Ray Didinger, like every die-hard Eagles fan, has been waiting since the 1960 NFL Title for the Birds to win the Super Bowl. In this “Champions Edition” of The Eagles Encyclopedia, beloved Eagles commentator Didinger celebrates his team and their remarkable, against-all-odds season that ended at Super Bowl LII, where they claimed victory over the Patriots in Minnesota.
Didinger updates his best-selling book The Eagles Encyclopedia with the departure of Coach Chip Kelly and the dawn of the Doug Pederson era. He provides a new chapter on the 2017–18 season and postseason. And he includes dozens of new player, coach, and front-office profiles as well as Hall of Fame updates on 2018 inductees Brian Dawkins and Terrell Owens.
But wait, there’s more!
TheEagles Encyclopedia: Champions Edition is more than a keepsake of a championship season. It is a book about a city and a team and the emotion that binds them.
The half-century between 1880 and 1930 saw rampant growth in many American cities and an equally rapid movement of women into the work force. In Los Angeles, the city not only grew from a dusty cow town to a major American metropolis but also offered its residents myriad new opportunities and challenges.Earning Power examines the role that women played in this growth as they attempted to make their financial way in a rapidly changing world. Los Angeles during these years was one of the most ethnically diverse and gender-balanced American cities. Moreover, its accelerated urban growth generated a great deal of economic, social, and political instability. In Earning Power, author Eileen V. Wallis examines how women negotiated issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and class to gain access to professions and skilled work in Los Angeles. She also discusses the contributions they made to the region’s history as political and social players, employers and employees, and as members of families. Wallis reveals how the lives of women in the urban West differed in many ways from those of their sisters in more established eastern cities. She finds that the experiences of women workers force us to reconsider many assumptions about the nature of Los Angeles’s economy, as well as about the ways women participated in it. The book also considers how Angelenos responded to the larger national social debate about women’s work and the ways that American society would have to change in order to accommodate working women. Earning Power is a major contribution to our understanding of labor in the urban West during this transformative period and of the crucial role that women played in shaping western cities, economies, society, and politics.
A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication
This comprehensive compilation of Moore's archaeological publications on eastern Florida will prove an invaluable primary resource for Florida archaeologists.
Clarence B. Moore (1852-1936), a wealthy Philadelphia socialite, paper company heir, and photographer made the archaeology of the Southeast his passion beginning in the 1870s. This volume collects 17 of Moore's publications on East Florida, originally published between 1892 and 1903. These invaluable and copiously illustrated works document the results of Moore's numerous archaeological expeditions along Florida's eastern coastline from the Georgia border to Lake Okeechobee and focus primarily on sites along the St. Johns River and its tributaries. Moore's archaeological work in East Florida was arguably his best and most thorough research from a modern perspective.
Jeffrey Mitchem's introduction to this volume describes and analyzes Moore's work in East Florida, summarizes what we know about the sites Moore investigated, and surveys subsequent archaeological work conducted in this area since Moore's expeditions. Mitchem's introduction highlights the significance of Moore's work on the shell heaps along the St. Johns River. It led to the earliest recorded instance of a researcher noting the changes in pottery styles in the region, a major key to establishing chronologies.In 1894, Moore wrote of his hope "that the archaeology of Florida may be redeemed from the obscurity that has hitherto characterized it." Over a century later, this Press has aimed to fulfill Moore's wish by reprinting this and other collections of his archaeological publications.
A collection of essays in which a dozen historians and novelists present their impressions and concerns about "end of the century Nevada." Human expectations and illusions are seen as a backdrop for today's Nevada as a new human frontier. As an overview of Nevada society, this study deals with culture as well as economics, with tradition as well as rapid population growth. The essayists inquire whether the friction between acquisition and preservation, quick wealth and refined sensitivity, will build a more humane and enlightened society.
In 1950 a million Texans—more than a tenth of the entire population of the state—lived in a region where one family in every two earned less than $2,000 a year. Composing that region are the thirty-two counties of northeastern Texas in which the lumber industry is concentrated. In eleven of these counties, 70 percent of family incomes were less than $2,000.
Until 1930 the Texas lumber industry furnished employment for more workers than any other manufacturing in the state. Though displaced in that year by oil refining, it still ranks near the top in the number of workers it hires. The aim of this study is to show how these people whose economic life has been dominated by a single industry have fared for eighty years in comparison with their fellow Texans and with lumber workers in the Pacific Northwest and the Lakes states.
Texas lumber workers have always been in many ways a peculiar people, conditioned by their historical roots, by isolation from the mainstream of national life, and by the deeply rural nature of their environment. A typical group portrait would show two of each three persons to be adult white males. One of three would be African American. It would not show any women. Here and there a face would bear the marks of alien birth. Most of the figures, however, would be natives not only of America but of East Texas.
In family background, in work experience, and in social and economic environment these people have been uniquely homogeneous. In the early 1950s the Congressional Committee on the Economic Report of the President designated the area as one of “deep poverty” and pinpointed it as one which had failed notably to reach the level of living achieved by the state and the nation. Its economic status has been lower than that of any other group in Texas except household servants, and its education level has been well below that of the state and nation and increasingly below the level of acceptance in any jobs other than those requiring a minimum of training and competence. The immediate past has shown not only no improvement but a positive deterioration.
Drawing upon personal investigation and state and federal reports, the author has put the contemporary situation in a historical setting. Her delineation is principally in terms of figures that weave a social fabric from which definite patterns emerge—insecure wages, illiteracy and inefficient production, unsuccessful attempts to achieve effective organization. Though the book is directed primarily toward those who should feel concern at its revelations, it also suggests a wealth of untapped sources for the ethnographer and the folklorist.
A natural division between the eastern and western slopes of the San Juans is the north-south line that runs approximately through Lake City, south of the crossing of the Piedra River by US Highway 160. In this super guidebook, twenty-seven contributors--all experts in their fields--artfully bring the geology, hydrology, animal and plant life, human histories, and travel routes of these eastern slopes to life. Designed to inform researchers, educators, and students about the region's complex systems, The Eastern San Juan Mountains also serves as an informative guidebook to accompany visitors along their travels on the Silver Thread National Scenic Byway, which stretches between South Fork and Lake City.
The Eastern San Juan Mountains deserves a place next to The Western San Juan Mountains on the bookshelf of every naturalist, researcher, resident, educator, student, and tourist seeking a greater understanding of this marvelous place and its history.
The year is 1915, and Benjamin Corvet, founder of the ship-owning firm Corvet, Sherrill and Spearman, suddenly disappears, sparking events and questions that baffle even those who are close to him.
Constance Sherrill, an attractive, sheltered young woman, feels strangely responsible for what may have happened to him---her father's best friend and coworker. Alan Conrad arrives in Chicago searching for his identity and an unknown benefactor and is swept into a maelstrom of mystery and intrigue that tests his intelligence and athleticism to the fullest. Henry Spearman, the firm's junior partner, is the most eligible bachelor along Chicago's Lake Shore Drive as a result of his catapult from ships' ranks to successful owner.
