front cover of M. K. Kellogg's Texas Journal, 1872
M. K. Kellogg's Texas Journal, 1872
Miner Kilbourne Kellogg
University of Texas Press, 1967

Miner Kilbourne Kellogg’s notes about his experiences with “the most completely and comfortably fitted-out expedition which ever went to Texas” is an account of the beauty, the wildness, and the dangers and inconveniences of 1872 Texas.

Editor Llerena Friend provides a setting for the journal by tracing the search for mineral wealth in post–Civil War Texas; by describing the aims of the Eastern-born Texas Copper and Land Association, whose expedition the diarist accompanied; and by narrating the life of Miner K. Kellogg—artist, world traveler, writer. Friend’s annotation of the journal fills in details about the names, places, and events that Kellogg mentions.

As the expedition travels across North Texas toward Double Mountain, Kellogg reveals himself not only as a man of artistic vision but also as a chronic complainer, an accomplished observer of human nature and individual personality, and a skillful interpreter of problems that beset the people in the uncivilized regions of Texas.

A cultured gentleman who had traveled the world and had sat in the company of presidents and princes, this non-Texan was disdainful of the “texans” of the wilderness, for whom “Cards & vulgar slang & stories of Indian adventures form the staple of their mental exercises.” An artist, he was often unable to draw, either because of his constant illnesses and frustrations or because of the unfavorable encampments of the party. Accustomed to the amenities and comforts of life, he criticized the lack of leadership and the purpose of the expedition, and complained incessantly of the chiggers, the “want of cleanliness decency & health,” and “the infernal bacon,” which became the stock fare.

Amid the complaints and derisions, however, appear vivid images of the Texas landscape, set down in word pictures by an artist’s pen: the night sky, “with a half moon now & then eclipsed by dark clouds passing over the clear starry vault of bluish grey”; the river-bank soil of “Vandyke brown color”; the mesquite trees in a melancholy and wild basin, “without a leaf upon their dead carcasses, yet still standing & clinging to the hope of resurrection from the life yet remaining in their roots”; and the “acres of the brilliant yellow Compositea & pink sabatea-like carpets spread in the morning air.”

Kellogg’s watercolor sketches were unfortunately lost in travel, but his literary record, “M. K. Kellogg’s Mems, Exploring Expedition to Texas, 1872,” remains as a personal account of an abortive attempt to exploit the natural resources of the Texas frontier during Reconstruction and an artist’s picture of the life and the land of that frontier.

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Ma'am Jones of the Pecos
Eve Ball
University of Arizona Press, 1969
"...highly entertaining and provides a valuable picture of the New Mexico frontier." —Journal of the West

"An unusual story of an American pioneer woman who used a needle, skillet, or gun, as needed, and who tended the dying during frontier wars or outbreaks of equally deadly diseases."  —The Old Bookaroos

"For vivid descriptions of pioneer life in southeastern New Mexico, no work of history or fiction can match Eve Ball's dramatic story of Barbara Jones and her family...Anyone who picks it up will be reluctant to stop reading... "Few western historians have made such expert use of oral history as Mrs. Ball. Colloquial language adds color; and carefully drawn sketches of the family, their acquaintances, and the major figures in Lincoln County provide a degree of intimacy seldom found in historical works. That the resulting tale is believable and deeply moving demonstrates just how effective these techniques can be." —Southwestern Historical Quarterly
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Made in Chicago
Stories Behind 30 Great Hometown Bites
Monica Eng and David Hammond
University of Illinois Press, 2023

A BookRiot Most Anticipated Travel Book of 2023

Italian beef and hot dogs get the headlines. Cutting-edge cuisine and big-name chefs get the Michelin stars. But Chicago food shows its true depth in classic dishes conceived in the kitchens of immigrant innovators, neighborhood entrepreneurs, and mom-and-pop visionaries.

Monica Eng and David Hammond draw on decades of exploring the city’s food landscape to serve up thirty can’t-miss eats found in all corners of Chicago. From Mild Sauce to the Jibarito and from Taffy Grapes to Steak and Lemonade, Eng and Hammond present stories of the people and places behind each dish while illuminating how these local favorites reflect the multifaceted history of the city and the people who live there. Each entry provides all the information you need to track down whatever sounds good and selected recipes even let you prepare your own Flaming Saganaki or Akutagawa.

Generously illustrated with full-color photos, Made in Chicago provides locals and visitors alike with loving profiles of a great food city’s defining dishes.

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Madeline Island & the Chequamegon Region
John O. Holzhueter
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 1974
An updated reprint of the definitive history of a storied corner of the Upper Great Lakes—Madeline Island and the Chequamegon region on Wisconsin’s Lake Superior.   A new foreword by Steve Cotherman, director of the Madeline Island Museum, brings the text of this book up to date on the history of Madeline Island and the Chequamegon region from the days before the missions to present-day tourism.  Madeline Island played a significant role in the early history of Wisconsin and was an important outpost in the fur trade. Ojibwe from Wisconsin and surrounding areas view the island as a sacred place. Other Indian Nations, such as the Huron and Ottawa, also trace their history to Madeline Island.  Today, Madeline Island and nearby Bayfield are popular tourist destinations, drawing tens of thousands of visitors every summer and throughout the winter.
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Madison in the Sixties
Stuart D. Levitan
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2018
Madison made history in the sixties.

Landmark civil rights laws were passed. Pivotal campus protests were waged. A spring block party turned into a three-night riot. Factor in urban renewal troubles, a bitter battle over efforts to build Frank Lloyd Wright’s Monona Terrace, and the expanding influence of the University of Wisconsin, and the decade assumes legendary status. 

In this first-ever comprehensive narrative of these issues—plus accounts of everything from politics to public schools, construction to crime, and more—Madison historian Stuart D. Levitan chronicles the birth of modern Madison with style and well-researched substance. This heavily illustrated book also features annotated photographs that document the dramatic changes occurring downtown, on campus, and to the Greenbush neighborhood throughout the decade. Madison in the Sixties is an absorbing account of ten years that changed the city forever.
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Madison
The Illustrated Sesquicentennial History, Volume 1, 1856–1931
Stuart D. Levitan
University of Wisconsin Press, 2006
This engaging illustrated history, full of photographs, maps, and bird’s-eye views, captures Madison’s early history from its first days as a city to the Great Depression. Biographical vignettes tell the stories of early movers and shakers in the city. The volume includes many archival images of Madison that have never been published or have not been seen since for a century or more.
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Mai Ya's Long Journey
Sheila Cohen
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2005

The story of Mai Ya Xiong and her family and their journey from the Ban Vinai refugee camp in Thailand to a new life in Madison, Wisconsin, is extraordinary. Yet it is typical of the stories of the 200,000 Hmong people who now live in the United States and who struggle to adjust to American society while maintaining their own culture as a free people.

Mai Ya's Long Journey follows Mai Ya Xiong, a young Hmong woman, from her childhood in Thailand's Ban Vinai Refugee Camp to her current home in Wisconsin. Mai Ya's parents fled Laos during the Vietnam War and were refugees in Thailand for several years before reaching the United States. But the story does not end there. Students will read the challenges Mai Ya faces in balancing her Hmong heritage and her adopted American culture as she grows into adulthood.

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front cover of The Main Event
The Main Event
Boxing in Nevada from the Mining Camps to the Las Vegas Strip
Richard O. Davies
University of Nevada Press, 2014
Richard O. Davies won Foreword Reviews' INDIEFAB Book of the Year Bronze Medal in Sports for The Main Event: Boxing in Nevada from the Mining Camps to the Las Vegas Strip. Davies' book was chosen as one of the best indie books of 2014. 

As the twentieth century dawned, bare-knuckle prizefighting was transforming into the popular sport of boxing, yet simultaneously it was banned as immoral in many locales. Nevada was the first state to legalize it, in 1897, solely to stage the Corbett-Fitzsimmons world heavyweight championship in Carson City. Davies shows that the history of boxing in Nevada is integral to the growth of the sport in America. Promoters such as Tex Rickard brought in fighters like Jack Dempsey to the mining towns of Goldfield and Tonopah and presented the Johnson-Jeffries “Fight of the Century” in Reno in 1910. Prizefights sold tickets, hotel rooms, drinks, meals, and bets on the outcomes. It was boxing\--before gambling, prostitution, and easy divorce\--that first got Nevada called “America’s Disgrace” and the “Sin State.” The Main Event explores how boxing’s growth in Nevada relates to the state’s role as a social and cultural outlier. Starting in the Rat Pack era, organized gambling’s moguls built arenas outside the Vegas casinos to stage championships\--more than two hundred from 1960 to the present. Tourists and players came to see and bet on historic bouts featuring Sonny Liston, Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, Sugar Ray Leonard, Mike Tyson, and other legends of the ring.

From the celebrated referee Mills Lane to the challenge posed by mixed martial arts in contemporary Las Vegas, the story of boxing in Nevada is a prism for viewing the sport. Davies utilizes primary and secondary sources to analyze how boxing in the Silver State intersects with its tourist economy and libertarian values, paying special attention to issues of race, class, and gender. Written in an engaging style that shifts easily between narrative and analysis, The Main Event will be essential reading for sports fans and historians everywhere.
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Main Street Public Library
Community Places and Reading Spaces in the Rural Heartland, 1876-956
Wayne A. Wiegand
University of Iowa Press, 2011
The United States has more public libraries than it has McDonald’s restaurants.
 
By any measure, the American public library is a heavily used and ubiquitous institution. Popular thinking identifies the public library as a neutral agency that protects democratic ideals by guarding against censorship as it makes information available to people from all walks of life. Among librarians this idea is known as the “library faith.” But is the American public library as democratic as it appears to be?
 
 In Main Street Public Library, eminent library historian Wayne Wiegand studies four emblematic small-town libraries in the Midwest from the late nineteenth century through the federal Library Service Act of 1956, and shows that these institutions served a much different purpose than is so often perceived. Rather than acting as neutral institutions that are vital to democracy, the libraries of Sauk Centre, Minnesota; Osage, Iowa; Rhinelander, Wisconsin; and Lexington, Michigan, were actually mediating community literary values and providing a public space for the construction of social harmony. These libraries, and the librarians who ran them, were often just as susceptible to the political and social pressures of their time as any other public institution.
 
By analyzing the collections of all four libraries and revealing what was being read and why certain acquisitions were passed over, Wiegand challenges both traditional perceptions and professional rhetoric about the role of libraries in our small-town communities. While the American public library has become essential to its local community, it is for reasons significantly different than those articulated by the “library faith.”
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Main Street Ready-Made
The New Deal Community of Greendale, Wisconsin
Arnold R. Alanen
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2012

The dream of the suburb is an old one in America. For more than a century, city dwellers have sought to escape the crowding and pollution of industrial centers for the quiet streets and green spaces on their fringes. In the 1930s, that dream inspired the largest migration of Americans in the twentieth century and led to the creation of Greendale, Wisconsin, one of three planned communities initially begun to resettle the rural poor hit hard by the Great Depression. This idea, though, quickly developed into a plan to revitalize cities and stabilize farming communities around the nation. The result was three “greenbelt towns” built from scratch, expressly for working-class families and within easy commuting distance of urban employment. Greendale, completed in 1938, was consciously designed as a midwestern town in both its physical character and social organization, where ordinary citizens could live in a safe, attractive, economical community that was in harmony with the surrounding farmland.

“Main Street Ready-Made” examines Greendale as an outgrowth of public policy, an experiment in social engineering, and an organic community that eventually evolved to embrace a huge shopping mall, condominiums, and expensive homes while still preserving much of the architecture and ambiance of the original village. A snapshot of 1930s idealism and ingenuity, “Main Street Ready-Made” makes a significant contribution to the history of cities, suburbs, and social planning in mid-century America.

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front cover of Maine’s Lithographic Landscapes
Maine’s Lithographic Landscapes
Town and City Views, 1830-1870
Earle G. Shettleworth Jr.
Brandeis University Press, 2020

During the nineteenth century, Americans celebrated their towns and cities through printed landscapes. In Maine, lithographs were commissioned from such leading artists as Fitz Henry Lane and talented, lesser known local artists, such as Esteria Butler. This book reproduces many of these works and provides insights into how these growing centers of commerce and industry viewed themselves and wished to be viewed by others. 

It’s the perfect book for those who love Maine, both full-time residents and those who make it a beloved summer destination. 

Published in association with the Bowdoin College Museum of Art on the occasion of the bicentennial of Maine statehood.

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front cover of Major Robert Farmar of Mobile
Major Robert Farmar of Mobile
Robert R. Rea
University of Alabama Press, 1990
The flamboyant military career of a colonist loyal to the British crown before the Revolution.

"An engaging biography [and] a colorful tale. . . . Robert Farmar, a son of New Jersey, used his position among that colony's elite to secure a commission as a captain in the British Army during the War of Jenkins' Ear and King George's War, serving in the unsuccessful assaults at Cartegena, Cuba, and Panama and then in the disaster at Fontenoy in Flanders and in the reversals at Rocoux and Laffeldt. . . . During the Seven Years' War he participated in the capture of Havana.


