The central issue Bush finds in these works is how their authors have dealt with the authority of Mormon Church leaders. As she puts it in her preface, "I use the phrase 'faithful transgression' to describe moments in the texts when each writer, explicitly or implicitly, commits herself in writing to trust her own ideas and authority over official religious authority while also conceiving of and depicting herself to be a 'faithful' member of the Church." Bush recognizes her book as her own act of faithful transgression. Writing it involved wrestling, she states, "with my own deeply ingrained religious beliefs and my equally compelling education in feminist theories that mean to liberate and empower women."
Faithful Transgressions examines a remarkable group of authors and their highly readable and entertaining books. In producing the first significant book-length study of Mormon women's autobiographical writing, Bush rides a wave of memoir publishing and academic interest in autobiography and other life narratives. As she elucidates these works in relation to the religious tradition that played a major role in shaping them, she not only positions them in relation to feminist theory and current work on women's life writings but ties them to the long literary tradition of spiritual autobiography.
Ranch families in the twenty-first century face many challenges, from competition with government-subsidized agribusiness corporations to tax laws that encourage development over agriculture and prevent the smooth transfer of land from one generation to the next. As a stabilizing force in the American West, ranch families play a critical role in our country, perhaps more so today than ever before, yet their stories have rarely been told. They contribute to our nation with the food they raise, the environments they protect, and the resources they manage, and they preserve our western heritage while holding the West open for the rest of us. In The Family Ranch, award-winning author Linda Hussa offers readers a personal, inside view into the lives of six diverse ranching families and the land that shapes their days and nights. Photographer Madeleine Graham Blake provides engaging and often moving images that portray each family at work and at play. With chapters on the critical issues that face each of them—from grazing rights and water use, to children's education and the emerging rural marketplace—these family profiles are set in a larger context. This is family ranching as it is now, a tracing of how it always was, but made far more complex in modern times. By combining their traditions with the tools of modern technology, these people strengthen the ideal of family and give the business of ranching a vibrant and viable future.The Family Ranch is rich in remarkable stories of what happens when parents, children, work, and nature come together for a lifetime of commitment. It speaks to urban and rural people in important ways, illuminating the realities of the western ranch and the people who make their living, and their lives, on it. Essential reading for people who love the West and care about its future. The Family Ranch inspires thoughts about tradition, values, and responsibility that are applicable to all communities.
Feast or Famine is the first comprehensive account of food and drink in the winning of the West, describing the sustenance of successive generations of western pioneers. Drawing on journals of settlers and travelers—as well as a lifetime of research on the American West—Reginald Horsman examines more than one hundred years of history, from the first advance of explorers into the Mississippi valley to the movement of ranchers and farmers onto the Great Plains, recording not only the components of their diets but food preparation techniques as well.
Most settlers were able to obtain food beyond the dreams of ordinary Europeans, for whom meat was a luxury. Not only were buffalo, deer, and wild turkey there for the taking, pioneers also gathered greens such as purslane, dandelion, and pigweed—as well as wild fruits, berries, and nuts. They replaced sugar with wild honey or maple syrup, and when they had no tea, they made drinks out of sage, sassafras, and mint. Horsman also reveals the willingness of Indians to convey their knowledge of food to newcomers, sharing salmon in the Pacific Northwest, agricultural crops in the arid Southwest.
Horsman tells how agricultural expansion and transportation opened a veritable cornucopia and how the development of canning soon made it possible for meals to transcend simple frontier foods, with canned oysters and crystallized eggs in airtight cans on merchants’ shelves. He covers food on different regional frontiers, as well as the cuisines of particular groups such as fur traders, soldiers, miners, and Mormons. He also discusses food shortages that resulted from poor preparation, temporary scarcity of game, marginal soil, or simply bad luck. At times, as with the ill-fated Donner Party, pioneers starved.
Engagingly written and meticulously researched, Feast or Famine is a one-of-a-kind look at a subject too long ignored in histories of the West. By revealing the spectrum of frontier fare across years and regions, it shows us that the land of opportunity was often a land of plenty.
Drawing on correspondence both between and within the Forest Service and the major timber industry associations, newspaper articles, articles from industry outlets, and policy documents from the late 1800s through the present, Hudson shows how the US forest industry, under the constraint of profitability, pushed the USFS away from private industry regulation and toward fire exclusion, eventually changing national forest policy into little more than fire policy.
More recently, the USFS has attempted to move beyond the policy of complete fire suppression. Interviews with public land managers in the Pacific Northwest shed light on the sources of the agency's struggles as it attempts to change the way we understand and relate to fire in the West.
Fire Management in the American West will be of great interest to environmentalists, sociologists, fire managers, scientists, and academics and students in environmental history and forestry.
For nearly two centuries, the creation myth for the United States imagined European settlers arriving on the shores of a vast, uncharted wilderness. Over the last two decades, however, a contrary vision has emerged, one which sees the country's roots not in a state of "pristine" nature but rather in a "human-modified landscape" over which native peoples exerted vast control.
Fire, Native Peoples, and the Natural Landscape seeks a middle ground between those conflicting paradigms, offering a critical, research-based assessment of the role of Native Americans in modifying the landscapes of pre-European America. Contributors focus on the western United States and look at the question of fire regimes, the single human impact which could have altered the environment at a broad, landscape scale, and which could have been important in almost any part of the West. Each of the seven chapters is written by a different author about a different subregion of the West, evaluating the question of whether the fire regimes extant at the time of European contact were the product of natural factors or whether ignitions by Native Americans fundamentally changed those regimes.