When a ship sinks off the coast of Beaver Island in Michigan, the intertwining lives of these characters unlock the mystery of the disappearance of another ship twenty years earlier, in a riveting whodunit set on the stormy waters of the Great Lakes.
Donald A. Johnston was born and raised in Detroit, served in World War II as a U.S. Navy Reserve officer, and was decorated for service in the Philippines and in the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. His career includes forty years in the insurance business. An ardent sailing enthusiast, he has cruised the Great Lakes extensively and has sailed winners in class boats and in offshore competition.
Jacket photograph © Yuriz / iStockphoto.com
Drinking a glass of tap water, strolling in a park, hopping a train for the suburbs: some aspects of city life are so familiar that we don’t think twice about them. But such simple actions are structured by complex relationships with our natural world. The contours of these relationships—social, cultural, political, economic, and legal—were established during America’s first great period of urbanization in the nineteenth century, and Boston, one of the earliest cities in America, often led the nation in designing them. A richly textured cultural and social history of the development of nineteenth-century Boston, this book provides a new environmental perspective on the creation of America’s first cities.
Eden on the Charles explores how Bostonians channeled country lakes through miles of pipeline to provide clean water; dredged the ocean to deepen the harbor; filled tidal flats and covered the peninsula with houses, shops, and factories; and created a metropolitan system of parks and greenways, facilitating the conversion of fields into suburbs. The book shows how, in Boston, different class and ethnic groups brought rival ideas of nature and competing visions of a “city upon a hill” to the process of urbanization—and were forced to conform their goals to the realities of Boston’s distinctive natural setting. The outcomes of their battles for control over the city’s development were ultimately recorded in the very fabric of Boston itself. In Boston’s history, we find the seeds of the environmental relationships that—for better or worse—have defined urban America to this day.
Few places were as important in the seventeenth-century European colonial New World as the pays d’en haut. This term means "upper country" and refers to the western Great Lakes (Huron, Michigan, and Superior) and the areas immediately north, south, and west of them. The region was significant because of its large Native American population, because it had an extensive riverine system needed for beaver populations—essential to the fur trade—and because it held the transportation key to westward expansion.
It was vital to the French, who controlled the region, to be on good terms with its peoples. To maintain good relations through trade and diplomacy with the nations in the pays d’en haut, the French built a number of posts, including one at Michilimackinac and one on the St. Joseph River (near Niles, Michigan). These posts were garrisoned by French troops and run by French commanders who contracted with merchants to manage business matters.
Edge of Empire provides both an overview and an intensely detailed look at Michilimackinac at a very specific period of history. While the introduction offers an overview of the French fur trade, of the place of Michilimackinac in that network, and of what Michilimackinac was like in the years up to 1716, the body of the book is comprised of over sixty French-language documents, now translated into English. Collected from archives in France, Canada, and the United States, the documents identify many of the people involved in the trade and reveal a great deal about the personal and professional relations among people who traded. They also reveal clearly the process by which trade was carried out, including the roles of both Native Americans and women. At the same time, the documents open a window into French colonial society in New France.
WINNER, 2021 Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year in Traditional Nonfiction!
Chicago’s quirky patron saint
This thrilling story of a daughter of America’s foremost industrialist, John D. Rockefeller, is complete with sex, money, mental illness, and opera divas—and a woman who strove for the independence to make her own choices. Rejecting the limited gender role carved out for her by her father and society, Edith Rockefeller McCormick forged her own path, despite pushback from her family and ultimate financial ruin.
Young Edith and her siblings had access to the best educators in the world, but the girls were not taught how to handle the family money; that responsibility was reserved for their younger brother. A parsimonious upbringing did little to prepare Edith for life after marriage to Harold McCormick, son of the Reaper King Cyrus McCormick. The rich young couple spent lavishly. They purchased treasures like the jewels of Catherine the Great, entertained in grand style in a Chicago mansion, and contributed to the city’s cultural uplift, founding the Chicago Grand Opera. They supported free health care for the poor, founding and supporting the John R. McCormick Memorial Institute for Infectious Diseases. Later, Edith donated land for what would become Brookfield Zoo.
Though she lived a seemingly enviable life, Edith’s disposition was ill-suited for the mores of the time. Societal and personal issues—not least of which were the deaths of two of her five children—caused Edith to experience phobias and panic attacks. Dissatisfied with rest cures, she ignored her father’s expectations, moved her family to Zurich, and embarked on a journey of education and self-examination. Edith pursued analysis with then-unknown Carl Jung. Her generosity of spirit led Edith to become Jung’s leading patron. She also supported up-and-coming musicians, artists, and writers, including James Joyce as he wrote Ulysses.
While Edith became a Jungian analyst, her husband, Harold, pursued an affair with an opera star. After returning to Chicago and divorcing Harold, Edith continued to deplete her fortune. She hoped to create something of lasting value, such as a utopian community and affordable homes for the middle class. Edith’s goals caused further difficulties in her relationship with her father and are why he and her brother cut her off from the family funds even after the 1929 stock market crash ruined her. Edith’s death from breast cancer three years later was mourned by thousands of Chicagoans.
Respectful and truthful, Andrea Friederici Ross presents the full arc of this amazing woman’s life and expertly helps readers understand Edith’s generosity, intelligence, and fierce determination to change the world
In 1904, Edmund J. James inherited the leadership of an educational institution in search of an identity. His sixteen-year tenure transformed the University of Illinois from an industrial college to a major state university that fulfilled his vision of a center for scientific investigation.
Winton U. Solberg and J. David Hoeveler provide an account of a pivotal time in the university’s evolution. A gifted intellectual and dedicated academic reformer, James began his tenure facing budget battles and antagonists on the Board of Trustees. But as time passed, he successfully campaigned to address the problems faced by women students, expand graduate programs, solidify finances, create a university press, reshape the library and faculty, and unify the colleges of liberal arts and sciences. Combining narrative force with exhaustive research, the authors illuminate the political milieu and personalities around James to draw a vivid portrait of his life and times.
The authoritative conclusion to a four-part history, Edmund J. James and the Making of the Modern University of Illinois, 1904–1920 tells the story of one man’s mission to create a university worthy of the state of Illinois.
Why—contrary to much expert and popular opinion—more education may not be the answer to skyrocketing inequality.
For generations, Americans have looked to education as the solution to economic disadvantage. Yet, although more people are earning degrees, the gap between rich and poor is widening. Cristina Groeger delves into the history of this seeming contradiction, explaining how education came to be seen as a panacea even as it paved the way for deepening inequality.
The Education Trap returns to the first decades of the twentieth century, when Americans were grappling with the unprecedented inequities of the Gilded Age. Groeger’s test case is the city of Boston, which spent heavily on public schools. She examines how workplaces came to depend on an army of white-collar staff, largely women and second-generation immigrants, trained in secondary schools. But Groeger finds that the shift to more educated labor had negative consequences—both intended and unintended—for many workers. Employers supported training in schools in order to undermine the influence of craft unions, and so shift workplace power toward management. And advanced educational credentials became a means of controlling access to high-paying professional and business jobs, concentrating power and wealth. Formal education thus became a central force in maintaining inequality.