 

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front cover of Make Way for Liberty
Make Way for Liberty
Wisconsin African Americans in the Civil War
Jeff Kannel
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2020
Hundreds of African American soldiers and regimental employees represented Wisconsin in the Civil War, and many of them lived in the state either before or after the conflict. And yet, if these individuals are mentioned at all in histories of the state, it is with a sentence or two about their small numbers, or the belief that they all were from slaveholding states and served as substitutes for Wisconsin draftees.  Relative to the total number of Badgers who served in the Civil War, African Americans soldiers were few, but they constituted a significant number in at least five regiments of the United States Colored Infantry and several other companies. Their lives before and after the war in rural communities, small towns, and cities form an enlightening story of acceptance and respect for their service but rejection and discrimination based on their race. Make Way for Liberty will bring clarity to the questions of how many African Americans represented Wisconsin during the conflict, who among them lived in the state before and after the war, and their impact on their communities
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front cover of Making a Better World
Making a Better World
Public Housing, the Red Scare, and the Direction of Modern Los Angeles
Don Parson
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
During the 1990s, Los Angeles - like many other cities across America - began demolishing public housing projects that had come to symbolize decades of failed urban policies. But public housing was not always regarded with such disdain. In the years surrounding World War II, it had been a popular New Deal program, viewed as a force for positive social change and supported by a broad coalition of civic, labor, religious, and community organizations. Socially conscious architects and planners developed innovative and livable projects that embodied the latest theories in urban design. With sharp historical perspective, Making a Better World traces the rise and fall of a public housing ethic in Los Angeles and its impact on the city's built environment. In the caustic political atmosphere of Joseph McCarthy's America, public housing opponents accused the city's housing authority of communist infiltration, effectively eliminating the left from debates over the city's development. In place of public housing, conservative forces promoted a pro-private growth agenda that redefined urban renewal and reshaped modern Los Angeles. No conventional public housing projects have been constructed in Los Angeles since 1955. In this era of skyrocketing housing prices, especially in urban areas, Don Parson's examination not only gives us the recent history of a city, but also opens up a new debate on a current national crisis in providing shelter for low-income Americans.
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front cover of Making an American Workforce
Making an American Workforce
The Rockefellers and the Legacy of Ludlow
Fawn-Amber Montoya
University Press of Colorado, 2014
Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the policies of the early years of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, Making an American Workforce explores John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s welfare capitalist programs and their effects on the company's diverse workforce.

Focusing on the workers themselves—men, women, and children representative of a variety of immigrant and ethnic groups—contributors trace the emergence of the Employee Representation Plan, the work of the company's Sociology Department, and CF&I's interactions with the YMCA in the early twentieth century. They examine CF&I's early commitment to Americanize its immigrant employees and shape worker behavior, the development of policies that constructed the workforce it envisioned while simultaneously laying the groundwork for the strike that eventually led to the Ludlow Massacre, and the impact of the massacre on the employees, the company, and beyond.

Making an American Workforce provides greater insight into the repercussions of the Industrial Representation Plan and the Ludlow Massacre, revealing the long-term consequences of Colorado Fuel and Iron Company policies on the American worker, the state of Colorado, and the creation of corporate culture. Making an American Workforce will be of interest to Western, labor, and business historians.

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front cover of Making an Antislavery Nation
Making an Antislavery Nation
Lincoln, Douglas, and the Battle over Freedom
Graham A. Peck
University of Illinois Press, 2020
Winner of the Russell P. Strange Memorial Book Award

This sweeping narrative presents an original and compelling explanation for the triumph of the antislavery movement in the United States prior to the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln's election as the first antislavery president was hardly preordained. From the country's inception, Americans had struggled to define slavery's relationship to freedom. Most Northerners supported abolition in the North but condoned slavery in the South, while most Southerners denounced abolition and asserted slavery's compatibility with whites' freedom. On this massive political fault line hinged the fate of the nation.

Graham A. Peck meticulously traces the conflict over slavery in Illinois from the Northwest Ordinance in 1787 to Lincoln's defeat of his archrival Stephen A. Douglas in the 1860 election. Douglas's attempt in 1854 to persuade Northerners that slavery and freedom had equal national standing stirred a political earthquake that brought Lincoln to the White House. Yet Lincoln's framing of the antislavery movement as a conservative return to the country's founding principles masked what was in fact a radical and unprecedented antislavery nationalism. It justified slavery's destruction but triggered the Civil War.

Presenting pathbreaking interpretations of Lincoln, Douglas, and the Civil War's origins, Making an Antislavery Nation shows how battles over slavery paved the way for freedom's triumph in America.

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front cover of Making an Atlantic World
Making an Atlantic World
Circles, Paths, and Stories from the Colonial South
James Taylor Carson
University of Tennessee Press, 2007
In the South, colonialism threw together three peoples who each played important roles in the creation of a new kind of society. Making an Atlantic World explores how Native Americans, Africans, and Europeans understood the landscapes they inhabited and how, after contact, their views of the world had to accommodate and then accept the presence of the others.

Based on the notion of “founding peoples” rather than “founding fathers,” Making an Atlantic World uses an innovative, interdisciplinary approach to interpret the Colonial South. James Taylor Carson uses historical ethnogeography-a new methodology that brings together the study of history, anthropology, and geography.  This method seeks to incorporate concepts of space and landscape with social perspectives to give students and scholars a better understanding of the forces that shaped the development of a synthesized southern culture.

Unlike previous studies, which considered colonization as a contest over land but rarely considered what the land was and how people understood their relationships to it, Making an Atlantic World shows how the founding peoples perceived their world before contact and how they responded to contact and colonization.

The author contends that each of the three groups involved-the first people, the invading people, and the enslaved people-possessed a particular worldview that they had to adapt to each other to face the challenges brought about by contact.

James Taylor Carson is associate professor of history at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada.  He is the author of <i>Searching for the Bright Path: The Mississippi Choctaws from Prehistory to Removal</i>. His articles and reviews have appeared in <i>Ethnohistory, Journal of Mississippi History, Agricultural History, Journal of Military History</i>, and other publications.


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front cover of Making Industrial Pittsburgh Modern
Making Industrial Pittsburgh Modern
Environment, Landscape, Transportation, and Planning
Joel Tarr and Edward Muller
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019

Pittsburgh’s explosive industrial and population growth between the mid-nineteenth century and the Great Depression required constant attention to city-building. Private, profit-oriented firms, often with government involvement, provided necessary transportation, energy resources, and suitable industrial and residential sites. Meeting these requirements in the region’s challenging hilly topographical and riverine environment resulted in the dramatic reshaping of the natural landscape. At the same time, the Pittsburgh region’s free market, private enterprise emphasis created socio-economic imbalances and badly polluted the air, water, and land. Industrial stagnation, temporarily interrupted by wars, and then followed deindustrialization inspired the formation of powerful public-private partnerships to address the region’s mounting infrastructural, economic, and social problems. The sixteen essays in Making Industrial Pittsburgh Modern examine important aspects of the modernizing efforts to make Pittsburgh and Southwestern Pennsylvania a successful metropolitan region. The city-building experiences continue to influence the region’s economic transformation, spatial structure, and life experience.
 

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front cover of Making Lemonade out of Lemons
Making Lemonade out of Lemons
Mexican American Labor and Leisure in a California Town 1880-1960
José M. Alamillo
University of Illinois Press, 2006

Out of the “lemons” handed to Mexican American workers in Corona, California--low pay, segregated schooling, inadequate housing, and racial discrimination--Mexican men and women made “lemonade” by transforming leisure spaces such as baseball games, parades, festivals, and churches into politicized spaces where workers voiced their grievances, debated strategies for  advancement, and built solidarity. Using oral history interviews, extensive citrus company records, and his own experiences in Corona, José Alamillo argues that Mexican Americans helped lay the groundwork for civil rights struggles and electoral campaigns in the post-World War II era.

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front cover of Making Maine
Making Maine
Statehood and the War of 1812
Joshua M. Smith
University of Massachusetts Press, 2022

Honorable mention for U.S. Maritime History, John Lyman Book Awards

After the Revolutionary War ended, the new American nation grappled with a question about its identity: Were the states sovereign entities or subordinates to a powerful federal government? The War of 1812 brought this vexing issue into sharp relief, as a national government intent on waging an unpopular war confronted a populace in Massachusetts that was vigorously opposed to it. Maine, which at the time was part of Massachusetts, served as the battleground in this political struggle.

Joshua M. Smith recounts an innovative history of the war, focusing on how it specifically affected what was then called the District of Maine. Drawing on archival materials from the United States, Britain, and Canada, Smith exposes the bitter experience of Maine’s citizens during that conflict as they endured multiple hardships, including starvation, burdensome taxation, smuggling, treason, and enemy occupation. War’s inherent miseries, along with a changing relationship between regional and national identities, gave rise to a statehood movement that rejected a Boston-centric worldview in favor of a broadly American identity.

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front cover of Making Medical Doctors
Making Medical Doctors
Science and Medicine at Vanderbilt since Flexner
Timothy C. Jacobson
University of Alabama Press, 1987
A study of the union of science and medicine in a particularly illustrative institutional setting
 
Making Medical Doctors is not a conventional institutional history, but rather a study of the union of science and medicine in a particularly illustrative institutional setting. Its general subject is the institution where science and medicine most dramatically came together: the modern medical school and medical center. Its particular subject is the medical school and center of Vanderbilt University, which was rebuilt in the 1920s as a model for medical education and research. Making Medical Doctors also explores the intellectual and financial sources of institutional development: the worlds of Abraham Flexner, Frederick T. Gates, and Henry S. Pritchett, three foundation masters of the early 20th century. It examines closely the vanished medical world of that generation of doctors who reached the height of their influence in the period between the two world wars and describes how they actually did medicine, surgery, and science.
 
The convergence of science and medicine in the 19th and 20th centuries produced what we know today as modern medicine. The balance of power and interdependence between science and medicine have changed vastly from the 1920s and 1930s, as Vanderbilt’s story clearly illustrates.
 
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Making Mexican Chicago
From Postwar Settlement to the Age of Gentrification
Mike Amezcua
University of Chicago Press, 2022
Winner of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society’s First Book Award: an exploration of how the Windy City became a postwar Latinx metropolis in the face of white resistance.

Though Chicago is often popularly defined by its Polish, Black, and Irish populations, Cook County is home to the third-largest Mexican-American population in the United States. The story of Mexican immigration and integration into the city is one of complex political struggles, deeply entwined with issues of housing and neighborhood control. In Making Mexican Chicago, Mike Amezcua explores how the Windy City became a Latinx metropolis in the second half of the twentieth century.

In the decades after World War II, working-class Chicago neighborhoods like Pilsen and Little Village became sites of upheaval and renewal as Mexican Americans attempted to build new communities in the face of white resistance that cast them as perpetual aliens. Amezcua charts the diverse strategies used by Mexican Chicagoans to fight the forces of segregation, economic predation, and gentrification, focusing on how unlikely combinations of social conservatism and real estate market savvy paved new paths for Latinx assimilation. Making Mexican Chicago offers a powerful multiracial history of Chicago that sheds new light on the origins and endurance of urban inequality.
 
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front cover of The Making of a Mexican American Mayor
The Making of a Mexican American Mayor
Raymond L. Telles of El Paso and the Origins of Latino Political Power
Mario T. García
University of Arizona Press, 2018
Raymond L. Telles was the first Mexican American mayor of a major U.S. city. Elected mayor of El Paso in 1957 and serving for two terms, he went on to become the first Mexican American ambassador in U.S. history, heading the U.S. delegation to Costa Rica. Historian Mario T. García brings Telles’s remarkable story to life in this newly updated edition of his pioneering biography, The Making of a Mexican American Mayor.

In the border metropolis of El Paso, more than half the population is Mexican American, yet this group had been denied effective political representation. Mexican Americans broke this barrier and achieved the “politics of status” through Telles’s stunning 1957 victory. This book captures the excitement of that long-awaited election.

The Making of a Mexican American Mayor also examines Telles’s story as a microcosm of the history of Mexican Americans before and after World War II—the Mexican American Generation. As mayor and ambassador, Telles symbolized this generation’s striving for political participation, and his legacy is evident in the growing number of Latinas/os holding office today.
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front cover of The Making of a Southerner
The Making of a Southerner
William Barclay Napton's Private Civil War
Christopher Phillips
University of Missouri Press, 2008
Christopher Phillips has brought to life a man, a story, and a voice lost in the din of competing post–Civil War narratives that each claim a timeless divide between North and South. William Barclay Napton (1808–1883) was an editor, lawyer, and state supreme court justice who lived in Missouri during the tumultuous American nineteenth century. He was a keen observer of the nation’s sectional politics just as he was a participant in those of his border state, the most divided of any in the nation, in the decades surrounding the Civil War. This book tells the story of one man’s civil war, lived and waged within the broader conflict, and the long shadows both cast.
But Napton’s story moves beyond the Civil War just as it transcends the formal political realm. His is a fascinating tale of identity politics and their shifting currents, by which the highly educated former New Jerseyite became the owner or trustee of nearly fifty slaves and one of the most committed and thoughtful of the nation’s proslavery ideologues. That a “northerner” could make such a life transition in the Border West suggests more than the powerful nature of slavery in antebellum American society. Napton’s story offers provocative insights into the process of southernization, one driven more by sectional ideology and politics than by elements of a distinctive southern culture.
Although Napton’s tragic Civil War experience was a watershed in his southern evolution, that evolution was completed only after he had constructed a politicized memory of the bitter conflict, one that was suffered nowhere worse than in Missouri. This war-driven transformation ultimately defined him and his family, just as it would his border state and region for decades to come. By suffering for the South, losing family and property in his defense of its ideals and principles, he claimed by right what he could not by birth. Napton became a southerner by choice.
Drawn from incomparable personal journals kept for more than fifty years and from voluminous professional and family correspondence, Napton’s life story offers a thoughtful and important perspective on the key issues and events that turned this northerner first into an avowed proslavery ideologue and then into a full southerner. As a prominent jurist who sat on Missouri’s high bench for more than a quarter century, he used his politicized position to give birth to the New South in the Old West. Students, teachers, and general readers of southern history, western history, and Civil War history will find this book of particular interest.
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The Making of American Resorts
Saratoga Springs, Ballston Spa, and Lake George
Corbett, Theodore
Rutgers University Press, 2001
What factors create a successful resort? How did the rise of lavish hotels and spas reflect the changing values of American society as the nineteenth century progressed? Historians have argued that resorts were created to meet the demands of a leisured social elite. Theodore Corbett offers a fresh, compelling argument, demonstrating that resorts created and re-created themselves to keep pace with changing times. Success came with anticipating demands, not just reacting to them.
 
Using an impressive variety of historical documents, Corbett focuses on the conditions underlying the rise—and the demise—of the resorts at Ballston Spa and Caldwell on Lake George. Both towns’ major landlord–developers saw tourism as only one vehicle that could lead to success. As a result of their divided policies, neither town invested in the proper infrastructure to make tourism an immediate succes. Both places were soon overshadowed by Saratoga Springs, which became the premier resort of the upper and middle class.
 
