Texas to forge a life for himself. Becoming a driving entrepreneurial force in Texas's development, Lee soon garnered the alliances and resources necessary to shape the financial destinies of disparate groups throughout the state. His story is expertly told in Donald F. Schofield's Indians, Cattle, Ships, and Oil.
Beginning in 1869 as a trader to the southern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes and fort provisioner to troops garrisoned at Camp Supply, Indian Territory, Lee gained a partner and amassed a fortune in short order from trading buffalo hides and robes. Vast herds of buffalo grazing on the southern plains were killed largely on his order. When buffalo were no longer a profitable commodity, Lee tackled his next challenge—the cattle trade.
He began with herds branded LR that grazed on pastures near Fort Supply. Then came his LE herd in the Texas Panhandle. Another partnership, with noted cattle rancher Lucien Scott, resulted in the vast LS ranch, one of the most successful operations of its day. Lee even introduced a new breed of cattle, the Aberdeen-Angus, to the western range. But as his partnership faded, Lee moved on to his next undertaking—the development of Texas' first deep-water harbor.
In 1888, Lee and other financiers put up one million dollars to finance a dream: opening international trade from the waters of the Gulf of Mexico to the mainland at the mouth of the Brazos River. Their Brazos River Channel and Dock Company was to construct, own, and operate a deep-water harbor at Velasco, with a railroad link to Houston. Though threats of financial disaster loomed large, the Velasco facility was to welcome, in its day, tugs, barges, and three-masted schooners and to provide impetus for Houston's boom. Yet with success, the mercurial Lee turned to yet another challenge—oil.
Starting still another partnership, Lee committed himself to prospecting for oil on the West Columbia Ridge in Brazoria County. Lee and crew struck oil in 1907, developing one of the first producing wells of Brazoria County, but inadequate drilling equipment hampered further fruitful exploration. Lee moved his rigs to the famed Spindletop, where he perfected the technique of shallow drilling. Though spectacular success in the oil business eluded him, Lee's accomplishments set him squarely among the great entrepreneurs of the Texas oil industry.
Lee's exploits led him to roles in some of the most dramatic moments in Texas and the West—Indian uprisings, buffalo hunts, political scandals, cowboy strikes and shoot-outs, railroad promotions, oil-well blow-outs and gushers. The people he encountered are the famous and infamous of western history: Cheyenne Chief Little Robe and the outlaw "Hurricane Bill" Martin; Indian Agent John D. Miles and Major General John Pope; outlaws Tom Harris and William Bonney, and Sheriff Pat Garrett. Altogether, Lee's biography vividly shows one man's manipulation of people and events during the settlement of the American frontier.
Working as merchants, skilled tradesmen, clerks, lawyers, and journalists, Indians formed the economic and administrative middle class in colonial Kenya. In general, they were wealthier than Africans, but were denied the political and economic privileges that Europeans enjoyed. Moreover, despite their relative prosperity, Indians were precariously positioned in Kenya. Africans usually viewed them as outsiders, and Europeans largely considered them subservient. Indians demanded recognition on their own terms. Indians in Kenya chronicles the competing, often contradictory, strategies by which the South Asian diaspora sought a political voice in Kenya from the beginning of colonial rule in the late 1890s to independence in the 1960s.
Indians’ intellectual, economic, and political connections with South Asia shaped their understanding of their lives in Kenya. Sana Aiyar investigates how the many strands of Indians’ diasporic identity influenced Kenya’s political leadership, from claiming partnership with Europeans in their mission to colonize and “civilize” East Africa to successful collaborations with Africans to battle for racial equality, including during the Mau Mau Rebellion. She also explores how the hierarchical structures of colonial governance, the material inequalities between Indians and Africans, and the racialized political discourses that flourished in both colonial and postcolonial Kenya limited the success of alliances across racial and class lines. Aiyar demonstrates that only by examining the ties that bound Indians to worlds on both sides of the Indian Ocean can we understand how Kenya came to terms with its South Asian minority.
During his invasion of Creek Indian territory in 1813, future U.S. president Andrew Jackson discovered a Creek infant orphaned by his troops. Moved by an “unusual sympathy,” Jackson sent the child to be adopted into his Tennessee plantation household. Through the stories of nearly a dozen white adopters, adopted Indian children, and their Native parents, Dawn Peterson opens a window onto the forgotten history of adoption in early nineteenth-century America. Indians in the Family shows the important role that adoption played in efforts to subdue Native peoples in the name of nation-building.
As the United States aggressively expanded into Indian territories between 1790 and 1830, government officials stressed the importance of assimilating Native peoples into what they styled the United States’ “national family.” White households who adopted Indians—especially slaveholding Southern planters influenced by leaders such as Jackson—saw themselves as part of this expansionist project. They hoped to inculcate in their young charges U.S. attitudes toward private property, patriarchal family, and racial hierarchy.
U.S. whites were not the only ones driving this process. Choctaw, Creek, and Chickasaw families sought to place their sons in white households, to be educated in the ways of U.S. governance and political economy. But there were unintended consequences for all concerned. As adults, these adopted Indians used their educations to thwart U.S. federal claims to their homelands, setting the stage for the political struggles that would culminate in the Indian Removal Act of 1830.
The people of Mexquitic, a town in the state of San Luis Potosí in rural northeastern Mexico, have redefined their sense of identity from "Indian" to "Mexican" over the last two centuries. In this ethnographic and historical study of Mexquitic, David Frye explores why and how this transformation occurred, thereby increasing our understanding of the cultural creation of "Indianness" throughout the Americas.
Frye focuses on the local embodiments of national and regional processes that have transformed rural "Indians" into modern "Mexicans": parish priests, who always arrive with personal agendas in addition to their common ideological baggage; local haciendas; and local and regional representatives of royal and later of national power and control. He looks especially at the people of Mexquitic themselves, letting their own words describe the struggles they have endured while constructing their particular corner of Mexican national identity.
This ethnography, the first for any town in northeastern Mexico, adds substantially to our knowledge of the forces that have rendered "Indians" almost invisible to European-origin peoples from the fifteenth century up to today. It will be important reading for a wide audience not only in anthropology and Latin American studies but also among the growing body of general readers interested in the multicultural heritage of the Americas.
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