The idea that more education should be the primary means of reducing inequality may be appealing to politicians and voters, but Groeger warns that it may be a dangerous policy trap. If we want a more equitable society, we should not just prescribe more time in the classroom, but fight for justice in the workplace.
The Illinois frontier offered abundant opportunity, noted English traveler William Oliver after his journey to America in 1841–42, but life there was hard. Accordingly, Oliver advised the wealthy and comfortable to remain in England and counseled the unprosperous to seek their fortunes in America. Written for the poor who would migrate and published in 1843, his Eight Months in Illinois: With Information to Immigrants sought only to provide pertinent, valid, and practical information about what people might encounter in the frontier state. What Oliver actually accomplished, however, was much more: he imparted invaluable insights into and analyses of American life during an era of sweeping social, economic, and political change.
In his new foreword to this edition, James E. Davis stresses Oliver’s sincere desire to help British immigrants succeed in America. Oliver, Davis notes, “devoted dozens of pages of advice on numerous matters: various routes to Illinois and their advantages and disadvantages, processes of settling, qualities of western houses, costs of obtaining a new farm.” Oliver discussed other practical matters, such as the importance of having sons. He also assured his intended readership that “in the West, distinction of classes is little known and seldom recognized.”
As a document covering the middle west in the 1840s, Eight Months in Illinois: With Information to Immigrants has few equals. Its portrayal of farming and trade in relatively primitive times is historically accurate. It paints a plain picture, laying out the essential facts and presenting the typical incidents that enable us to trace the course of a settler’s simple, diligent, laborious day-to-day life. According to Davis, Oliver depicted “accurate and balanced slices of life in Illinois and America, including nasty insects, crude conditions, and the necessity of work.” And he did so without a trace of anti-American bias.
Eight Months in Illinois with Information to Immigrants was reprinted with emendations in 1924 by Walter Hill.
Here is a look at the life and legacy of an irrepressible innovator. Pushing against both social convention and technological boundaries, L.L. Nunn left enduring marks on economic and social history, labor development, and, educational reform. The Electric Edge of Academe is a bold portrayal of this progressive-era hydroelectric power magnate who, driven by a dynamic conscience, also became a force for social change and educational experimentation.
In 1891, Nunn, working with Tesla and Westinghouse, pioneered the world’s first commercial production of high-tension alternating current (AC) for long-distance transmission—something Thomas Edison deemed dangerous and irresponsible. After creating the Telluride Power Company, Nunn constructed the state-of-the-art Olmsted Power Plant in Provo Canyon and the Ontario Power Works at Niagara Falls. To support this new technology, he developed an imaginative model of industrial training that became so compelling that he ultimately abandoned his entrepreneurial career to devote his wealth and talents to experimenting with a new model of liberal education. In 1917, Nunn founded Deep Springs College in eastern California. The school remains one of the most daring, progressive, and selective institutions of higher learning in America. Newell examines how Nunn’s radical educational ideas have survived internal and external challenges for nearly a century and explores their relevance today.
In addition to providing the full text, Uihlein and the contributors trace Ricker’s career and delve into his practice of teaching. Subject experts explore specific topics. Thomas Leslie surveys contemporary construction practices in Chicago. Tom F. Peters considers Ricker’s writings in the context of the time while Rachel Will looks at masonry know-how and testing. Donald Friedman examines the teaching of iron and steel construction.
An illuminating look at a field and a legacy, The Elements of Construction rediscovers a figure that shaped the teaching of architecture and trained a generation that forever changed Chicago.
This is the first full-length biography of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, one of the three notable Peabody sisters of Salem, Massachusetts, and sister-in-law of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Horace Mann. In elegant prose it traces the intricate private life and extraordinary career of one of nineteenth-century America's most important Transcendental writers and educational reformers. Yet Peabody has also been one of the most scandalously neglected and caricatured female intellectuals in American history.
Bruce Ronda has recaptured Peabody from anecdotal history and even blue-stocking portrayals in film--most recently by Jessica Tandy in Henry James's The Bostonians. Peabody was a reformer devoted to education in the broadest, and yet most practical, senses. She saw the classroom as mediating between the needs of the individual and the claims of society. She taught in her own private schools and was an assistant in Bronson Alcott's Temple School. In her contacts with Ralph Waldo Emerson's Transcendental circle in the 1830s, and as publisher of the famous Dial and other imprints, she took a mediating position once more, claiming the need for historical knowledge to balance the movement's stress on individual intuition. She championed antislavery, European liberal revolutions, Spiritualism, and, in her last years, the Paiute Indians. She was, as Theodore Parker described her, the Boswell of her age.
A crack shot, expert skinner and tanner, seamstress, sculptor, and later writer—a list that only hints at her intelligence and abilities—Ella Elgar Bird Dumont was one of those remarkable women who helped tame the Texas frontier. First married at sixteen to a Texas Ranger, she followed her husband to Comanche Indian country in King County, where they lived in a tepee while participating in the final slaughter of the buffalo. Living off the land until the frontier was opened for ranching, Ella and Tom Bird typified the Old West ideals of self-sufficiency and generosity, with a hesitancy to complain about the hard life in the late 1800s.
Yet, in one important way, Ella Dumont was unsuited for life on the frontier. Endowed with an instinctive desire and ability to carve and sculpt, she was largely prevented from pursuing her talents by the responsibilities of marriage and frontier life and later, widowhood with two small children. Even though her second marriage, to Auguste Dumont, made life more comfortable, the realities of her existence still prevented the fulfillment of her artistic longings.
Ella Bird Dumont’s memoir is rich with details of the frontier era in Texas, when Indian depredations were still a danger for isolated settlers, where animals ranged close enough to provide dinner and a new pair of gloves, and where sheer existence depended on skill, luck, and the kindness of strangers. The vividness and poignancy of her life, coupled with the wealth of historical material in the editor’s exhaustive notes, make this Texas pioneer’s autobiography a very special book.
Rand notes that portrayals of the Statue of Liberty as a beacon for immigrants tend to suppress the Statue’s connections to people brought to this country by force. She examines what happened to migrants at Ellis Island whose bodies did not match the gender suggested by the clothing they wore. In light of contemporary ideas about safety and security, she examines the “Decide an Immigrant’s Fate” program, which has visitors to Ellis Island act as a 1910 board of inspectors hearing the appeal of an immigrant about to be excluded from the country. Rand is a witty, insightful, and open-minded tour guide, able to synthesize numerous diverse ideas—about tourism, immigration history, sexuality, race, ethnicity, commodity culture, and global capitalism—and to candidly convey her delight in her Ellis Island snow globe. And pen. And lighter. And back scratcher. And golf ball. And glittery pink key chain.
Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, and space aliens like the Transformers share a surprising connection along with James Bond, Indiana Jones, and Rocky Balboa. These beloved icons played active roles in movie and television projects set in the state of Nevada. Long time state film commissioner and movie reviewer Holabird explores the blending of icons and Nevada, along with her personal experiences of watching movies, talking with famous people, and showing off a diverse range of stunning and iconic locations like Las Vegas, Reno, Lake Tahoe, and Area 51.
Holabird shows how Nevada’s flash, flair, and fostering of the forbidden provided magic for singers, sexpots, and strange creatures from other worlds. She also gives readers an insider’s look into moviemaking in Nevada by drawing on her extensive experience as a film commissioner. This is a unique take on film history and culture, and Holabird explores eighteen film genres populated by one-of-a-kind characters with ties to Nevada. Along with being a film history of the state of Nevada written by a consummate insider, the book is a fun mixture of research, personal experiences, and analysis about how Nevada became the location of choice for a broad spectrum of well-known films and characters.
In The Emerald Horizon, Cornelia Mutel combines lyrical writing with meticulous scientific research to portray the environmental past, present, and future of Iowa. In doing so, she ties all of Iowa's natural features into one comprehensive whole.
Since so much of the tallgrass state has been transformed into an agricultural landscape, Mutel focuses on understanding today's natural environment by understanding yesterday's changes. After summarizing the geological, archaeological, and ecological features that shaped Iowa's modern landscape, she recreates the once-wild native communities that existed prior to Euroamerican settlement. Next she examines the dramatic changes that overtook native plant and animal communities as Iowa's prairies, woodlands, and wetlands were transformed. Finally she presents realistic techniques for restoring native species and ecological processes as well as a broad variety of ways in which Iowans can reconnect with the natural world. Throughout, in addition to the many illustrations commissioned for this book, she offers careful scientific exposition, a strong sense of respect for the land, and encouragement to protect the future by learning from the past.
The "emerald prairie" that "gleamed and shone to the horizon's edge," as botanist Thomas Macbride described it in 1895, has vanished. Cornelia Mutel's passionate dedication to restoring this damaged landscape—and by extension the transformed landscape of the entire Corn Belt—invigorates her blend of natural history and human history. Believing that citizens who are knowledgeable about native species, communities, and ecological processes will better care for them, she gives us hope—and sound suggestions—for the future.
This long-awaited volume offers the general reader the heart of Emerson’s journals, that extraordinary series of diaries and notebooks in which he poured out his thoughts for more than fifty years, beginning with the “luckless ragamuffin ideas” of his college days.
Emerson as revealed in his journals is more spontaneous, more complex, more human and appealing than he appears in the published works. This man is the seeker rather than the sage; he records the turmoil, struggle, and questioning that preceded the serene and confident affirmations of the essays. He is honest, earthy, tough-minded, self-critical (“I am a lover of indolence, & of the belly”), warm in his enthusiasms, a witty and sharp observer of people and events. Everything is grist for his mill: personal experiences, his omnivorous reading, ruminations on matters large and small, his doubts and perplexities, public issues and local gossip. There are abrupt shifts in subject and tone, reflecting the variousness of his moods and the restless energy of his mind.
Drawing from Harvard’s sixteen-volume scholarly edition of the journals—but omitting the textual apparatus that makes it hard to read—Joel Porte presents a sympathetic selection that brings us close to Emerson the man.
In Enchanted Ground, Sharon Hatfield brings to life the true story of a nineteenth-century farmer-turned-medium, Jonathan Koons, one of thousands of mediums throughout the antebellum United States. In the hills outside Athens, Ohio, Koons built a house where it was said the dead spoke to the living, and where ancient spirits communicated the wisdom of the ages. Curious believers, in homespun and in city attire, traveled from as far as New Orleans to a remote Appalachian cabin whose marvels would rival any of P. T. Barnum’s attractions.
Yet Koons’s story is much more than showmanship and sleight of hand. His enterprise, not written about in full until now, embodied the excitement and optimism of citizens breaking free from societal norms. Reform-minded dreamers were drawn to Koons’s seances as his progressive brand of religion displaced the gloomy Calvinism of previous generations. As heirs to the Second Great Awakening, which stretched from New York State to the far reaches of the Northwest Territory, the curious, the faithful, and Koons himself were part of a larger, uniquely American moment that still marks the cultural landscape today.
A remarkable number of Wisconsin towns and cities were home to an opera house in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Some were freestanding structures built by local benefactors, industrialists, and capitalists. Others were located within a city hall building and financed by local tax dollars with the support of government officials who believed in the value of the arts for their community
In Encore! The Renaissance of Wisconsin Opera Houses, Brian Leahy Doyle chronicles the histories of ten Wisconsin opera houses and theaters, from their construction to their heydays as live performance spaces and through the periods when many of these stages went dark. But what makes these stories so compelling is that all but one of the featured theaters has been restored to its original splendor. Just as the beginnings of these theaters were often the result of the efforts of local citizens, Doyle discovers that their restoration is due to the commitment of dedicated and passionate people. More than one of these revived theaters has spurred the revitalization of its surrounding downtown business district as well.
Encore! is the second book in the Places along the Way series. Richly illustrated with historic and contemporary photos, the Places along the Way series links Wisconsin's past with its present, exploring the state's history through its architecture.
What do a rockabilly musician turned cinematic swamp monster, a composer of player-piano music, an avant-garde cellist, a musical instrument that lent its name to a weapon, a rock musician turned Catholic monk, some of the best audio speakers in the world, and the creator of Schoolhouse Rock! have in common? That’s right–they all come from Arkansas.
Encyclopedia of Arkansas Music is a special project of the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture (EOA), an online encyclopedia launched in 2006 by the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies at the Central Arkansas Library System.
This colorful, photo-filled reference work spanning all aspects of Arkansas’s musical past and present includes more than 150 entries on musicians, ensembles, musical works, and events.
The End of American Lynching questions how we think about the dynamics of lynching, what lynchings mean to the society in which they occur, how lynching is defined, and the circumstances that lead to lynching. Ashraf H. A. Rushdy looks at three lynchings over the course of the twentieth century—one in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, in 1911, one in Marion, Indiana, in 1930, and one in Jasper, Texas, in 1998—to see how Americans developed two distinct ways of thinking and talking about this act before and after the 1930s.
One way takes seriously the legal and moral concept of complicity as a way to understand the dynamics of a lynching; this way of thinking can give us new perceptions into the meaning of mobs and the lynching photographs in which we find them. Another way, which developed in the 1940s and continues to influence us today, uses a strategy of denial to claim that lynchings have ended. Rushdy examines how the denial of lynching emerged and developed, providing insight into how and why we talk about lynching the way we do at the dawn of the twenty-first century. In doing so, he forces us to confront our responsibilities as American citizens and as human beings.
It isn’t enough to celebrate the death penalty’s demise. We must learn from it.
When Henry McCollum was condemned to death in 1984 in rural North Carolina, death sentences were commonplace. In 2014, DNA tests set McCollum free. By then, death sentences were as rare as lethal lightning strikes. To most observers this national trend came as a surprise. What changed? Brandon Garrett hand-collected and analyzed national data, looking for causes and implications of this turnaround. End of Its Rope explains what he found, and why the story of who killed the death penalty, and how, can be the catalyst for criminal justice reform.