Due to complex interwoven influences, Saratoga Springs was able to supply the amenities needed to attract and retain the patronage of the well heeled. The town provided visitors with lavish hotels, parks, public squares, pleasure gardens, and convenient service alleys. Saratoga Springs also had a work force that was available for the five-month period per year that the spas were active. Corbett examines the history and participation of various ethnic groups in the resort’s service sector: African Americans, Irish, and Native Americans.
 
Corbett also stresses middle-class America’s emulation of the leisure habits of the English aristocracy. Even though these pursuits (hunting, fishing, horse racrting) were dominaterd by men, social rituals were dominated by women, and resorts that accommodated “public domesticity” thrived as the century progressed. The Making of American Resorts offers a window into shifting public values and the structure of commercial tourism.

 

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front cover of The Making of an American
The Making of an American
The Autobiography of a Hungarian Immigrant, Appalachian Entrepreneur, and OSS Officer
Cathy Cassady Corbin
University of Tennessee Press, 2018
Martin Himler emigrated from Hungary to America in 1907, and he arrived in New York City with no money and no plan other than to find work. From these impoverished beginnings, Himler persevered to become a self-made new American. As a coal mining entrepreneur, he established the Himler Coal Company—a bold experiment in a worker-owned mine—founded the small town of Himlerville, Kentucky—a town almost completely populated by Hungarian immigrants—and founded and edited a weekly newspaper, the Magyar Bányászlap (Hungarian Miners’ Journal). During WWII, Himler was called by the United States government to work for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Colonel Himler arrested more than 300 Nazi war criminals and interrogated 40 himself.

Himler’s autobiography tells in Himler’s own words his life story as it evolves into the American dream, wherein hard work results in success. Himler captivates readers from his earliest memories of his childhood in Hungary to his experiences with the OSS.

Following Himler’s death, the manuscript of the autobiography was passed down among Himler family members and then donated to the Martin County Historical and Genealogical Society, Inez, Kentucky, in 2007. Editor Cathy Cassady Corbin’s annotations enhance Himler’s words, while the introduction by scholar Doug Cantrell provides historical context for Himler’s migration to Appalachia. Finally, Charles Fenyvesi’s foreword analyzes Himler’s courageous OSS work.
 
 
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Making of Legends
More True Stories of Frontier America
Mark Dugan
Ohio University Press, 1997
Some of the American West’s grandest legends are about people who in reality were remorseless killers, robbers, and bandits. These outlaws flourished during the 1800s and gained notoriety throughout the following century. How did their fame persist, and what has inspired the publishing, movie, and television industries to recreate their fictionalized careers over and over again?

Mark Dugan brings reality to the forefront in The Making of Legends. Some of the characters in his accounts are practically unknown but deserve more recognition than the bandits whose names are mythic. Exhaustive archival research enables him to recreate such colorful lives as North Carolina’s Malina Blaylock, who, disguised as a man, joined her outlaw husband in the Confederate army; slippery escape artist David Lewis, the Robin Hood of the Cumberland, who finally stopped two bullets in a chaotic Pennsylvania shoot-out; Wyatt Earp, in his mysterious post-OK Corral year, amidst the Coeur d’Alene gold rush; and grim “Laughing Sam” Hartman, of South Dakota.

Dugan sets the stage by explaining how newspapers and dime novels fanned the flames of public fascination with outlaws. He unmasks the real Billy the Kid, traces the paths of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to their historic shoot-out in South America, and masterfully summarizes the Civil War grudges, bloodshed, and wanton destruction along the Kansas-Missouri border that spawned Jesse and Frank James and the Younger brothers gang.

In researching the lawless era of the American frontier, Dugan discovered much information that has never been published — material that will expand readers' views of frontier history and people, both good and bad. The Making of Legends proves that the actual stories of notorious legends can be more exciting, moving, and intriguing than anything dreamed up in a dime novel or a Hollywood fantasy.

With The Making of Legends Mark Dugan’s pursuit of outlaws takes him to Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Texas, California, South Dakota, Idaho, Oregon, Nebraska, Indiana, Wyoming, and Montana.
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The Making of Modern Nevada
Hal Rothman
University of Nevada Press, 2010
Nevada has always been different from other states. Almost from its beginning, Nevada sanctioned behaviors considered immoral elsewhere—gambling, prize-fighting, brothels, easy divorce—and embraced a culture of individualism and disdain for the constraints of more conventional society. In The Making of Modern Nevada, author Hal Rothman focuses on the factors that shaped the state’s original maverick, colonial status and those that later allowed it to emerge as the new standard of American consumer- ism and postmodern liberalism. Rothman introduces the masters who sought to own Nevada, from bonanza kings to Mafia mobsters, as well as the politicians, miners, gamblers, civic and civil-rights leaders, union organ- izers, and casino corporate moguls who guided the state into prosperity and national importance. He also analyzes the role of mob and labor union money in the development of Las Vegas; the Sagebrush Rebellion; the rise of megaresorts and of Las Vegas as a world icon of leisure and pleasure; and the political and social impact of the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. The Making of Modern Nevada is essential reading for anyone who wonders how the Silver State got this way, and where it may be going in the twenty-first century.
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The Making of Pioneer Wisconsin
Voices of Early Settlers
Michael E. Stevens
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2018
From the mid-1830s through the 1850s, more than a half million people settled in Wisconsin. While traveling in ships and wagons, establishing homes, and forming new communities, these men, women, and children recorded their experiences in letters, diaries, and newspaper articles. In their own words, they revealed their fears, joys, frustrations, and hopes for life in this new place. 

The Making of Pioneer Wisconsin provides a unique and intimate glimpse into the lives of these early settlers, as they describe what it felt like to be a teenager in a wagon heading west or an isolated young wife living far from her friends and family. Woven together with context provided by historian Michael E. Stevens, these first-person accounts form a fascinating narrative that deepens our ability to understand and empathize with Wisconsin’s early pioneers. 
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The Making of the Northwest Forest Plan
The Wild Science of Saving Old Growth Ecosystems
K. Norman Johnson
Oregon State University Press, 2023

Tree sitters. Logger protests. Dying timber towns. An iconic species on the brink. The Timber Wars consumed the Pacific Northwest in the late 1980s and early1990s and led political leaders to ask scientists for a solution. The Northwest Forest Plan was the result.  

For most of the twentieth century, the central theme of federal forest management in the Pacific Northwest had been logging old-growth forests to provide a sustained yield of timber. During the 1970s and 1980s, however, a series of studies by young scientists highlighted the destructive impact of that logging on northern spotted owls, salmon, and the old-growth ecosystem itself.  

Combining this new science with newly minted environmental laws like the Endangered Species Act, environmental activists obtained court injunctions to stop old-growth logging on federal land, setting off a titanic struggle in the Pacific Northwest to find a way to accommodate conservation imperatives as well as the logging that provided employment for tens of thousands of people. That effort involved years of controversy and debate, federal courts, five science assessments, Congress, and eventually the president of the United States. It led to creation of the Northwest Forest Plan, which sharply and abruptly shifted the primary goal of federal forestry toward conserving the species and ecosystems of old-growth forests.   Scientists went from spectators to planners and guides, employing their latest scientific findings and expertise to create a forest plan for 20 million acres that would satisfy the courts. The largest upheaval in federal forest management in history had occurred, along with a precipitous decline in timber harvest, and there was no going back.  

In this book, three of the scientists who helped craft that change tell the story as they know it: the causes, development, adoption, and implementation of the Northwest Forest Plan. The book also incorporates personal reflections from the authors, short commentaries and histories from key figures— including spotted owl expert Eric Forsman—and experiences from managers who implemented the Plan as best they could. Legal expert Susan Jane M. Brown helped interpret court cases and Debora Johnson turned spatial data into maps. The final chapters cover the Plan’s ongoing significance and recommendations for conserving forest and aquatic ecosystems in an era of megafires and climate change.

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Making the Carry
The Lives of John and Tchi-Ki-Wis Linklater
Timothy Cochrane
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

An extraordinary illustrated biography of a Métis man and Anishinaabe woman navigating great changes in their homeland along the U.S.–Canada border in the early twentieth century

John Linklater, of Anishinaabeg, Cree, and Scottish ancestry, and his wife, Tchi-Ki-Wis, of the Lac La Croix First Nation, lived in the canoe and border country of Ontario and Minnesota from the 1870s until the 1930s. During that time, the couple experienced radical upheavals in the Quetico–Superior region, including the cutting of white and red pine forests, the creation of Indian reserves/reservations and conservation areas, and the rise of towns, tourism, and mining. With broad geographical sweep, historical significance, and biographical depth, Making the Carry tells their story, overlooked for far too long.

John Linklater, a renowned game warden and skilled woodsman, was also the bearer of traditional ecological knowledge and Indigenous heritage, both of which he was deeply committed to teaching others. He was sought by professors, newspaper reporters, museum personnel, and conservationists—among them Sigurd Olson, who considered Linklater a mentor. Tchi-Ki-Wis, an extraordinary craftswoman, made a sweeping array of necessary yet beautiful objects, from sled dog harnesses to moose calls to birch bark canoes. She was an expert weaver of large Anishinaabeg cedar bark mats with complicated geometric designs, a virtually lost art.

Making the Carry traces the routes by which the couple came to live on Basswood Lake on the international border. John’s Métis ancestors with deep Hudson’s Bay Company roots originally came from Orkney Islands, Scotland, by way of Hudson Bay and Red River, or what is now Winnipeg. His family lived in Manitoba, northwest Ontario, northern Minnesota, and, in the case ofJohn and Tchi-Ki-Wis, on Isle Royale. A journey through little-known Canadian history, the book provides an intimate portrait of Métis people.

Complete with rarely seen photographs of activities from dog mushing to guiding to lumbering, as well as of many objects made by Tchi-Ki-Wis, such as canoes, moccasins, and cedar mats, Making the Carry is a window on a traditional way of life and a restoration of two fascinating Indigenous people to their rightful place in our collective past.

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Making the Frontier Man
Violence, White Manhood, and Authority in the Early Western Backcountry
Matthew C. Ward
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023

Contextualizes the Development of Early American Violence and Gun Culture 

For western colonists in the early American backcountry, disputes often ended in bloodshed and death. Making the Frontier Man examines early life and the origins of lawless behavior in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio from 1750 to 1815. It provides a key to understanding why the trans-Appalachian West was prone to violent struggles, especially between white men. Traumatic experiences of the Revolution and the Forty Years War legitimized killing as a means of self-defense—of property, reputation, and rights—transferring power from the county courts to the ordinary citizen. Backcountry men waged war against American Indians in state-sponsored militias as they worked to establish farms and seize property in the West. And white neighbors declared war on each other, often taking extreme measures to resolve petty disputes that ended with infamous family feuds.  

Making the Frontier Man focuses on these experiences of western expansion and how they influenced American culture and society, specifically the nature of western manhood, which radically transformed in the North American environment. In search of independence and improvement, the new American man was also destitute, frustrated by the economic and political power of his elite counterparts, and undermined by failure. He was aggressive, misogynistic, racist, and violent, and looked to reclaim his dominance and masculinity by any means necessary.  

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Making the Heartland Quilt
A Geographical History of Settlement and Migration in Early-Nineteenth-Century Illinois
Douglas K. Meyer
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000

In Making the Heartland Quilt, Douglas K. Meyer reconstructs the settlement patterns of thirty-three immigrant groups and confirms the emergence of discrete culture regions and regional way stations. Meyer argues that midcontinental Illinois symbolizes a historic test strip of the diverse population origins that unfolded during the Great Migration. Basing his research on the 1850 U.S. manuscript schedules, Meyer dissects the geographical configurations of twenty-three native and ten foreign-born adult male immigrant groups who peopled Illinois. His historical geographical approach leads to the comprehension of a new and clearer map of settlement and migration history in the state.

 
Meyer finds that both cohesive and mixed immigrant settlements were established. Balkan-like immigrant enclaves or islands were interwoven into evolving local, regional, and national settlement networks. The midcontinental location of Illinois, its water and land linkages, and its lengthy north-south axis enhanced cultural diversity. The barrier effect of Lake Michigan contributed to the convergence and mixing of immigrants. Thus, Meyer demonstrates, Illinois epitomizes midwestern dichotomies: northern versus southern; native-born versus foreign-born; rural versus urban; and agricultural versus manufacturing.
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Making the March King
John Philip Sousa's Washington Years, 1854-1893
Patrick Warfiled
University of Illinois Press, 2013
John Philip Sousa's mature career as the indomitable leader of his own touring band is well known, but the years leading up to his emergence as a celebrity have escaped serious attention. In this revealing biography, Patrick Warfield explains how the March King came to be by documenting Sousa's early life and career. Covering the period 1854 to 1893, this study focuses on the community and training that created Sousa, exploring the musical life of late nineteenth-century Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia as a context for Sousa's development.

Warfield examines Sousa's wide-ranging experience composing, conducting, and performing in the theater, opera house, concert hall, and salons, as well as his leadership of the United States Marine Band and the later Sousa Band, early twentieth-century America's most famous and successful ensemble. Sousa composed not only marches during this period but also parlor, minstrel, and art songs; parade, concert, and medley marches; schottisches, waltzes, and polkas; and incidental music, operettas, and descriptive pieces. Warfield's examination of Sousa's output reveals a versatile composer much broader in stylistic range than the bandmaster extraordinaire remembered as the March King.

In particular, Making the March King demonstrates how Sousa used his theatrical training to create the character of the March King. The exuberant bandmaster who pleased audiences was both a skilled and charismatic conductor and a theatrical character whose past and very identity suggested drama, spectacle, and excitement. Sousa's success was also the result of perseverance and lessons learned from older colleagues on how to court, win, and keep an audience. Warfield presents the story of Sousa as a self-made business success, a gifted performer and composer who deftly capitalized on his talents to create one of the most entertaining, enduring figures in American music.