An introductory essay offers context for the regional chapters, and a concluding section compares results from the various regions and highlights patterns both common to the West as a whole and distinctive for various parts of the western states. The final section also relates the findings to policy questions concerning the management of natural areas, particularly on federal lands, and of the "naturalness" of the pre-European western landscape.
Shaped by fire for thousands of years, the forests of the western United States are as adapted to periodic fires as they are to the region's soils and climate. Our widespread practice of ignoring the vital role of fire is costly in both ecological and economic terms, with consequences including the decline of important fire-dependent tree and undergrowth species, increasing density and stagnation of forests, epidemics of insects and diseases, and the high potential for severe wildfires.
Flames in Our Forest explains those problems and presents viable solutions to them. It explores the underlying historical and ecological reasons for the problems associated with our attempts to exclude fire and examines how some of the benefits of natural fire can be restored Chapters consider:
Flames in Our Forest presents a new picture of the role of fire in maintaining forests, describes the options available for restoring the historical effects of fires, and considers the implications of not doing so. It will help readers appreciate the importance of fire in forests and gives a nontechnical overview of the scientific knowledge and tools available for sustaining western forests by mimicking and restoring the effects of natural fire regimes.
"…an impressive new book… [The Forgotten Founders] is a gem that encompasses virtually every aspect of the development of our region." -ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS
"[Udall] offers a convincing argument that it wasn't the cavalry, fur traders, prospectors, gunslingers or railroad builders who tamed the West; it was 'courageous men and women who made treks into wilderness and created communities in virgin valleys.' Udall's spare prose adds impact to his words." -THE SEATTLE TIMES
"The West is so cluttered with misconceptions that it is hard to have a serious discussion about its history." --Wallace Stegner.
For most Americans, the "Wild West" popularized in movies and pulp novels -- a land of intrepid traders and explorers, warlike natives, and trigger-happy gunslingers -- has become the true history of the region. The story of the West's development is a singular chapter of history, but not, according to former Secretary of the Interior and native westerner Stewart L. Udall, for the reasons filmmakers and novelists would have us believe.
In The Forgotten Founders, Stewart Udall draws on his vast knowledge of and experience in the American West to make a compelling case that the key players in western settlement were the sturdy families who travelled great distances across forbidding terrain to establish communities there. He offers an illuminating and wide-ranging overview of western history and those who have written about it, challenging conventional wisdom on subjects ranging from Manifest Destiny to the importance of Eastern capitalists to the role of religion in westward settlement.
Stewart Udall argues that the overblown and ahistorical emphasis on a "wild west" has warped our sense of the past. For the mythical Wild West, Stewart Udall substitutes a compelling description of an Old West, the West before the arrival of the railroads, which was the home place for those he calls the "wagon people," the men and women who came, camped, settled, and stayed. He offers a portrait of the West not as a government creation or a corporate colony or a Hollywood set for feckless gold seekers and gun fighters but as primarily a land where brave and hardy people came to make a new life with their families. From Native Americans to Franciscan friars to Mormon pioneers, these were the true settlers, whose goals, according to Stewart Udall were "amity not conquest; stability, not strife; conservation, not waste; restraint, not aggression." The Forgotten Founders offers a provocative new look at one of the most important chapters of American history, rescuing the Old West and its pioneers from the margins of history where latter-day mythmakers have dumped them. For anyone interested in the authentic history of the American West, it is an important and exciting new work.
“In addition to his accomplishments as a talented novelist, a thorough historian, and an excellent essayist, Frank Waters is that rare breed of man who has merged heart and mind early in his life and moved forward to confront ultimate questions. This dilemma of faith and heritage, religion and identity, and commitment and comfort has never been resolved intellectually. Even with profound faith and rigorous discipline of self, mystics have found it difficult to resolve through action and prayer…I look at the life and writing of Frank Waters…and find…a remarkable journey of inquiry spanning nearly a century and illuminating questions which I did not think possible to formulate.”
—Vine Deloria, Jr., editor
Contributors to this volume are Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., Bobby Bridger, Steven Wall, Will Wright, William Eastlake, Larry Evers, David Jongeward, Max Evans, Win Blevins, Barbara Waters, Rudolfo Anaya, Thomas J. Lyon, Joe Gordon, Robert Kostka, Charles Adams, Father Peter J. Powell, Quay Grigg, Alexander Blackburn, and T. N. Luther.
Over the course of his life, Frank Waters amassed a body of work that has few equals in the literature of the American West. Because his was a writing that touched every facet of the Western experience, his voice still echoes throughout that region’s literary world.
Swallow Press is especially proud to present this generous sampling of Frank Waters’s writings. A Frank Waters Reader encompasses the full range of his work and draws from both his nonfiction and his many novels. It stands as a testament to his singular achievement and proof of the talent that established him as the foremost writer in the Southwest.
This collection spanning forty years of writing provides an excellent introduction for the uninitiated as well as a retrospective for those already familiar with this giant talent. His gift for achieving a delicate balance among the many contrary forces at work in the land and the people who inhabit it is as true and enduring as the region that inspired him.
Over the course of his life, Frank Waters amassed a body of work that has few equals in the literature of the American West. Because his was a writing that touched every facet of the Western experience, his voice still echoes throughout that region’s literary world.
Swallow Press is especially proud to present this generous sampling of Frank Waters’s writings. A Frank Waters Reader encompasses the full range of his work and draws from both his nonfiction and his many novels. It stands as a testament to his singular achievement and proof of the talent that established him as the foremost writer in the Southwest.
This collection spanning forty years of writing provides an excellent introduction for the uninitiated as well as a retrospective for those already familiar with this giant talent. His gift for achieving a delicate balance among the many contrary forces at work in the land and the people who inhabit it is as true and enduring as the region that inspired him.
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