No single factor put the death penalty on the road to extinction, Garrett concludes. Death row exonerations fostered rising awareness of errors in death penalty cases, at the same time that a decline in murder rates eroded law-and-order arguments. Defense lawyers radically improved how they litigate death cases when given adequate resources. More troubling, many states replaced the death penalty with what amounts to a virtual death sentence—life without possibility of parole. Today, the death penalty hangs on in a few scattered counties where prosecutors cling to entrenched habits and patterns of racial bias.
The failed death penalty experiment teaches us how inept lawyering, overzealous prosecution, race discrimination, wrongful convictions, and excessive punishments undermine the pursuit of justice. Garrett makes a strong closing case for what a future criminal justice system might look like if these injustices were remedied.
In this volume, brothers Mark and John Bieter chronicle three generations of Basque presence in Idaho from 1890 to the present, resulting in an engaging story that begins with a few solitary sheepherders and follows their evolution into the prominent ethnic community of today.
Enduring Nations documents how tribal peoples have adapted to cultural change while shaping midwestern history. Examining the transformation of Native American communities, which often occurred in response to shifting government policy, the contributors explore the role of women, controversial tribal enterprises and economies, social welfare practices, and native peoples' frequent displacement to locations such as reservations and urban centers. Central to both past and contemporary discussions of Native American cultural change is whether Native American identity should be determined by genetics, shared cultural values, or a combination of the two.
Contributors are Bradley J. Birzer, Brenda J. Child, Thomas Burnell Colbert, Gregory Evans Dowd, R. David Edmunds, Brian Hosmer, Rebecca Kugel, James B. LaGrand, Melissa L. Meyer, Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, Alan G. Shackelford, Susan Sleeper-Smith, and Stephen Warren.
New England's economy has a history as dramatic as any in the world. From an inauspicious beginning--as immigration ground to a halt in the eighteenth century--New England went on to lead the United States in its transformation from an agrarian to an industrial economy. And when the rest of the country caught up in the mid-twentieth century, New England reinvented itself as a leader in the complex economy of the information society.
Engines of Enterprise tells this dramatic story in a sequence of narrative essays written by preeminent historians and economists. These essays chart the changing fortunes of entrepreneurs and venturers, businessmen and inventors, and common folk toiling in fields, in factories, and in air-conditioned offices. The authors describe how, short of staple crops, colonial New Englanders turned to the sea and built an empire; and how the region became the earliest home of the textile industry as commercial fortunes underwrote new industries in the nineteenth century. They show us the region as it grew ahead of the rest of the country and as the rest of the United States caught up. And they trace the transformation of New England's products and exports from cotton textiles and machine tools to such intangible goods as education and software. Concluding short essays also put forward surprising but persuasive arguments--for instance, that slavery, while not prominent in colonial New England, was a critical part of the economy; and that the federal government played a crucial role in the development of the region's industrial skills.
More than any other single group of individuals, the Boston Associates were responsible for the sweeping economic transformation that occurred in New England between 1815 and 1861. Through the use of the corporate form, they established an extensive network of modern business enterprises that were among the largest of the time. Their most notable achievement was the development of the Waltham-Lowell system in the textile industry, but they were also active in transportation, banking, and insurance, and at the same time played a major role in philanthropy and politics.
Evaluating each of these efforts in turn and placing the Associates in the context of the society and culture that produced them, the author convincingly explains the complex motives that led the group to undertake initiatives on so many different fronts. Dalzell shows that men like Francis Cabot Lowell, Nathan Appleton, and Amos and Abbott Lawrence are best understood as transitional figures. Although they used modern methods when it suited their interest, they were most concerned with protecting the positions they had already won at the top of a traditional social order. Thus, for all the innovations they sponsored, their commitment to change remained both partial and highly selective. And while something very like an industrial revolution did occur in New England during the nineteenth century, paradoxically the Associates neither sought nor welcomed it. On the contrary, as time passed they became increasingly preoccupied with combating the forces of change.
In addition to the light it sheds on a crucial chapter of business history, this gracefully written study offers fresh insights into the role and attitudes of elites during the period. Furthermore it contradicts some of the prevailing thought about entrepreneurial behavior in the early phases of industrialization in America.
As Austin grew from a college and government town of the 1950s into the sprawling city of 2010, two ideas of Austin as a place came into conflict. Many who promoted the ideology of growth believed Austin would be defined by economic output, money, and wealth. But many others thought Austin was instead defined by its quality of life. Because the natural environment contributed so much to Austin's quality of life, a social movement that wanted to preserve the city's environment became the leading edge of a larger movement that wanted to retain a unique sense of place. The "environmental movement" in Austin became the political and symbolic arm of the more general movement for place.
This is a history of the environmental movement in Austin—how it began; what it did; and how it promoted ideas about the relationships between people, cities, and the environment. It is also about a deeper movement to retain a sense of place that is Austin, and how that deeper movement continues to shape the way Austin is built today. The city it helped to create is now on the forefront of national efforts to rethink how we build our cities, reduce global warming, and find ways that humans and the environment can coexist in a big city.
The Apostle Islands National Lakeshore is a breathtakingly beautiful archipelago of twenty-two islands in Lake Superior, just off the tip of northern Wisconsin. For years, the national park has been a favorite destination for tourists and locals alike, but the remarkable story behind its creation is little known. In Environmental Politics and the Creation of a Dream, Harold Jordahl, one of the primary advocates for designating the islands as a national park, discloses the full story behind the effort to preserve their natural beauty for posterity. He describes in detail the political and bureaucratic complexities of the national lakeshore campaign, augmented by his own personal recollections and those of such prominent figures as Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson and President John F. Kennedy. Writing in collaboration with Annie Booth, Jordahl recounts how activists, legislators, media, local residents, and other players shaped the islands’ future establishment as a national park.
Less celebrated than the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, the 1933–1934 Century of Progress Exposition brought visitors face-to-face with gleaming American consumerism in the midst of the Great Depression. Lindsay Fullerton draws on a wealth of personal photographs, scrapbooks, oral histories, and writings to illuminate the wildly different experiences of fairgoers against the backdrop of a city steeped in poverty and segregation.
The Exposition took place amidst massive changes sparked by expansion of mass media, Franklin Roosevelt’s election, the repeal of Prohibition, and the Great Migration. A diverse cross-section of Chicagoans informs Fullerton’s history of the event in the context of the fast-changing America of the interwar era. These personal accounts tell stories of how attendees interpreted their own experiences while being surrounded by whiz-bang products and full-throated evangelism on the benefits of progress.
A colorful people’s history, Ephemeral City takes readers inside the other Chicago World’s Fair and how visitors interacted with a pivotal moment in American history.