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Making the MexiRican City
Migration, Placemaking, and Activism in Grand Rapids, Michigan
Delia Fernández-Jones
University of Illinois Press, 2023

Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2023

Large numbers of Latino migrants began to arrive in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the 1950s. They joined a small but established Spanish-speaking community of people from Texas, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. Delia Fernández-Jones merges storytelling with historical analysis to recapture the placemaking practices that these Mexicans, Tejanos, and Puerto Ricans used to create a new home for themselves. Faced with entrenched white racism and hostility, Latinos of different backgrounds formed powerful relationships to better secure material needs like houses and jobs and to recreate community cultural practices. Their pan-Latino solidarity crossed ethnic and racial boundaries and shaped activist efforts that emphasized working within the system to advocate for social change. In time, this interethnic Latino alliance exploited cracks in both overt and structural racism and attracted white and Black partners to fight for equality in social welfare programs, policing, and education.

Groundbreaking and revelatory, Making the MexiRican City details how disparate Latino communities came together to respond to social, racial, and economic challenges.

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Making the Mission
Planning and Ethnicity in San Francisco
Ocean Howell
University of Chicago Press, 2015
In the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, residents of the city’s iconic Mission District bucked the city-wide development plan, defiantly announcing that in their neighborhood, they would be calling the shots. Ever since, the Mission has become known as a city within a city, and a place where residents have, over the last century, organized and reorganized themselves to make the neighborhood in their own image.

In Making the Mission, Ocean Howell tells the story of how residents of the Mission District organized to claim the right to plan their own neighborhood and how they mobilized a politics of place and ethnicity to create a strong, often racialized identity—a pattern that would repeat itself again and again throughout the twentieth century. Surveying the perspectives of formal and informal groups, city officials and district residents, local and federal agencies, Howell articulates how these actors worked with and against one another to establish the very ideas of the public and the public interest, as well as to negotiate and renegotiate what the neighborhood wanted. In the process, he shows that national narratives about how cities grow and change are fundamentally insufficient; everything is always shaped by local actors and concerns.
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Making the Scene in the Garden State
Popular Music in New Jersey from Edison to Springsteen and Beyond
Dewar MacLeod
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Making the Scene in the Garden State explores New Jersey’s rich musical heritage through stories about the musicians, listeners and fans who came together to create sounds from across the American popular music spectrum. The book includes chapters on the beginnings of musical recording in Thomas Edison’s factories in West Orange; early recording and the invention of the Victrola at Victor Records’ Camden complex; Rudy Van Gelder’s recording studios (for Blue Note, Prestige, and other jazz labels) in Hackensack and Englewood Cliffs; Zacherley and the afterschool dance television show Disc-o-Teen, broadcast from Newark in the 1960s; Bruce Springsteen’s early years on the Jersey Shore at the Upstage Club in Asbury Park; and, the 1980s indie rock scene centered at Maxwell’s in Hoboken. Concluding with a foray into the thriving local music scenes of today, the book examines the sounds, sights and textures of the locales where New Jerseyans have gathered to rock, bop, and boogie.
 
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Making the Second Ghetto
Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960
Arnold R. Hirsch
University of Chicago Press, 2021
First published in 1983 and praised by the likes of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Thomas Sugrue, Arnold R. Hirsch’s Making the Second Ghetto is the rare book that has only become more piercingly prescient over the years.

Hirsch’s classic and groundbreaking work of urban history is a revelatory look at Chicago in the decades after the Great Depression, a period when the city dealt with its rapidly growing Black population not by working to abolish its stark segregation but by expanding and solidifying it. Even as the civil rights movement rose to prominence, Chicago exploited a variety of methods of segregation—including riots, redevelopment, and a host of new legal frameworks—that provided a national playbook for the emergence of a new kind of entrenched inequality. Hirsch’s chronicle of the strategies employed by ethnic, political, and business interests in reaction to the Great Migration of Southern Blacks in the mid-twentieth century makes startingly clear how the violent reactions of an emergent white population found common ground with policy makers to segregate first a city and then the nation.

This enlarged edition of Making the Second Ghetto features a visionary afterword by historian N. D. B. Connolly, explaining why Hirsch’s book still crackles with “blistering relevance” for contemporary readers.
 
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Making the Second Ghetto
Race and Housing in Chicago 1940-1960
Arnold R. Hirsch
University of Chicago Press, 1998
In Making the Second Ghetto, Arnold Hirsch argues that in the post-depression years Chicago was a "pioneer in developing concepts and devices" for housing segregation. Hirsch shows that the legal framework for the national urban renewal effort was forged in the heat generated by the racial struggles waged on Chicago's South Side. His chronicle of the strategies used by ethnic, political, and business interests in reaction to the great migration of southern blacks in the 1940s describes how the violent reaction of an emergent "white" population combined with public policy to segregate the city.

"In this excellent, intricate, and meticulously researched study, Hirsch exposes the social engineering of the post-war ghetto."—Roma Barnes, Journal of American Studies

"According to Arnold Hirsch, Chicago's postwar housing projects were a colossal exercise in moral deception. . . . [An] excellent study of public policy gone astray."—Ron Grossman, Chicago Tribune

"An informative and provocative account of critical aspects of the process in [Chicago]. . . . A good and useful book."—Zane Miller, Reviews in American History

"A valuable and important book."—Allan Spear, Journal of American History
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Making the White Man's West
Whiteness and the Creation of the American West
Jason E. Pierce
University Press of Colorado, 2016

The West, especially the Intermountain states, ranks among the whitest places in America, but this fact obscures the more complicated history of racial diversity in the region. In Making the White Man’s West, author Jason E. Pierce argues that since the time of the Louisiana Purchase, the American West has been a racially contested space. Using a nuanced theory of historical “whiteness,” he examines why and how Anglo-Americans dominated the region for a 120-year period.

In the early nineteenth century, critics like Zebulon Pike and Washington Irving viewed the West as a “dumping ground” for free blacks and Native Americans, a place where they could be segregated from the white communities east of the Mississippi River. But as immigrant populations and industrialization took hold in the East, white Americans began to view the West as a “refuge for real whites.” The West had the most diverse population in the nation with substantial numbers of American Indians, Hispanics, and Asians, but Anglo-Americans could control these mostly disenfranchised peoples and enjoy the privileges of power while celebrating their presence as providing a unique regional character. From this came the belief in a White Man’s West, a place ideally suited for “real” Americans in the face of changing world.

The first comprehensive study to examine the construction of white racial identity in the West, Making the White Man’s West shows how these two visions of the West—as a racially diverse holding cell and a white refuge—shaped the history of the region and influenced a variety of contemporary social issues in the West today.

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Making Waves
Michigan’s Boat-Building Industry, 1865-2000
Scott M. Peters
University of Michigan Press, 2015
Michigan will always be known as the automobile capital of the world, but the Great Lakes State boasts a similarly rich heritage in the development of boat building in America. By the late nineteenth century, Michigan had emerged as the industry’s hub, drawing together the most talented designers, builders, and engine makers to produce some of the fastest and most innovative boats ever created. Within decades, gifted Michigan entrepreneurs like Christopher Columbus Smith, John L. Hacker, and Gar Wood had established some of the nation’s top boat brands and brought the prospect of boat ownership within reach for American consumers from all ranges of income. More than just revolutionizing recreational boating, Michigan boat builders also left their mark on history—from developing the speedy runabouts favored by illicit rum-runners during the Prohibition era to creating the landing craft that carried Allied forces to shores in Europe and the Pacific in WWII. In Making Waves, Scott M. Peters explores this intriguing story of people, processes, and products—of an industry that evolved in Michigan but would change boating across the world.
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Malibu Diary
Notes From An Urban Refugee
Penelope O'Malley
University of Nevada Press, 2004
In 1986, Penelope O’Malley moved to Malibu, at that time a small community of oddballs and cantankerous isolationists, hoping to find peaceful exile from Los Angeles and a life that had become too frantic and confused. She knew little then of the landscape that she hoped would inspire her—who owned it, what manner of flora and fauna it might support—and she wasn’t much interested. Nor did she give much thought to the people who would become her neighbors. As it turned out, her life on this urban-wildland frontier was very different from what she had planned. Malibu Diary is O’Malley’s account of her years as a resident of this beautiful, beleaguered Southern California coastal community. Here, a landscape of rare beauty conceals geological and climatic treachery, and human presence endangers a rich but fragile ecosystem. Far from isolating herself from the ills of contemporary urban life, O’Malley found herself deeply engaged in a community where realtors lusted after the magnificent hills and beachfront, Native Americans fought to protect the artifacts of their ancestors, and locals, no matter how resistant to development, were forced to address such pressing urban issues as zoning and sewage treatment. Malibu’s decision to incorporate introduced politics into the quiet village while horrendous fires and floods destroyed property and the natural environment. Malibu Diary combines environmental history, personal memoir, and a meditation on the complicated relationships between humans and the landscapes they destroy. It is also the story of a colorful community, of how change has happened—and why—and what it has meant. And it is, ultimately, the story of many communities where people try to resist development, “assuming little responsibility to ameliorate the effects of our having settled here.” 
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Maltese in Michigan
Joseph M. Lubig
Michigan State University Press, 2011

Maltese in Michigan is an enlivening volume depicting the struggles and accomplishments of a singular culture, an immigrant narrative at once recognizable and enigmatic. Without realizing it, most Americans are probably familiar with the Maltese people through the cross displayed by firefighters, which bears a strong similarity in design and meaning to the one used by the Knights of Malta. The noble qualities embodied by the Maltese Cross are reflected in the pride and accomplishments of Maltese immigrants in Michigan, a small but vibrant ethnic group. Rooted in the post–World War II experiences of the 20th century, the Maltese established themselves in the city of Detroit, and thrived due to a strong work ethic and Catholic faith, while maintaining a strong central identity. This volume is a tribute to the Maltese of Michigan and all who have begun anew in an unfamiliar land and culture.

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Mammals Of Nevada
E. Raymond Hall
University of Nevada Press, 1995

First published in 1946, Mammals of Nevada is a monumental work. Hall and a team of more than sixty scientists, graduate students, and staff members of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology in Kansas spent innumerable hours trapping, preparing, studying, and documenting thousands of specimens found within the state. This long out-of-print reference contains extensive examinations of the topography, climate, life zones, and floral and faunal areas. Hundreds of illustrations enhance the work. This updated edition features a new foreword and updated taxonomy by Timothy Lawlor.

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A Man for All Seasons
Monroe Sweetland and the Liberal Paradox
William Robbins
Oregon State University Press, 2015
The life of prominent Oregon political leader Monroe Sweetland spans the spectrum of 20th-century America. Through seven decades, Sweetland experienced the economic collapse of the Great Depression, the unparalleled violence of a nation at war, the divisiveness of Cold War politics, and the cultural and political turmoil of the Vietnam War.

Historian William G. Robbins illuminates the wrenching transformation of American political culture in A Man for All Seasons: Monroe Sweetland and the Liberal Paradox. Racial and economic inequalities motivated much of Sweetland’s civic life, including his lifelong memberships in the American Civil Liberties Committee, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Urban League, the Japanese American Citizens League, and the Red Cross, where Sweetland worked repatriating American prisoners of war after Japan’s surrender.

Robbins’ portrait is holistic, exploring Sweetland’s socialist beginnings, inconsistencies in his politics—especially during the Cold War—and his regional legacy. He was the most important person in the resurgence of the modern, liberal Oregon Democratic Party from the late 1940s to the 1960s.  He joined the National Education Association in 1964 and became the driving force behind the Bilingual Education Act of 1968 and the fight for the age-18 vote, achieved in the ratification of the 26th amendment in 1971. Monroe Sweetland was a nationally prominent figure, whose fights bequeathed to modern America important legislation that shaped its political landscape.
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Managing the River Commons
Fishing and New England's Rural Economy
Erik Reardon
University of Massachusetts Press, 2021
New England once hosted large numbers of anadromous fish, which migrate between rivers and the sea. Salmon, shad, and alewives served a variety of functions within the region's preindustrial landscape, furnishing not only maritime areas but also agricultural communities with an important source of nutrition and a valued article of rural exchange.

Historian Erik Reardon argues that to protect these fish, New England's farmer-fishermen pushed for conservation measures to limit commercial fishing and industrial uses of the river. Beginning in the colonial period and continuing to the mid-nineteenth century, they advocated for fishing regulations to promote sustainable returns, compelled local millers to open their dams during seasonal fish runs, and defeated corporate proposals to erect large-scale dams. As environmentalists work to restore rivers in New England and beyond in the present day, Managing the River Commons offers important lessons about historical conservation efforts that can help guide current campaigns to remove dams and allow anadromous fish to reclaim these waters.
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A Mansion's Memories
Mary Chapman Mathews
University of Alabama Press, 2006
An engaging history of The University of Alabama President’s Mansion
 
As part of The University of Alabama’s 175th anniversary celebration (2006), the new edition of A Mansion’s Memories includes details of the tenures of the four presidents who have served since the Mathews term. Profusely illustrated with 69 black-and-white and 17 color photographs, this classic is sure to be welcomed anew by alumni and friends of the University and all lovers of fine old buildings that still function in their original capacities.
 
 
 
 
 
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The Many and the Few
A Chronicle of the Dynamic Auto Workers
Henry Kraus. With an Introduction by Neil O. Leighton, William J. Meyer, and Nan Pendrell
University of Illinois Press, 1985
The Many and the Few recounts the dramatic "inside" story of one of the pivotal strikes in American history. For six weeks in 1937, workers at General Motors' Flint, Michigan, plant refused to budge from their sit-down strike. That action changed the course of industrial and labor history, when General Motors finally agreed to recognize the United Auto Workers as the sole bargaining agent in all GM plants. Through it all, UAW activist Henry Kraus was there.
 