Whether fulfilling subsistence needs or featured in stories of grand adventure, hunting loomed large in the material and the imagined landscape of the nineteenth-century West. Epiphany in the Wilderness explores the social, political, economic, and environmental dynamics of hunting on the frontier in three “acts,” using performance as a trail guide and focusing on the production of a “cultural ecology of the chase” in literature, art, photography, and taxidermy.
Using the metaphor of the theater, Jones argues that the West was a crucial stage that framed the performance of the American character as an independent, resourceful, resilient, and rugged individual. The leading actor was the all-conquering masculine hunter hero, the sharpshooting man of the wilderness who tamed and claimed the West with each provident step. Women were also a significant part of the story, treading the game trails as plucky adventurers and resilient homesteaders and acting out their exploits in autobiographical accounts and stage shows.
Epiphany in the Wilderness informs various academic debates surrounding the frontier period, including the construction of nature as a site of personal challenge, gun culture, gender adaptations and the crafting of the masculine wilderness hero figure, wildlife management and consumption, memorializing and trophy-taking, and the juxtaposition of a closing frontier with an emerging conservation movement.
The University Press of Colorado gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University toward the publication of this book.
Bennion provides in-depth portraits of nineteenth-century women editors of the West and their diverse publications. The book's title takes its name from an 1898 editorial in the Wasatch Wave which described Piute Pioneer editor Candace Alice De Witt as a "maiden fair, fully equal to the occasion."Equal to the Occasion delves into the lives, publications, and historical contexts in which approximately thirty-five female editors of newspapers and other periodicals worked in the nineteenth-century West. The book covers the period from 1854, when the West's first woman editor began her work, through the turn of the century; it includes research gathered from thirteen western states. With its in-depth portraits of pioneering women editors and its appendix listing more than two hundred women and the major repositories where their extant publications are kept, Equal to the Occasion rescues from obscurity a whole panoply of nineteenth-century western women.
Although the northern Illinois chapters of the story of Susan “Sukey” Richardson’s escape from slavery on the Underground Railroad are documented, the part played by southern Illinois in that historic episode has remained obscure. Carol Pirtle changes that with her investigation into the 1843 suit Andrew Borders lodged against William Hayes, charging his neighbor with helping slaves from the Borders estate escape to Galesburg. In conjunction with her probe into the past, Pirtle also discovered the Hayes correspondence.
Pirtle documents Hayes’s involvement in the Illinois Underground Railroad through approximately two hundred letters received by Hayes from the early 1820s until his death in 1849. Many of these letters specifically corroborate his participation in the escape of slaves from the Borders estate. One such letter came from T. A. Jones in 1843: “You Dear Sir are to me an unknown friend, yet I believe you are a friend to the poor down trodden Slave. This is as good an introduction as I want from any man. My brother, our cause is a holy one.” Letters written by Galesburg residents show that several prominent citizens of that community also assisted in the affair, proving that Knox College administrators and trustees were active in the Underground Railroad.
Pirtle also includes excerpts from the trial transcript from the 1844 civil case against Hayes, which was tried in Pinckneyville, Illinois. She researched newspaper accounts of the event, most notably those in the Western Citizen and the Sparta Herald. Records of the Covenanter Presbyterian church of which Hayes was a member provide partial explanations of Hayes’s motives.
Telling the story of Hayes and his involvement with Susan Richardson and the Underground Railroad, Pirtle provides insight into the work of abolitionists in Illinois. Escape Betwixt Two Suns, in fact, is one of the few books to substantiate the legends of the Underground Railroad. She tells the story of a quiet man who made a difference, of a man deserving the accolades of a hero.
San Antonio Conservation Society Citation, 2009
In the early part of the eighteenth century, the Spanish colonial mission Espíritu Santo de Zúñiga was relocated from far south Texas to a site along the Guadalupe River in Mission Valley, Victoria County. This mission, along with a handful of others in south Texas, was established by the Spaniards in an effort to Christianize and civilize the local Native American tribes in the hopes that they would become loyal Spanish citizens who would protect this new frontier from foreign incursions.
With written historical records scarce for Espíritu Santo, Tamra Walter relies heavily on material culture recovered at this site through a series of recent archaeological investigations to present a compelling portrait of the Franciscan mission system. By examining findings from the entire mission site, including the compound, irrigation system, quarry, and kiln, she focuses on questions that are rarely, if ever, answered through historical records alone: What was daily life at the mission like? What effect did the mission routine have on the traditional lifeways of the mission Indians? How were both the Indians and the colonizers changed by their frontier experiences, and what does this say about the missionization process?
Walter goes beyond simple descriptions of artifacts and mission architecture to address the role these elements played in the lives of the mission residents, demonstrating how archaeology is able to address issues that are not typically addressed by historians. In doing so, she presents an accurate portrait of life in South Texas at this time. This study of Mission Espíritu Santo will serve as a model for research at similar early colonial sites in Texas and elsewhere.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Alfred Kazin observes in his Introduction, “was a great writer who turned the essay into a form all his own.” His celebrated essays—the twelve published in Essays: First Series (1841) and eight in Essays: Second Series (1844)—are here presented for the first time in an authoritative one-volume edition, which incorporates all the changes and corrections Emerson made after their initial publication.
The text is reproduced from the second and third volumes of The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a critical edition which draws on the vast body of Emerson scholarship of the last half century. Alfred R. Ferguson was founding editor of the edition, followed by Joseph Slater (until 1996).
Emory Kemp is the founder and director of the Institute for the History of Technology and Industrial Archaeology at West Virginia University, where he also served as a chair and professor of civil engineering and a professor of history. This collection of essays encompasses over fifty years of his research in the field of the history of technology.
Within these twelve essays, Kemp describes and analyzes nineteenth century improvements in building materials such as iron, steel, and cement; roads and bridges, especially the evolution of the suspension bridge; canals and navigable rivers, including the Ohio River and its tributaries; and water supply systems. As one of the few practicing American engineers who also researches and writes as an academic, Kemp adds an important historical context to his work by focusing not only on the construction of a structure but also on the analytical science that heralds a structure’s design and development.
Establishing Congress: The Removal to Washington, D.C., and the Election of 1800 focuses on the end of the 1790s, when, in rapid succession, George Washington died, the federal government moved to Washington, D.C., and the election of 1800 put Thomas Jefferson and the Democratic-Republican Party in charge of the federal government.
Establishing Congress dispels the myths and misinformation that surround the federal government’s move to Washington and demonstrates that the election of 1800 changed American party politics forever, establishing the success of the American experiment in government and completing the founding of the Republic. It also contends that the lame-duck session of Congress had far-reaching implications for the governance of the District of Columbia. Later chapters examine aspects of the political iconography of the Capitol—one illuminating Jefferson’s role in turning the building into a temple for the legislature and an instrument for nation-building, another analyzing the fascinating decades-long debate over whether to bury George Washington in the Capitol.
The book considers as well the political implications of social life in early Washington, examining the political lobbying by Washington women within a social context and detailing the social and political life in the city’s homes, hotels, boardinghouses, and eating messes. Establishing Congress is an invaluable reference work for anyone interested in these pivotal moments in American history.