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The Many Geographies of Urban Renewal
New Perspectives on the Housing Act of 1949
Edited by Douglas R. Appler
Temple University Press, 2023
The consequences of the federal Housing Act of 1949—which supported the clearance and redevelopment of “blighted” areas across the nation—were felt by communities of all sizes, not just large cities. The Many Geographies of Urban Renewal presents a more comprehensive view of the federal urban renewal program by situating the experiences of large cities like Baltimore, MD and Philadelphia PA alongside other geographies, such as the small city of Waterville, ME, suburban St. Louis County in Missouri, the State of New York, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and others.  Chapters identify trends and connections that cut across jurisdictional boundaries, investigate who used federal funds, how those funds were used, and examine the profound short and long-term consequences of the program.
 
Taken as a whole, the essays showcase the unexpected diversity of how different communities used the federal urban renewal program. The Many Geographies of Urban Renewal allows us to better understand what was arguably the most significant urban policy of the 20th century, and how that policy  shaped the American landscape.
 
Contributors include Francesca Russello Ammon, Brent Cebul, Robert B. Fairbanks, Leif Fredrickson, Colin Gordon, David Hochfelder, Robert K. Nelson, Benjamin D. Lisle, Stacy Kinlock Sewell and the editor.
 
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Manzanar Mosaic
Essays and Oral Histories on America's First World War II Japanese American Concentration Camp
Arthur A. Hansen
University Press of Colorado, 2023
Providing a new mosaic-style view of Manzanar’s complex history through unedited interviews and published scholarship, Arthur A. Hansen presents a deep, longitudinal portrait of the politics and social formation of the Japanese American community before, during, and after World War II.
 
To begin, Hansen presents two essays, the first centering on his work with Ronald Larson in the mid-1970s on the history of Doho, a Japanese and English dual-language newspaper, and the second an article with David Hacker on revisionist ethnic perspectives of the Manzanar “riot.” A second section is composed of five oral history interviews of selected camp personalities—a female Nisei journalist, a male Nisei historical documentarian,  a male Kibei Communist block manager, the Caucasian wife and comrade of the block manager, and the male Kibei who was the central figure in the Manzanar Riot/Revolt—that offer powerful insight into the controversial content of the two essays that precede them.
 
Manzanar can be understood only by being considered within the much wider context of Japanese American community formation and contestation before, during, and after World War II. A varied collection of scholarly articles and interviews, Manzanar Mosaic engages diverse voices and considers multiple perspectives to illuminate aspects of the Japanese American community, the ethnic press, the Manzanar concentration camp, and the movement for redress and reparations.
 
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Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future
Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawai'i
Candace Fujikane
Duke University Press, 2021
In Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future, Candace Fujikane contends that the practice of mapping abundance is a radical act in the face of settler capital's fear of an abundance that feeds. Cartographies of capital enable the seizure of abundant lands by enclosing "wastelands" claimed to be underdeveloped. By contrast, Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) cartographies map the continuities of abundant worlds. Vital to restoration movements is the art of kilo, intergenerational observation of elemental forms encoded in storied histories, chants, and songs. As a participant in these movements, Fujikane maps the ecological lessons of these elemental forms: reptilian deities who protect the waterways, sharks who swim into the mountains, the navigator Māui who fishes up the islands, the deities of snow and mists on Mauna Kea. The laws of these elements are now being violated by toxic waste dumping, leaking military jet fuel tanks, and astronomical-industrial complexes. As Kānaka Maoli and their allies stand as land and water protectors, Fujikane calls for a profound attunement to the elemental forms in order to transform climate events into renewed possibilities for planetary abundance.
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Mapping And Imagination In The Great Basin
A Cartographic History
Richard V. Francaviglia
University of Nevada Press, 2005
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Mapping Historical Las Vegas
A Cartographic Journey
Joe Weber
University of Nevada Press, 2022
Las Vegas has a long and rich history that extends far beyond the clichés of “sin city,” the Mafia, Elvis, or mindless urban sprawl. Mapping Historical Las Vegas takes readers beyond stereotypical tales and provides an illustrated cartographic exploration of the entire region from the time of the ancient Anasazi farmers to the present. Weber shows the development of the surrounding area, revealing a geographical perspective on the city’s growth, including the influence of water, public land surveys, transportation routes, and the construction of casinos on Las Vegas’s evolution.

Reaching past the city limits, Mapping Historical Las Vegas also examines the development of public lands, military bases, and the canyons and valleys of the Colorado River before the Hoover Dam was built and Lake Mead was created. Weber also includes information on dams, highways, railroads, and other projects that were planned but never constructed— showing what might have been in one of the nation’s largest cities.

With 137 color maps generated using Geographic Information Systems, along with extensive mapping by Weber that draws on his decades of experience in the region, Mapping Historical Las Vegas offers a unique perspective on one of the world’s most famous desert cities.
 
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Mapping Identity
The Creation of the Coeur d'Alene Indian Reservation, 1805-1902
Laura Woodworth-Ney
University Press of Colorado, 2004
Mapping Identity traces the formation of the Coeur d'Alene Indian Reservation in northern Idaho from the introduction of the Jesuit notion of "reduction" in the 1840s to the finalization of reservation boundaries in the 1890s. Using Indian Agency records, congressional documents, Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) records, Jesuit missionary reports, and tribal accounts, historian Laura Woodworth-Ney argues that the reservation-making process for the Coeur d'Alenes reflected more than just BIA policy objectives. It was also the result of a complex interplay of Jesuit mission goals, the Schitsu'umsh chief Andrew Seltice's assimilationist policy, and political pressure from local non-Indians. Woodworth-Ney concludes that in creating the reservation, BIA officials and tribal leaders mapped boundaries not only of territory, but also of tribal identity.

Mapping Identity builds on the growing body of literature that presents a more complex picture of federal policy, native identity, and the creation of Indian reservations in the western United States. It will be important to readers interested in western U.S. history, legal and administrative history, Native American history, and interior Northwest history.

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Mapping The Empty
Eight Artists And Nevada
William L. Fox
University of Nevada Press, 1999
Foreword by Jeff Kelley. Nevada's open spaces have long inspired complex responses from a population largely shaped by European sensibilities toward land and its uses. In Mapping the Empty Fox considers how eight of the state's most distinguished and innovative contemporary artists have responded to the harsh, enigmatic landscapes of the Great Basin and how, through their work, they have expressed and helped to define our attitudes toward the space we call the West. The artists are Jim McCormick, Rita Deanin Abbey, Dennis Parks, Walter McNamara, Robert Beckmann, Michael Heizer, Bill Barker, and Mary Ann Bonjorni.
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Mapping Wisconsin History
Teacher's Guide and Student Materials
Wisconsin Cartographers' Guild
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2000
The joy of maps abounds in this set of exciting classroom materials from the Wisconsin Historical Society's Office of School Services and the Wisconsin Cartographers' Guild, creators of the best-selling book, Wisconsin's Past and Present: A Historical Atlas. For use either independently or as a companion to the Atlas, this publication includes seven color transparencies depicting: landscape and glaciation; American Indians; migration and ethnic settlement; cities and counties; mining; timber; agriculture; and industry and transportation. Background information and classroom activities, as well as reproducible worksheets and blackline transparencies, give educators the opportunity to explore and integrate Wisconsin history and geography with students from grades four and up.
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Mapping Wonderlands
Illustrated Cartography of Arizona, 1912–1962
Dori Griffin
University of Arizona Press, 2013
Though tourism now plays a recognized role in historical research and regional studies, the study of popular touristic images remains sidelined by chronological histories and objective statistics. Further, Arizona remains underexplored as an early twentieth-century tourism destination when compared with nearby California and New Mexico. With the notable exception of the Grand Canyon, little has been written about tourism in the early days of Arizona’s statehood.

Mapping Wonderlands fills part of this gap in existing regional studies by looking at early popular pictorial maps of Arizona. These cartographic representations of the state utilize formal mapmaking conventions to create a place-based state history. They introduce illustrations, unique naming conventions, and written narratives to create carefully visualized landscapes that emphasize the touristic aspects of Arizona.

Analyzing the visual culture of tourism in illuminating detail, this book documents how Arizona came to be identified as an appealing tourism destination. Providing a historically situated analysis, Dori Griffin draws on samples from a comprehensive collection of materials generated to promote tourism during Arizona’s first half-century of statehood. She investigates the relationship between natural and constructed landscapes, visual culture, and narratives of place. Featuring sixty-six examples of these aesthetically appealing maps, the book details how such maps offered tourists and other users a cohesive and storied image of the state. Using historical documentation and rhetorical analysis, this book combines visual design and historical narrative to reveal how early-twentieth-century mapmakers and map users collaborated to imagine Arizona as a tourist’s paradise.
 
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March to Independence
The Revolutionary War in the Southern Colonies, 1775–1776
Michael Cecere
Westholme Publishing, 2021

The American Revolutionary War began when Massachusetts militiamen and British troops clashed at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775. Two months later, a much larger engagement occurred at Bunker Hill in Boston. The conflict then expanded into a continent-wide war for independence from Great Britain. Or so we are taught. A closer look at events in the South in the eighteen months following Lexington and Concord tells different story. The practice of teaching the Revolutionary War as one generalized conflict between the American colonies and Great Britain assumes the South’s support for the Revolutionary War was a foregone conclusion. However, once shots were fired, it was not certain that the southern colonies would support the independence movement. What is clear is that both the fledgling American republic and the British knew that the southern colonies were critical to any successful prosecution of the war by either side.
In March to Independence: The American Revolution in the Southern Colonies, 1775–1776, historian Michael Cecere, consulting primary source documents, examines how Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia ended up supporting the colonies to the north, while East Florida remained within the British sphere. South Carolina, Georgia, and East Florida all retained their royal governors through the summer of 1775, and no military engagements occurred in any of the southern colonies in the six months following the battles in Massachusetts. The situation changed significantly in the fall, however, with armed clashes in Virginia and South Carolina; by early 1776 the war had spread to all of the southern colonies except East Florida. Although their march to independence did not follow the exact route as the colonies to the north, events in the South pulled the southern colonists in the same direction, culminating with a united Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. This book explores the crucial events in the southern colonies that led all but East Florida to support the American cause.
 

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Marcha
Latino Chicago and the Immigrant Rights Movement
Edited by Amalia Pallares and Nilda Flores-Gonzalez
University of Illinois Press, 2010

Marcha is a multidisciplinary survey of the individuals, organizations, and institutions that have given shape and power to the contemporary immigrant rights movement in Chicago. A city with longstanding historic ties to immigrant activism, Chicago has been the scene of a precedent-setting immigrant rights mobilization in 2006 and subsequent mobilizations in 2007 and 2008.

Positing Chicago as a microcosm of the immigrant rights movement on national level, these essays plumb an extraordinarily rich set of data regarding recent immigrant rights activities, defining the cause as not just a local quest for citizenship rights, but a panethnic, transnational movement. The result is a timely volume likely to provoke debate and advance the national conversation about immigration in innovative ways.

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Marching Students
Chicana and Chicano Activism in Education, 1968 to the Present
Margarita Berta-Avila
University of Nevada Press, 2011
In 1968 over 10,000 Chicana/o high school students in East Los Angeles walked out of their schools in the first major protest against racism and educational inequality staged by Mexican Americans in the United States. They ignited the Mexican-American civil rights movement, which opened the doors to higher education and equal opportunity in employment for Mexican Americans and other Latinos previously excluded. Marching Students is a collaborative effort by Chicana/o scholars in several fields to place the 1968 walkouts and Chicana and Chicano Civil Rights Movement in historical context, highlighting the contribution of Chicana/o educators, students, and community activists to minority education.
Contributors: Alejandro Covarrubias, Xico González, Eracleo Guevara, Adriana Katzew, Lilia R. De Katzew, Rita Kohli, Edward M. Olivos, Alejo Padilla, Carmen E. Quintana, Evelyn M. Rangel-Medina, Marianna Rivera, Daniel G. Solórzano, Carlos Tejeda
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Marfa
The Transformation of a West Texas Town
By Kathleen Shafer
University of Texas Press, 2019

A small town in the vast desert of West Texas, Marfa attracts visitors from around the world to its art foundations and galleries, film and music festivals, and design and architecture symposiums. While newcomers sometimes see it as “another Santa Fe,” long-time residents often take a bemused, even disapproving attitude toward the changes that Marfa has undergone since artist Donald Judd came to town in the 1970s and began creating spaces for his own and other artists’ work. They remember when ranching and the military formed the basis of the town’s economy, even as they acknowledge that tourist dollars are now essential to Marfa’s sustainability

Marfa tells an engaging story of how this isolated place became a beacon in the art world, like the famous Marfa Lights that draw curious spectators into the West Texas night. As Kathleen Shafer delves into the town’s early history, the impact of Donald Judd, the expansion of arts programming, and the increase in tourism, she unlocks the complex interplay between the particularities of the place, the forces of commerce and growth, the textures of local culture and tradition, and the transformative role of artists and creative work. Bookending her story between two iconic artworks—the whimsical Prada Marfa and the crass Playboy Marfa—Shafer illuminates the shifting cultural landscape of Marfa, showing why this place has become a mecca for so many and how the influx of newcomers has transformed its character.

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Margaret Murray Washington
The Life and Times of a Career Clubwoman
Sheena Harris
University of Tennessee Press, 2021

Born enslaved in 1861, by 1892 Margaret Murray Washington of Macon, Mississippi, married the twice-widowed race leader Booker T. Washington and joined the ranks of the rising black middle class. While one cannot discount the accomplishments of her storied husband, Washington’s own successes warrant further exploration. In this first biography of Margaret Murray Washington, author Sheena Harris discusses Washington’s importance as an active clubwoman, educational reformer, and integral partner to her husband and his success with the Tuskegee Institute.

Individual black, female leadership continues to be a blind spot in much scholarly historical literature. Washington was an important educator and clubwoman whose influence emanated from her own planning and actions. As Lady Principal, Washington was sincere and earnest in her campaign to improve Tuskegee Institute. She also transformed her community through her local club organizations. In addition, Washington cofounded the National Federation of Afro-American Women (1895) and the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) (1896). Harris illustrates how Washington improved race relations as a whole through local and national organizations such as the Tuskegee Woman’s Club, the NACW, and 1922 creation of the International Council of Women of the Darker Races (ICWDR). Harris explains clearly that Washington took her leadership positions seriously and strategically worked to expand opportunities for blacks through such organizations.

Washington’s life provides a glimpse into the inner workings of the Black Women’s Club Movement and illuminates the experiences of a race woman who came of age during the Jim Crow South. Harris’s biography is a convincing portrait of an under-studied black woman in the early civil rights movement and places Washington within the pantheon of other important women of the era.

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Maria Baldwin's Worlds
A Story of Black New England and the Fight for Racial Justice
Kathleen Weiler
University of Massachusetts Press, 2019
Maria Baldwin (1856–1922) held a special place in the racially divided society of her time, as a highly respected educator at a largely white New England school and an activist who carried on the radical spirit of the Boston area's internationally renowned abolitionists from a generation earlier.

African American sociologist Adelaide Cromwell called Baldwin "the lone symbol of Negro progress in education in the greater Boston area" during her lifetime. Baldwin used her respectable position to fight alongside more radical activists like William Monroe Trotter for full citizenship for fellow members of the black community. And, in her professional and personal life, she negotiated and challenged dominant white ideas about black womanhood. In Maria Baldwin's Worlds, Kathleen Weiler reveals both Baldwin's victories and what fellow activist W. E. B. Du Bois called her "quiet courage" in everyday life, in the context of the wider black freedom struggle in New England.
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Maria's Journey
Ramon Arredondo and Trisha (Hull) Arredondo
Indiana Historical Society Press, 2010
Born into the Mexican Revolution, Maria Perez entered an arranged marriage at age fourteen to Miguel Arredondo. The couple and their tiny daughter immigrated to the United States in the 1920s, living in a boxcar while Miguel worked for a Texas railroad and eventually settling in East Chicago, Indiana, where Miguel worked for Inland Steel. Their story includes much of early-twentieth-century America: the rise of unions, the plunge into the Great Depression, the patriotism of World War II, and the starkness of McCarthyism. It is flavored by delivery men hawking fruit and ice, street sports, and Saturday matinees that began with newsreels. Immigration status colors every scene, adding to their story deportation and citizenship, generational problems unique to new immigrants, and a miraculous message of hope.
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The Marion Thompson Wright Reader
Edited and with a Biographical Introduction by Graham Russell Gao Hodges
Graham Russell Gao Hodges
Rutgers University Press, 2022
In The Marion Thompson Wright Reader, acclaimed historian Graham Russell Hodges provides a scholarly, accessible introduction to a modern edition of Marion Thompson Wright’s classic book, The Education of Negroes in New Jersey and to her full body of scholarly work. First published in 1941 by Teachers College Press, Thompson’s landmark study has been out of print for decades. Such rarity understates the book’s importance. Thompson’s major book and her life are significant for the histories of New Jersey, African Americans, local and national, women’s and education history. Drawing upon Wright's work, existing scholarship, and new archival research, this new landmark scholarly edition, which includes an all-new biography of this pioneering scholar, underscores the continued relevance of Marion Thompson Wright.
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Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith
New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina
Vincanne Adams
Duke University Press, 2013
Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith is an ethnographic account of long-term recovery in post-Katrina New Orleans. It is also a sobering exploration of the privatization of vital social services under market-driven governance. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, public agencies subcontracted disaster relief to private companies that turned the humanitarian work of recovery into lucrative business. These enterprises profited from the very suffering that they failed to ameliorate, producing a second-order disaster that exacerbated inequalities based on race and class and leaving residents to rebuild almost entirely on their own.

Filled with the often desperate voices of residents who returned to New Orleans, Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith describes the human toll of disaster capitalism and the affect economy it has produced. While for-profit companies delayed delivery of federal resources to returning residents, faith-based and nonprofit groups stepped in to rebuild, compelled by the moral pull of charity and the emotional rewards of volunteer labor. Adams traces the success of charity efforts, even while noting an irony of neoliberalism, which encourages the very same for-profit companies to exploit these charities as another market opportunity. In so doing, the companies profit not once but twice on disaster.

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The Marlin Compound
Letters of a Singular Family
By Frank Calvert Oltorf
University of Texas Press, 1968

Written over a hundred-year period, the letters of Zenas Bartlett and his family and friends capture the vitality that marked the expansion and development of Texas during the nineteenth century. Warm, humorous, and illuminating, these letters and other papers record the changes in a family and in a region as bustling towns replaced clusters of log cabins and the hardships of the frontier were gradually mellowed by the luxuries of settled life.

The earliest letters describe the adventures of young Zenas Bartlett, who left his home in Maine and traveled first to Alabama and then to camps of the California Gold Rush. A new venture brought him to Marlin, Texas, in 1854. The transformation of a wilderness area into a prosperous community is the unifying theme of the rest of the collection.

Churchill Jones, Bartlett’s future father-in-law, writes about his struggles to establish a cotton plantation at the Falls of the Brazos River. Zenas’ antebellum letters perceptively reveal the poignancy of his partner’s death and the joys of his own fulfilling marriage.

John Watkins, an associate in Bartlett’s store, expresses the pride, loyalty, and eventual disillusionment of a soldier in the Civil War. Zenas’ correspondence with his family in the East describes the privations endured by Marlin during Reconstruction.

Beguiling Mollie Dickson’s schoolgirl journal and the letters of Zenas’ large family depict happier times during the eighties and nineties. The last letters were written by Lottie Barnes, a former servant who recalls the tranquil years following the turn of the century. An epilogue brings the story to conclusion, and selections from the author’s delightful collection of family photographs illustrate the book.

Frank Calvert Oltorf was reared on the “Marlin Compound,” the home where members of this singular family lived or visited and where many of the manuscripts included in this book were found. His comments bind the letters in a narrative of pioneering, which is also a humorous and human family history.

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A Marriage Out West
Theresa and Frank Russell’s Explorations in Arizona, 1900–1903
Theresa Russell, Nancy J. Parezo, and Don D. Fowler
University of Arizona Press, 2020
A Marriage Out West is an intimate biographical account of two fascinating figures of twentieth-century archaeology. Frances Theresa Peet Russell, an educator, married Harvard anthropologist Frank Russell in June 1900. They left immediately on a busman’s honeymoon to the Southwest. Their goal was twofold: to travel to an arid environment to quiet Frank’s tuberculosis and to find archaeological sites to support his research.

During their brief marriage, the Russells surveyed almost all of Arizona Territory, traveling by horse over rugged terrain and camping in the back of a Conestoga wagon in harsh environmental conditions. Nancy J. Parezo and Don D. Fowler detail the grit and determination of the Russells’ unique collaboration over the course of three field seasons. Delivering the first biographical account of Frank Russell’s life, this book brings detail to his life and work from childhood until his death in 1903. Parezo and Fowler analyze the important contributions Theresa and Frank made to the bourgeoning field of archaeology and Akimel O’odham (Pima) ethnography. They also offer never-before-published information on Theresa’s life after Frank’s death and her subsequent career as a professor of English literature and philosophy at Stanford University.

In 1906 Theresa Russell published In Pursuit of a Graveyard: Being the Trail of an Archaeological Wedding Journey, a twelve-part serial in Out West magazine. Theresa’s articles constituted an experiential narrative based on field journals and remembrances of life in the northern Southwest. The work offers both a biography and a seasonal field narrative that emphasized personal experiences rather than traditional scientific field notes. Included in A Marriage Out West, Theresa’s writing provides an invaluable participant’s perspective of early 1900s American archaeology and ethnography and life out West.
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Married To A Daughter Of The Land
Spanish-Mexican Women And Interethnic Marriage In California, 1820-80
Maria Raquel Casas
University of Nevada Press, 2009
The surprising truth about intermarriage in 19th-Century California. Until recently, most studies of the colonial period of the American West have focused on the activities and agency of men. Now, historian María Raquél Casas examines the role of Spanish-Mexican women in the development of California. She finds that, far from being pawns in a male-dominated society, Californianas of all classes were often active and determined creators of their own destinies, finding ways to choose their mates, to leave unsatisfactory marriages, and to maintain themselves economically. Using a wide range of sources in English and Spanish, Casas unveils a picture of women’s lives in these critical decades of California’s history. She shows how many Spanish-Mexican women negotiated the precarious boundaries of gender and race to choose Euro-American husbands, and what this intermarriage meant to the individuals involved and to the larger multiracial society evolving from California’s rich Hispanic and Indian past. Casas’s discussion ranges from California’s burgeoning economy to the intimacies of private households and ethnically mixed families. Here we discover the actions of real women of all classes as they shaped their own identities. Married to a Daughter of the Land is a significant and fascinating contribution to the history of women in the American West and to our understanding of the complex role of gender, race, and class in the Borderlands of the Southwest.
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Mary Austin Holley
The Texas Diary, 1835–1838
Edited by J. P. Bryan
University of Texas Press, 1965
Mary Austin Holley (1784–1846), a cousin of Stephen F. Austin, journeyed to Texas on three separate occasions. Her first visit, in 1831, resulted in the publication of her book, Texas. Her second and third trips, in 1835 and 1837, were depicted in her diary. This witty, observant, and highly perceptive woman captured the infant Texas in her journal—the Mexican state moving toward rebellion and the new Republic, dynamic and struggling with a great destiny. The Holley diary is an important insight into the social and political history of early Texas.
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Mary Lincoln Demystified
Frequently Asked Questions about Abraham’s Wife
Donna D. McCreary
Southern Illinois University Press, 2022
WINNER, 2023 Illinois State Historical Society Superior Achievement Award in “Books, Scholarly”!

Answering the most enigmatic questions about Mary Lincoln’s life

After portraying Mary Lincoln in hundreds of performances and giving lectures over a more than thirty-year career, Donna D. McCreary has fielded every imaginable inquiry about the First Lady. Gathered here, readers will find answers to the most frequently asked questions to come from live audiences. This first question-and-answer book arises directly from a public’s enduring curiosity with one the country’s most important historical figures. Decades of conversations with audiences, scholars, and relatives of the Todd family frame McCreary’s intimate and devoted research to offer a new and unique portrait of the most tragic First Lady. 

Though Mary has been portrayed in books and film, McCreary’s book contains information not found elsewhere—details others have overlooked and those that would not fit well into a narrative history—such as lists of Mary’s beaus, servants, and the people the Todd family enslaved; appendixes that present mini-biographies of families and friends; and a uniquely thorough timeline. Mary Lincoln Demystified covers areas in which McCreary’s audiences have expressed the most interest: Mary’s sanity, her family relationships, her views on slavery and African Americans, her personality and habits, and what happened to her possessions and children after she died.

While sympathetic to the woman she portrayed for two decades, McCreary examines both sides of controversial issues and presents the facts with her trademark style and flair. More than a good read, McCreary’s Q&A factbook, based as it is on decades of extensive research in primary and secondary sources, will be the definitive resource for answers about Mary for years to come.
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Mary McLeod Bethune
Village of God
Yahya Jongintaba
University of Tennessee Press, 2021

Mary McLeod Bethune was born on May 10, 1875, in a log cabin in rural Sumter County, South Carolina. She was the fifteenth child among seventeen siblings but the first born free of the bonds of slavery. As a child she attended a Presbyterian mission school in nearby Mayesville and Scotia Seminary in Concord, North Carolina. After some years at Scotia she was admitted in 1894 to the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. Her two years of training at Moody did not lead to missionary work in Africa, as she had dreamed, but to missionlike teaching positions in the South and eventually her founding, in 1904, of the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute for Girls, in Daytona Beach, Florida. That institution would grow to the present-day Bethune-Cookman University.

In this religious biography, author Yahya Jongintaba traces Bethune’s life of service in lively prose, structuring his book in a five-part framework that organizes his subject’s life in parallel with the Lord’s Prayer and virtues identified by Bethune herself: freedom, creativity, integrity, discipline, and love. With unfettered access to Bethune’s personal archive, Jongintaba paints a picture of a mother figure and mentor to generations, a nearsaint who lived “a blameless life for four-score years.” With deep empathy and the kind of “spiritual understanding” that Bethune had despaired of finding in a biographer in her own lifetime (despite attempts by publishers and herself to find just the right person), Jongintaba endeavors to achieve in his biography what Bethune wrote that she hoped to accomplish in an autobiography that never materialized: to “give to the world the real Mary McLeod Bethune’s life as I have lived it.”

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Massachusetts Treasures
A Guide to Marvelous, Must-See Museums
Chuck D'Imperio
University of Massachusetts Press, 2018
Well known for its world-renowned art museums—from the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston—Massachusetts is also home to numerous institutions with more eclectic collections and, oftentimes, lower profiles. These include Mansfield's National Black Doll Museum of History and Culture, Watertown's Plumbing Museum, and Granville's Noble and Cooley Center for Historic Preservation.

In Massachusetts Treasures, Chuck D'Imperio explores more than forty museums scattered throughout the Bay State, from Cape Cod to the Berkshires. Many—but not all—might be considered "offbeat," and each and every one is enchanting. Through personal visits and interviews with founders and directors, D'Imperio offers an inside glimpse into some of the Commonwealth's most unique museums, providing a valuable guide for road warriors and history buffs discovering Massachusetts either for the first or the tenth time.
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Massacre at the Yuma Crossing
Spanish Relations with the Quechans, 1779-1782
Mark Santiago
University of Arizona Press, 1998
The quiet of the dawn was rent by the screams of war. Scores, perhaps hundreds, of Quechan and Mohave warriors leaped from concealment, rushing the plaza from all sides. Painted for battle and brandishing lances, bows, and war clubs, the Indians killed every Spaniard they could catch.

The route from the Spanish presidial settlements in upper Sonora to the Colorado River was called the Camino del Diablo, the "Road of the Devil." Running through the harshest of deserts, this route was the only way for the Spanish to transport goods overland to their settlements in California. At the end of the route lay the only passable part of the lower Colorado, and the people who lived around the river, the Yumas or Quechans, initially joined into a peaceful union with the Spanish. When the relationship soured and the Yumas revolted in 1781, it essentially ended Spanish settlement in the area, dashed the dreams of the mission builders, and limited Spanish expansion into California and beyond.