Establishing Congress: The Removal to Washington, D.C., and the Election of 1800 focuses on the end of the 1790s, when, in rapid succession, George Washington died, the federal government moved to Washington, D.C., and the election of 1800 put Thomas Jefferson and the Democratic-Republican Party in charge of the federal government.
Establishing Congress dispels the myths and misinformation that surround the federal government’s move to Washington and demonstrates that the election of 1800 changed American party politics forever, establishing the success of the American experiment in government and completing the founding of the Republic. It also contends that the lame-duck session of Congress had far-reaching implications for the governance of the District of Columbia. Later chapters examine aspects of the political iconography of the Capitol—one illuminating Jefferson’s role in turning the building into a temple for the legislature and an instrument for nation-building, another analyzing the fascinating decades-long debate over whether to bury George Washington in the Capitol.
The book considers as well the political implications of social life in early Washington, examining the political lobbying by Washington women within a social context and detailing the social and political life in the city’s homes, hotels, boardinghouses, and eating messes. Establishing Congress is an invaluable reference work for anyone interested in these pivotal moments in American history.
As the introductory volume in the series Discovering the Peoples of Michigan, Ethnicity in Michigan outlines the processes of migration, as well as the rich relationship between ethnic groups and the trajectories of historical and social change in Michigan. On both state and local levels, issues of identity, race, politics, and shared history inform community development. Jack Glazier and Arthur Helweg provide a substantive general and theoretical overview of the various ethnic groups in Michigan, and of the ways in which immigrants both respond to and shape Michigan's particular regional character.
A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication
Detailed reconstruction of the waxing and waning of political fortunes among the chiefly elites at an important center of the prehistoric world
At the time the first Europeans arrived in the New World, thousands of earthen platform mounds dotted the landscape of eastern North America. Only a few of the mound sites have survived the ravages of time and the devastation of pilferers; one of these valuable monuments is Etowah, located near Cartersville in northern Georgia. Over a period of more than 100 years, excavations of the site’s six mounds, and in particular Mound C, have yielded a wealth of artifacts, including marble statues, copper embossed plates, ceremonial items, and personal adornments. These objects indicate an extensive trading network between Mississippian centers and confirm contact with Spanish conquistadores near Etowah in the mid-1500s.
Adam King has analyzed the architecture and artifacts of Etowah and deduced its vital role in the prehistory of the area. He advances a plausible historical sequence and a model for the ancient town's complex political structure. The chiefdom society relied upon institutional social ranking, permanent political offices, religious ideology, a redistribution of goods and services, and the willing support of the constituent population. King reveals strategies used by the paramount chiefs to maintain their sources of power and to control changes in the social organization. Elite alliances did not necessarily involve the extreme asymmetry of political domination and tribute extraction. King's use of ceramic assemblages recovered from Etowah to determine the occupation history and the construction sequence of public facilities (mounds and plazas) at the center is significant.
This fresh interpretation of the Etowah site places it in a contemporary social and political context with other Mississippian cultures. It is a one-volume sourcebook for the Etowah polity and its neighbors and will, therefore, command an eager audience of scholars and generalists.
In Every Root an Anchor, writer and arborist R. Bruce Allison celebrates Wisconsin's most significant, unusual, and historic trees. More than one hundred tales introduce us to trees across the state, some remarkable for their size or age, others for their intriguing histories. From magnificent elms to beloved pines to Frank Lloyd Wright's oaks, these trees are woven into our history, contributing to our sense of place. They are anchors for time-honored customs, manifestations of our ideals, and reminders of our lives' most significant events.
For this updated edition, Allison revisits the trees' histories and tells us which of these unique landmarks are still standing. He sets forth an environmental message as well, reminding us to recognize our connectedness to trees and to manage our tree resources wisely. As early Wisconsin conservationist Increase Lapham said, "Tree histories increase our love of home and improve our hearts. They deserve to be told and remembered."
“What I done and what I been accused of covers everything, you put ’em both together.” Wyatt Moore of Caddo Lake exaggerates, but perhaps not very much. During his long life at Caddo Lake, Moore was at various times a boat operator, commercial fisherman, boat builder, farmer, fishing and hunting camp operator, guide, commercial hunter, trapper, raftsman, moonshiner, oil field worker, water well driller, and mechanical jack-of-all-trades. Still, he always found time for his lifelong study of the natural and human history of Caddo Lake. Here, in words as fresh and forceful as the day they were uttered, is his tale.
Moore, who was given the gift of a unique story to tell and great power to tell it, was the historical interpreter of his strange homeland of Caddo Lake. Twenty-three miles long, some forty thousand acres at high water, stretching across two Texas counties and one Louisiana parish, Caddo Lake’s fresh waters merge into a labyrinthine swamp punctuated by inlets, holes, and geological oddities like Goat Island, Whistleberry Slough, Whangdoodle Pass, and the Devil’s Elbow. Here among these lost reminders of steamboats and old bateau men is Moore’s world.
Born in 1901 at Karnack, Texas, Moore grew up in a time when kids wore button shoes and in a place where pigs and chickens roamed the backyard. He drank his first whiskey at age eight, gigged fish, trapped, and hunted for pearls as a boy, and grew up to an easy assurance on the lake that comes only to those long accustomed to its ways. A walking library of the history of Caddo Lake, Moore delved into almost every nook and corner of it, and wherever he went, whatever he did, he sought to learn more about his subect. Sought out by writers and journalists—among them James Michener and Bill Moyers—because of his laconic wit and remarkable command of the region’s story, Moore became known as a resource as precious as the lake itself. Moore’s story is eloquently introduced by Thad Sitton in an opening essay that chronicles the history of Caddo Lake. Striking photographs of Moore at home and at work on the lake beautifully amplify his life story, and an exuberant word-and-picture essay of Moore expertly building the traditional boat of the region, a bateau, reinforces the vivid image we have of this remarkable man.
In 1920s Middle America, the Ku Klux Klan gained popularity not by appealing to the fanatical fringes of society, but by attracting the interest of “average” citizens. During this period, the Klan recruited members through the same unexceptional channels as any other organization or club, becoming for many a respectable public presence, a vehicle for civic activism, or the source of varied social interaction. Its diverse membership included men and women of all ages, occupations, and socio-economic standings. Although surviving membership records of this clandestine organization have proved incredibly rare, Everyday Klansfolk uses newly available documents to reconstruct the life and social context of a single grassroots unit in Newaygo County, Michigan. A fascinating glimpse behind the mask of America’s most notorious secret order, this absorbing study sheds light on KKK activity and membership in Newaygo County, and in Michigan at large, during the brief and remarkable peak years of its mass popular appeal.
In the modern world, the public looks to scientists and scholars for their expertise on issues ranging from the effectiveness of vaccines to the causes of natural disasters. But for early Americans, whose relationship to nature was more intimate and perilous than our own, personal experience, political allegiances, and faith in God took precedence over the experiments of the learned.