In Massacre at the Yuma Crossing, Mark Santiago introduces us to the important and colorful actors involved in the dramatic revolt of 1781: Padre Francisco Garcés, who discovered a path from Sonora to California, made contact with the Yumas and eventually became their priest; Salvador Palma, the informal leader of the Yuman people, whose decision to negotiate with the Spanish earned him a reputation as a peacebuilder in the region, which eventually caused his downfall; and Teodoro de Croix, the Spanish commandant-general, who, breaking with traditional settlement practice, established two pueblos among the Quechans without an adequate garrison or mission, thereby leaving the settlers without any sort of defense when the revolt finally took place.

Massacre at the Yuma Crossing not only tells the story of the Yuma Massacre with new details but also gives the reader an understanding of the pressing questions debated in the Spanish Empire at the time: What was the efficacy of the presidios? How extensive should the power of the Catholic mission priests be? And what would be the future of Spain in North America?
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Mastering Boston Harbor
Courts, Dolphins, and Imperiled Waters
Charles M. Haar
Harvard University Press, 2005

Mastering Boston Harbor chronicles how America's most glorious and historically significant harbor was rescued from decades of pollution and neglect by a community of caring citizens who were linked to an environmentally committed judge and his special harbor master. This dynamic public-private team shaped novel legal and political procedures for governing and restoring the harbor.

Charles Haar provides a fascinating study of the convergence of judicial supervision with political, environmental, financial, and technological interests. He challenges those who will instantly decry an "activist" judiciary and pulls back the curtain on the serious problems a court faces when it must grapple with an intractable problem affecting public interest. Haar demonstrates that at times only a resolute judiciary can energize and coordinate the branches of government to achieve essential contemporary social goals--goals that are endorsed and supported by a majority whose voice is often ignored in legislative and executive back rooms.

Because of his experience as special master in the dispute, Haar provides the reader with an insider's view of a modern brand of judicial decision-making that is not anti-majoritarian, and could be applied to similar crises in which the legislative and executive branches of government are impotent. Citizens concerned about the conflict between unbridled economic liberty and environmental protection will gain important insight from this eyewitness account of how the "harbor of shame" became a vibrant focal point for the renewal of Boston as a world-class city.

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Mastering the Inland Seas
How Lighthouses, Navigational Aids, and Harbors Transformed the Great Lakes and America
Theodore J. Karamanski
University of Wisconsin Press, 2020
Theodore J. Karamanski's sweeping maritime history demonstrates the far-ranging impact that the tools and infrastructure developed for navigating the Great Lakes had on the national economies, politics, and environment of continental North America. Synthesizing popular as well as original historical scholarship, Karamanski weaves a colorful narrative illustrating how disparate private and government interests transformed these vast and dangerous waters into the largest inland water transportation system in the world.
Karamanski explores both the navigational and sailing tools of First Nations peoples and the dismissive and foolhardy attitude of early European maritime sailors. He investigates the role played by commercial boats in the Underground Railroad, as well as how the federal development of crucial navigational resources exacerbated sectionalism in the antebellum United States. Ultimately Mastering the Inland Sea shows the undeniable environmental impact of technologies used by the modern commercial maritime industry. This expansive story illuminates the symbiotic relationship between infrastructure investment in the region's interconnected waterways and North America's lasting economic and political development.
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Masterpieces of the Peabody Museum, Harvard University
C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky
Harvard University Press, 1978
This unpretentious catalog, issued for the Peabody's "masterpieces" exhibit of 1978, presents some of the best-known artifacts of the museum, along with brief explanations of each piece's significance, heritage, and meaning. Contributors include Marie Jeanne Adams, Jeffrey P. Brain, J. O. Brew, Wilburt K. Carter, Kwang-chih Chang, Clemency C. Coggins, Carleton S. Coon, Ian Graham, Tatiana Proskouriakoff, Peter Wells, and others.
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Masters of the Middle Waters
Indian Nations and Colonial Ambitions along the Mississippi
Jacob F. Lee
Harvard University Press, 2019

A riveting account of the conquest of the vast American heartland that offers a vital reconsideration of the relationship between Native Americans and European colonists, and the pivotal role of the mighty Mississippi.

America’s waterways were once the superhighways of travel and communication. Cutting a central line across the landscape, with tributaries connecting the South to the Great Plains and the Great Lakes, the Mississippi River meant wealth, knowledge, and power for those who could master it. In this ambitious and elegantly written account of the conquest of the West, Jacob Lee offers a new understanding of early America based on the long history of warfare and resistance in the Mississippi River valley.

Lee traces the Native kinship ties that determined which nations rose and fell in the period before the Illinois became dominant. With a complex network of allies stretching from Lake Superior to Arkansas, the Illinois were at the height of their power in 1673 when the first French explorers—fur trader Louis Jolliet and Jesuit priest Jacques Marquette—made their way down the Mississippi. Over the next century, a succession of European empires claimed parts of the midcontinent, but they all faced the challenge of navigating Native alliances and social structures that had existed for centuries. When American settlers claimed the region in the early nineteenth century, they overturned 150 years of interaction between Indians and Europeans.

Masters of the Middle Waters shows that the Mississippi and its tributaries were never simply a backdrop to unfolding events. We cannot understand the trajectory of early America without taking into account the vast heartland and its waterways, which advanced and thwarted the aspirations of Native nations, European imperialists, and American settlers alike.

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Matchless Organization
The Confederate Army Medical Department
Guy R. Hasegawa, Foreword by F. Terry Hambrecht
Southern Illinois University Press, 2021
The essential reference about a surprisingly well-organized medical department
 
Despite the many obstacles it had to overcome—including a naval blockade, lack of a strong industrial base, and personnel unaccustomed to military life—the Richmond-based Confederate Army Medical Department developed into a robust organization that nimbly adapted to changing circumstances. In the first book to address the topic, Guy R. Hasegawa describes the organization and management of the Confederate army’s medical department. At its head was Surgeon General Samuel Preston Moore, a talented multitasker with the organizational know-how to put in place qualified medical personnel to care for sick and wounded Confederate soldiers.
 
Hasegawa investigates how political considerations, personalities, and, as the war progressed, the diminishing availability of human and material resources influenced decision-making in the medical department. Amazingly, the surgeon general’s office managed not only to provide care but also to offer educational opportunities to its personnel and collect medical and surgical data for future use, regardless of constant and growing difficulties.
 
During and after the war, the medical department of the Confederate army was consistently praised as being admirably organized and efficient. Although the department was unable to match its Union counterpart in manpower and supplies, Moore’s intelligent management enabled it to help maintain the fighting strength of the Confederate army.
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MATEWAN BEFORE THE MASSACRE
"POLITICS, COAL AND THE ROOTS OF CONFLICT IN A WEST VIRGINIA MINING COMMUNITY"
Rebecca J. Bailey
West Virginia University Press, 2008

On May 19, 1920, gunshots rang through the streets of Matewan, West Virginia, in an event soon known as the “Matewan Massacre.” Most historians of West Virginia and Appalachia see this event as the beginning of a long series of tribulations known as the second Mine Wars. But was it instead the culmination of an even longer series of proceedings that unfolded in Mingo County, dating back at least to the Civil War? Matewan Before the Massacre provides the first comprehensive history of the area, beginning in the late eighteenth century continuing up to the Massacre. It covers the relevant economic history, including the development of the coal mine industry and the struggles over land ownership; labor history, including early efforts of unionization; transportation history, including the role of the N&W Railroad; political history, including the role of political factions in the county’s two major communities—Matewan and Williamson; and the impact of the state’s governors and legislatures on Mingo County.

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Maury Maverick
A Political Biography
By Richard B. Henderson
University of Texas Press, 1970

Maury Maverick was possibly the first liberal United States Congressman from Texas to achieve national and even international stature. A dedicated Democrat, he was ready to attack Franklin D. Roosevelt whenever he felt that Roosevelt was flagging in his enthusiasm for reform. He was honest to the point of rudeness, and he belonged to the "damn the torpedoes" class that pulled ahead regardless of political consequences.

He was at home with the literate—he was a prodigious writer and speaker—but always ready to puncture their pretensions. And he could cuss with sailors, pecan shellers, and any breed of saloon keeper. Put all that together with a short, stocky, bulldog frame, a fierce face and a voice to match, and you have one of the nation's more colorful political figures.

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The Maverick and the Machine
Governor Dan Walker Tells His Story
Dan Walker
Southern Illinois University Press, 2007
A reformer who was always colorful, provocative, and controversial, Dan Walker became a political maverick, taking on Mayor Richard J. Daley’s vaunted Chicago machine and the powerful incumbent Richard Ogilvie to become the governor of Illinois. The Maverick and the Machine tells the dramatic story of Walker’s rise from dirt-poor beginnings to the pinnacle of power in Illinois and his conviction on charges of bank fraud that landed him in federal prison. This frank volume also probes the inner sanctum of the governorship and reviews the investigations of Governor Blagojevich’s administration and the criminal trial of former governor George Ryan.
 
Best Memoir of 2008, San Diego Book Awards
Illinois State Historical Society Certificate of Excellence, 2008

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The Maverick Spirit
Building The New Nevada
Richard O. Davies
University of Nevada Press, 1998

A collection of biographical essays on fourteen contemporary Nevadans. The subjects of the essays are Maude Frazier; Moe Dalitz; James B. McMillan; William F. Harrah; Hank Greenspun; Alan Bible; Robert Laxalt; Grant Sawyer; Molly Flagg Knudtsen; Paul Laxalt; Steve Wynn; William Raggio; Sue Wagner; and Jerry Tarkanian. 

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Maxwell Street
Writing and Thinking Place
Tim Cresswell
University of Chicago Press, 2019
What is the nature of place, and how does one undertake to write about it? To answer these questions, geographer and poet Tim Cresswell looks to Chicago’s iconic Maxwell Street Market area. Maxwell Street was for decades a place where people from all corners of the city mingled to buy and sell goods, play and listen to the blues, and encounter new foods and cultures. Now, redeveloped and renamed University Village, it could hardly be more different.
 
In Maxwell Street, Cresswell advocates approaching the study of place as an “assemblage” of things, meanings, and practices. He models this innovative approach through a montage format that exposes the different types of texts—primary, secondary, and photographic sources—that have attempted to capture the essence of the area. Cresswell studies his historical sources just as he explores the different elements of Maxwell Street—exposing them layer by layer. Brilliantly interweaving words and images, Maxwell Street sheds light on a historic Chicago neighborhood and offers a new model for how to write about place that will interest anyone in the fields of geography, urban studies, or cultural history.
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Mayday! Mayday!
Aircraft Crashes In The Great Smoky Mtn Nat Park, 1920-
Jeff Wadley
University of Tennessee Press, 2002
Mayday! Mayday!
Aircraft Crashes in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, 1920–2000
Jeff Wadley and Dwight McCarter
Since the dawn of aviation, more than fifty aircraft have crashed in the Great Smoky Mountains. This book details all of those known incidents from 1920 to 2000, including those that occurred within the area before the establishment of the National Park in 1934. Jeff Wadley and Dwight McCarter, who have been involved in search-and-rescue missions in the Smokies for decades, have researched official documents and newspaper archives and conducted extensive interviews with survivors, family members, and eyewitnesses to record not only tragedies but also triumphs of survival.
The authors tell how the earliest known plane crashes in the Smokies were of the single-engine Curtis "Jenny" biplanes flown by young air aces during the World War I era. In the years since, the Smokies have claimed private planes, military jets, helicopters, and even a hot air balloon. These disasters arose from numerous causes—from fuel depletion and icing to "dare-deviling" or simply flying too low. Wadley and McCarter attest to the difficult duties of search-and-rescue teams in the most remote areas of the park. Of 127 persons involved in crashes, only 56 survived. Readers will be touched by these accounts—such as that of two small children who survived a December 1977 crash that killed their father and older sister.
Mayday! Mayday! offers both cautionary tales for pilots who fly above these ridges and seasoned advice to those who search for victims. The Smokies have been called by some another Bermuda Triangle; this book explains why and reminds us that no skies are entirely friendly.
The Authors: Jeff Wadley is a lieutenant colonel in the Tennessee Civil Air Patrol who serves as a mission coordinator and trainer in the Smokies.
Dwight McCarter served as a backcountry ranger in the park for over twenty years and is the author of Lost! A Ranger's Journal of Search and Rescue in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.


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Mayor Harold Washington
Champion of Race and Reform in Chicago
Roger Biles
University of Illinois Press, 2020
In 1983, Harold Washington made history by becoming Chicago's first African American mayor. The racially charged campaign and election heralded an era of bitter political divisiveness that obstructed his efforts to change city government.

Roger Biles's sweeping biography provides a definitive account of Washington and his journey. Once in City Hall, Washington confronted the backroom deals, aldermanic thuggery, open corruption, and palm greasing that fueled the Chicago machine's autocratic political regime. His alternative: a vision of fairness, transparency, neighborhood empowerment, and balanced economic growth at one with his emergence as a dynamic champion for African American uplift and a crusader for progressive causes. Biles charts the countless infamies of the Council Wars era and Washington's own growth through his winning of a second term--a promise of lasting reform left unfulfilled when the mayor died in 1987.

Original and authoritative, Mayor Harold Washington redefines a pivotal era in Chicago's modern history.
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The Mayors, 3rd Edition
The Chicago Political Tradition
Edited by Paul M. Green and Melvin G. Holli
Southern Illinois University Press, 2005

The Mayors: The Chicago Political Tradition taps America’s most qualified observers to scrupulously assess the city’s mayors within the vigorous and tumultuous history of Chicago government. This revised and updated edition features extensive commentary on the enduring mayoral influence of Richard M. Daley.


“In the seventeen years since The Mayors was first published,” editors Paul M. Green and Melvin G. Holli write in the Preface to this edition, “Chicago politics has become more genteel, more docile, and more predictable. This dampening of the city’s once red-hot political coals is due to domination by one man: Mayor Richard M. Daley.” Also providing a political roadmap through the complex and fascinating labyrinth of Chicago politics are essays on other recent mayors: Richard J. Daley, Michael A. Bilandic, Jane M. Byrne, and Harold Washington.


Green and Holli’s popular study maintains that the key to the mayor’s office is power: the power to reward and the power to punish that comes with occupying the fifth floor of city hall in Chicago. Beginning with Joseph Medill, the Tribune publisher who guided the city in its rise from the ashes after the Great Fire of 1871, The Mayors takes readers through the terms of some of the city’s most colorful leaders: from the progressive Carter Harrison II and the radical Edward F. Dunne to the politically reticent Fred A. Busse and the loudmouth Big Bill Thompson. The essays collectively tell a riveting story of structures wherein aggressive power brokers surmount even massive corruption and scandal, and those who fail to seize the office’s inherent authority have short, uncomfortable tenures.

In addition to Green and Holli, contributors include David L. Protess, Edward R. Kantowicz, John D. Buenker, Maureen A. Flanagan, Douglas Bukowski, John R. Schmidt, Roger Biles, Arnold R. Hirsch, William J. Grimshaw, Monroe Anderson, Steve Neal, Steve Rhodes, and Laura S. Washington.

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The Mayors
The Chicago Political Tradition, fourth edition
Edited by Paul M. Green and Melvin G. Holli
Southern Illinois University Press, 2013
 Originally released in 1987, The Mayors: The Chicago Political Tradition gathered some of the finest minds in political thought to provide shrewd analysis of Chicago’s mayors and their administrations. Twenty-five years later, this fourth edition continues to illuminate the careers of some of Chicago’s most respected, forceful, and even notorious mayors, leaders whose lives were often as vibrant and eclectic as the city they served. In addition to chapters on the individual mayors—including a new chapter on Rahm Emanuel, enhanced by an expert explanation of the current state of the city’s budget by Laurence Msall, president of the Civic Federation—this new edition offers an insightful overview of the Chicago mayoral tradition throughout the city’s history; rankings of the mayors evaluated on their leadership and political qualities; an appendix of Chicago’s mayors and their years of service; and additional updated materials.

Chicago’s mayoral history is one of corruption and reform, scandal and ambition. This well-researched volume, more relevant than ever twenty-five years after its first edition, presents an intriguing and informative glimpse into the fascinating lives and legacies of Chicago’s most influential leaders.

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Meadowood Phase Settlement Pattern in the Niagara Frontier Region of Western New York State
Joseph E. Granger, Jr.
University of Michigan Press, 1978
In this work the author reports on his excavation of the Sinking Ponds site in Erie County, New York. He combines this with extensive information on the Riverhaven 2 site and a general definition and description of the Meadowood Phase in New York State. Using assemblages excavated in these areas of the Niagara Frontier, Granger explores adaptive processes (procurement, manufacturing, storage, and exchange) of the Meadowood settlement pattern and settlement system.
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Meanings of Maple
An Ethnography of Sugaring
Michael Lange
University of Arkansas Press, 2017
In Meanings of Maple, Michael A. Lange provides a cultural analysis of maple syrup making, known in Vermont as sugaring, to illustrate how maple syrup as both process and product is an aspect of cultural identity.

Readers will go deep into a Vermont sugar bush and its web of plastic tubes, mainline valves, and collection tanks. They will visit sugarhouses crammed with gas evaporators and reverse-osmosis machines. And they will witness encounters between sugar makers and the tourists eager to invest Vermont with mythological fantasies of rural simplicity.

So much more than a commodity study, Meanings of Maple frames a new approach for evaluating the broader implications of iconic foodways, and it will animate conversations in food studies for years to come.
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The Mechanics of Optimism
Mining Companies, Technology, and the Hot Spring Gold Rush, Montana Territory, 1864-1868
Jeffrey J. Safford
University Press of Colorado, 2004
For every successful mining district celebrated in history, there were failed dozens whose stories have been largely forgotten. The Mechanics of Optimism documents, in rare detail, the boom-bust cycle of Hot Spring District, a mid-1860s Montana gold camp that did not pay, despite early predictions of a sure thing.

Historian Jeffrey J. Safford examines how gold mining ventures were developed and financed during and after the Civil War, and how men, primarily Easterners with scant knowledge of mining, were willing to invest large sums in gold mines that promised quick and lucrative returns.

Safford explains how these mining companies were organized and underwritten, and why a little-known district in southwestern Montana was chosen as a center of operations. Relying on extensive primary sources, Safford addresses the mind-set of the businessmen, the expectations and realities of new mining technology, the financial strategies, and the universality of the Hot Spring experience.

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Medicine at Michigan
A History of the University of Michigan Medical School at the Bicentennial
Dea H. Boster and Joel D. Howell
University of Michigan Press, 2017
A trailblazer in American medical education since 1850, the Medical School at the University of Michigan was the first program in the United States to own and operate its own hospital and the earliest major medical school to admit women. In the late nineteenth century, the School emerged as a frontrunner in modern scientific medical education in the United States, and one of the first in the nation to implement both required clinical clerkships and laboratory science as part of their curriculum, including the first full laboratory course in bacteriology. Decades later, the Medical School remained at the vanguard of medical education by increasing its focus on research, and these efforts resulted in world-changing breakthroughs such as field-testing the first safe polio vaccine, proposing a genetic mechanism for sickle cell anemia, inventing the fiber-optic endoscope, and cloning the gene responsible for cystic fibrosis. The Medical School’s history is not without its growing pains: alongside top-tier education and incredible innovation came times of stress with the broader University and Ann Arbor communities, complex expectations and realities for student diversity, and many controversies over curriculum and methodology. Medicine at Michigan explores how the School has dealt with changes in medical science, practice, and social climates over the past 150 years and illuminates the complicated interactions between economic, social, and cultural trends and medical education at the University of Michigan and across the nation. This book will appeal to readers interested in the history of medicine as well as current and former medical faculty members, students, and employees of the University of Michigan Medical School.
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The Medicine of Memory
A Mexica Clan in California
By Alejandro Murguía
University of Texas Press, 2002

"People who live in California deny the past," asserts Alejandro Murguía. In a state where "what matters is keeping up with the current trends, fads, or latest computer gizmo," no one has "the time, energy, or desire to reflect on what happened last week, much less what happened ten years ago, or a hundred." From this oblivion of memory, he continues, comes a false sense of history, a deluded belief that the way things are now is the way they have always been.

In this work of creative nonfiction, Murguía draws on memories—his own and his family's reaching back to the eighteenth century—to (re)construct the forgotten Chicano-indigenous history of California. He tells the story through significant moments in California history, including the birth of the mestizo in Mexico, destruction of Indian lifeways under the mission system, violence toward Mexicanos during the Gold Rush, Chicano farm life in the early twentieth century, the Chicano Movement of the 1960s, Chicano-Latino activism in San Francisco in the 1970s, and the current rebirth of Chicano-Indio culture. Rejecting the notion that history is always written by the victors, and refusing to be one of the vanquished, he declares, "This is my California history, my memories, richly subjective and atavistic."

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Meet Me on the Midway
A History of Wisconsin Fairs
Jerry Apps
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2022
Jerry Apps explores the history of county and state fairs in Wisconsin, from their earliest incarnations as livestock exhibitions to today’s multitude of exhibits and demonstrations, grandstand entertainment, games and rides, and competitions of all sorts. Drawing on his extensive research, interviews, and personal experience as a 4-H leader, county extension agent, fair judge, and lifelong fairgoer, Apps takes readers back through 178 years of Wisconsin fair history, covering everything from horsepulling and calf-showing contests to exhibit judging to the roar of gasoline engines powering the midway rides. He evokes the sights and sounds of fairs through the ages while digging in to the political and social forces that shaped the fair into an icon of our rural heritage. Illustrated with vintage and modern photos and featuring the voices of exhibitors, judges, volunteers, and visitors, Meet Me on the Midway vividly captures the thrills and cherished memories of these beloved annual gatherings.
 
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The Memoirs of Wendell W. Young III
A Life in Philadelphia Labor and Politics
Francis Ryan
Temple University Press, 2019

Philadelphia native Wendell W. Young III was one of the most important American labor leaders in the last half of the twentieth century. An Acme Markets clerk in the 1950s and ’60s, he was elected top officer of the Retail Clerks Union when he was twenty-four. His social justice unionism sought to advance wages while moving beyond collective bargaining to improve the conditions of the working-class majority, whether in a union or not. Young quickly gained a reputation for his independence, daring at times to publicly criticize the policies of the city’s powerful AFL-CIO leadership and tangle with the city’s political machine.

Editor Francis Ryan, whose introduction provides historical context, interviewed Young about his experiences working in the region’s retail and food industry, measuring the changes over time and the tangible impact that union membership had on workers. Young also describes the impact of Philadelphia’s deindustrialization in the 1970s and ’80s and recounts his activism for civil rights and the anti-war movements as well as on John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign. 

The Memoirs of Wendell W. YoungIII  provides the most extensive labor history of late twentieth-century Philadelphia yet written.

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Memorializing Motherhood
Anna Jarvis and the Struggle for Control of Mother's Day
Katharine Lane Antolini
West Virginia University Press, 2017

Few know the name Anna Jarvis, yet on the second Sunday in May, we mail the card, buy the flowers, place the phone call, or make the brunch reservation to honor our mothers, all because of her. 

Anna Jarvis organized the first official Mother’s Day celebration in Grafton, West Virginia in 1908 and then spent decades promoting the holiday and defending it from commercialization. She designed her Mother’s Day celebration around a sentimental view of motherhood and domesticity, envisioning a day venerating the daily services and sacrifices of mothers within the home.

     After Mother’s Day became a national holiday in 1914, many organizations sought to align the holiday’s meaning with changing perceptions of modern motherhood in the twentieth century. Instead of restricting a mother’s service and influence solely to the domestic sphere, they emphasized the power of mothers both within their homes and throughout their communities. 

     Jarvis refused to accept this changing interpretation, claiming both intellectual and legal ownership of Mother’s Day. Her obsession with protecting the purity of her vision sustained a war of verbal and legal assaults against rival holiday promoters, patriotic women’s organizations, charitable foundations, public health reformers, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. The struggle for control of Mother’s Day ultimately threatened her livelihood, physical health, and emotional stability. 

Memorializing Motherhood explores the complicated history of Anna Jarvis’s movement to establish and control Mother’s Day, as well as the powerful conceptualization of this day as both a holiday and a cultural representation of motherhood.

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Memorializing Pearl Harbor
Unfinished Histories and the Work of Remembrance
Geoffrey M. White
Duke University Press, 2016
Memorializing Pearl Harbor examines the challenge of representing history at the site of the attack that brought America into World War II. Analyzing moments in which history is re-presented—in commemorative events, documentary films, museum design, and educational programming—Geoffrey M. White shows that the memorial to the Pearl Harbor bombing is not a fixed or singular institution. Rather, it has become a site in which many histories are performed, validated, and challenged. In addition to valorizing military service and sacrifice, the memorial has become a place where Japanese veterans have come to seek recognition and reconciliation, where Japanese Americans have sought to correct narratives of racial mistrust, and where Native Hawaiians have challenged their ongoing erasure from their own land. Drawing on extended ethnographic fieldwork, White maps these struggles onto larger controversies about public history, museum practices, and national memory.
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Memories of Lac du Flambeau Elders
Edited by Elizabeth M. Tornes
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004
    Memories of Lac du Flambeau Elders is a collection of interviews with fifteen Ojibwe elders of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians in northern Wisconsin. The elders, in their seventies and eighties when interviewed, all experienced enormous changes in their lifetimes. In their stories they discuss these changes as well as the traditions and beliefs that the Ojibwe have continued to maintain, despite attempts at forced assimilation on the part of the U.S. government and others. Their stories are testimony to the enduring strength of the Ojibwe people and their way of life.
    Most historical accounts of the Ojibwe have been written by Americans of European descent. This book tells the history of the Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe in their own words. It also includes a historical introduction, by Leon Valliere, Jr., going back four hundred years to Lac du Flambeau’s original settlement. A black-and-white photographic portrait of each elder prefaces each interview, and historical photos from the George W. Brown Jr. Ojibwe Museum Cultural Center and collection illustrate the text.

Distributed for the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures.
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Memphis Hoops
Race and Basketball in the Bluff City,1968–1997
Keith Brian Wood
University of Tennessee Press, 2021

Memphis Hoops tells the story of basketball in Tennessee’s southwestern-most metropolis following the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Keith Brian Wood examines the city through the lens of the Memphis State University basketball team and its star player-turned-coach Larry Finch. Finch, a Memphis native and the first highly recruited black player signed by Memphis State, helped the team make the 1973 NCAA championship game in his senior year. In an era when colleges in the south began to integrate their basketball programs, the city of Memphis embraced its flagship university’s shift toward including black players. Wood interjects the forgotten narrative of LeMoyne-Owen’s (the city’s HBCU) 1975 NCAA Division III National Championship team as a critical piece to understanding this era. Finch was drafted by the Lakers following the 1973 NCAA championship but instead signed with the American Basketball Association’s Memphis Tams. After two years of playing professionally, Finch returned to the sidelines as a coach and would eventually become the head coach of the Memphis State Tigers.

Wood deftly weaves together basketball and Memphis’s fraught race relations during the post–civil rights era. While many Memphians viewed the 1973 Tigers’ championship run as representative of racial progress, Memphis as a whole continued to be deeply divided on other issues of race and civil rights. And while Finch was championed as a symbol of the healing power of basketball that helped counteract the city’s turbulence, many black players and coaches would discover that even its sports mirrored Memphis’s racial divide. Today, as another native son of Memphis, Penny Hardaway, has taken the reigns of the University of Memphis’s basketball program, Wood reflects on the question of progress in the city that saw King’s assassination little more than forty years ago.

In this important examination of sports and civil rights history, Wood summons social memory from an all-too-recent past to present the untold—and unfinished—story of basketball in the Bluff City.

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Memphis In The Great Depression
Roger Biles
University of Tennessee Press, 1986


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