In Everyday Nature, Sara Gronim shows how scientific advances were received in the early modern world, from the time Europeans settled in America until just before the American Revolution. Settlers approached a wide range of innovations, such as smallpox inoculation, maps and surveys, Copernican cosmology, and Ben Franklin’s experiments with electricity, with great skepticism. New Yorkers in particular were distrustful because of the chronic political and religious factionalism in the colony. Those discoveries that could be easily reconciled with existing beliefs about healing the sick, agricultural practices, and the revolution of the planets were more readily embraced.
A fascinating portrait of colonial life, this book traces a series of innovations that were disseminated throughout the Atlantic world during the Enlightenment, and shows how colonial New Yorkers integrated new knowledge into their lives.
"I was but a boy in my nineteenth year, and in for adventure when I started out from Hopkinsville, Kentucky, with all my worldly possessions, consisting of a few dollars in money, a change of clothes, and a gun, of course, to seek my fortune in this lazy man's paradise."
Noah Smithwick was an old man, blind and near his ninetieth year, when his daughter recorded these words. He had stayed on in "paradise"—Texas—from 1827 to 1861, when his opposition to secession took him to California. The Evolution of a State is his story of these "old Texas days."
A blacksmith and a tobacco smuggler, Noah Smithwick made weapons for the Battle of Concepción, and he fought in that battle. With Hensley's company, he chased the Mexican army south of the Rio Grande after the Battle of San Jacinto. Twice he served with the Texas Rangers. In quieter times, he was a postmaster and justice of the peace in little Webber's Prairie.
Eyewitness to so much Texas history, Smithwick recounts his life and adventures in a simple, straightforward style, with a wry sense of humor. His keen memory for detail—what the people wore, what they ate, how they worked and played— vividly evokes the sights, sounds, and smells of the frontier.
First published in part by the Dallas Morning News, Smithwick's recollections gained such popularity that they were published in book form, as The Evolution of a State, in 1900. This new edition of a Texas classic makes widely available for the first time in many years this "best of all books dealing with life in early Texas."
The aims of this study are twofold: compile, for the first time, all the archaeological, environmental, and geological data pertinent to the evolution of the aboriginal inhabitants of southwest Florida; and, using this basis, develop a specific, integrated, and dynamic model of cultural adaptation that will serve as a stimulus for hypotheses that go beyond simple culture-historical concerns for future archaeological research in this region.
Wesler provides an impressive and definitive compilation of more than 70 years of archaeological excavations at one of the most important
archaeological sites in Kentucky.
The Wickliffe Mounds site is located on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River in Ballard County, Kentucky, about three miles south of the mouth of the Ohio River. Around A.D. 1100, Mississippian people--farmers and traders with a culture closely related to the historic cultures of the Southeast (Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and others)—created a settlement there on which they lived for approximately 250 years before moving on.
In 1930 road construction cut a channel through the site, revealing archaeological deposits and bringing the area to the attention of Fain King, a local lumberman and entrepreneur. King bought the site in hopes of turning it into an attraction for the education and entertainment of the public, and not incidentally for his own profit. For more than 50 years the area was subjected to excavations ranging from looting to professional research efforts. In 1983, the site was finally turned over to Murray State University to be developed into an academic facility dedicated to research, student training, public education, and preservation of the site and its collections. Fortunately, the Wickliffe collections include all the early excavation records as well as more than 85,000 artifacts, 90% of which had been catalogued. Between 1984 and 1996 excavations were conducted specifically to affirm questionable data and/or fill in gaps in the Wickliffe archaeological record.
In this volume, Wesler and his colleagues have compiled data from almost seven decades of excavations at Wickliffe Mounds, providing the first comprehensive study of this important site. The paperback version of the book is accompanied by a CD-ROM that contains contributions from a wide range of archaeological specialists and includes archaeological data, site maps, database files, plats of excavations, artifact descriptions, and photographs, compiling in one place the entire archaeological record for this very important eastern North American site.
New Orleans has always captured our imagination as an exotic city in its racial ambiguity and pursuit of les bons temps. Despite its image as a place apart, the city played a key role in nineteenth-century America as a site for immigration and pluralism, the quest for equality, and the centrality of self-making.
In both the literary imagination and the law, creoles of color navigated life on a shifting color line. As they passed among various racial categories and through different social spaces, they filtered for a national audience the meaning of the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution of 1804, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and de jure segregation.
Shirley Thompson offers a moving study of a world defined by racial and cultural double consciousness. In tracing the experiences of creoles of color, she illuminates the role ordinary Americans played in shaping an understanding of identity and belonging.
In Notable Men and Women of Spanish Texas, Donald Chipman and Harriett Joseph combined dramatic, real-life incidents, biographical sketches, and historical background to reveal the real human beings behind the legendary figures who discovered, explored, and settled Spanish Texas from 1528 to 1821. Drawing from their earlier book and adapting the language and subject matter to the reading level and interests of middle and high school students, the authors here present the men and women of Spanish Texas for young adult readers and their teachers.
These biographies demonstrate how much we have in common with our early forebears. Profiled in this book are:
Few sources before have dealt with the archaeology of African American settlements outside the Atlantic seaboard and the southern states. This book describes in detail the archaeological investigations conducted at the town site of Buxton, Iowa, a coal mining community inhabited by a significantly large population of blacks between 1900 and 1925.
David Gradwohl and Nancy Osborn present the archaeology of Buxton from “the group up” to articulate the material remains with the data acquired from archival studies and oral history interviews. They also examine the broader significance of the Buxton experience in terms of those who lived there and their children and grandchildren who have heard about Buxton all their lives.
The innovative format of Exploring Civil War Wisconsin makes it easy for Civil War buffs, genealogists, and students to find and effectively use the vast array of historical materials about the Civil War found in archives, military and census records, published firsthand accounts, newspapers, and even on the Internet. This lively, illustrated guide focuses on Wisconsin in the Civil War, but is broadly applicable to Civil War research anywhere. Images of original documents and historic photographs illustrate every chapter, acquainting readers with both the Civil War and its sources. The easy-to-use and informative text is unlike anything else currently on the market.
Throughout the book, boxed features and sidebars provide background information and tips on how to do research. Author Brett Barker explains how to uncover the history of an individual soldier, his regiment, and his role in the Union Army using rosters, military records, pension files, and memoirs. And, he shows how to explore the home front during the war using the census, newspapers, city directories, and government records.
Discovering Illinois through twenty of the state's most important places
A one-of-a-kind travel guide, Exploring the Land of Lincoln invites road-trippers and history buffs to explore the Prairie State's most extraordinary historic sites. Charles Titus blends storytelling with in-depth research to highlight twenty must-see destinations selected for human drama, historical and cultural relevance, and their far-reaching impact on the state and nation. Maps, illustrations, and mileage tables encourage readers to create personal journeys of exploration to, and beyond, places like Cahokia, the Lincoln sites, Nauvoo, and Chicago's South Side Community Art Center.
Detailed and user-friendly, Exploring the Land of Lincoln is the only handbook you need for the sights and stories behind the names on the map of Illinois.
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