301 books match the query 'West (U.S.)' and 11 start with p

cover of Packrat Middens: The Last 40,000 Years of Biotic Change

Packrat Middens

The Last 40,000 Years of Biotic Change

Edited by Julio L. Betancourt, Thomas R. Van Devender, and Paul S. Martin

University of Arizona Press, 1990

Over the past thirty years, late Quaternary environments in the arid interior of western North America have been revealed by a unique source of fossils: well-preserved fragments of plants and animals accumulated locally by packrats and quite often encased, amberlike, in large masses of crystallized urine. These packrat middens are ubiquitous in caves and rock crevices throughout the arid West, where they can lie preserved for tens of thousands of years. More than a thousand of these deposits have been dated and analyzed, and middens have supplanted pollen records as a touchstone for studying vegetation dynamics and climatic change in radiocarbon time (the last 40,000 years). Now, similar deposits made by other mammals like hyraxes are being reported from other parts of the world.

This book brings together the findings and views of many of the researchers investigating fossil middens in the United States, Mexico, Africa, the Middle East, and Australia. The contributions serve to open a forum for methodological concerns, update the fossil record of various geographic regions, introduce new applications, and display the vast potential for fossil midden analysis in arid regions worldwide. The findings presented here will serve to foster regional research and to promote general studies devoted to global climate change. Included in the text are more than two hundred charts, photographs, and maps.
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cover of Passage to Wonderland: Rephotographing Joseph Stimson's Views of the Cody Road to Yellowstone National Park, 1903 and 2008

Passage to Wonderland

Rephotographing Joseph Stimson's Views of the Cody Road to Yellowstone National Park, 1903 and 2008

Michael A. Amundson

University Press of Colorado, 2012

In 1903 the Cody Road opened, leading travelers from Cody, Wyoming, to Yellowstone National Park. Cheyenne photographer J. E. Stimson traveled the route during its first week in existence, documenting the road for the state of Wyoming's contribution to the 1904 World's Fair. His images of now-famous landmarks like Cedar Mountain, the Shoshone River, the Holy City, Chimney Rock, Sylvan Pass, and Sylvan Lake are some of the earliest existing photographs of the route. In 2008, 105 years later, Michael Amundson traveled the same road, carefully duplicating Stimson's iconic original photographs. In Passage to Wonderland, these images are paired side by side and accompanied by a detailed explanation of the land and history depicted.

Amundson examines the physical changes along "the most scenic fifty miles in America" and explores the cultural and natural history behind them. This careful analysis of the paired images make Passage to Wonderland more than a "then and now" photography book--it is a unique exploration of the interconnectedness between the Old West and the New West. It will be a wonderful companion for those touring the Cody Road as well as those armchair tourists who can follow the road on Google Earth using the provided GPS coordinates.

 

The University Press of Colorado gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University toward the publication of this book.


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cover of Peter Fidler: From York Factory to the Rocky Mountains

Peter Fidler

From York Factory to the Rocky Mountains

Barbara Belyea

University Press of Colorado, 2026

In 1792–93 Peter Fidler surveyed the Hudson’s Bay Company’s river and overland routes west from York Factory. He traveled with a fur brigade up the Hayes and Saskatchewan Rivers and then spent the winter months with a Piikani band who hunted buffalo in the Rocky Mountain foothills. Fidler kept precise journals that make it possible to follow the traders’ passage over a lake-strewn landscape and across the plains. The journal texts combine astronomical observations, notation of distances and directions, small sketch maps, and verbal descriptions. Peter Fidler: From York Factory to the Rocky Mountains presents two of Fidler’s survey journals edited and extensively annotated by historian Barbara Belyea from manuscripts in the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives.
 
The two journals—“From York Factory to Buckingham House” and “From Buckingham House to the Rocky Mountains”—detail Fidler’s travels over a period of nine months. They include remarks on fur trade history, organization of the inland brigade, three distinct geographical regions, and the daily life of a Plains nation. Belyea’s introduction and ample notes provide insight into the way geographic, specifically cartographic, information was noted in the journals, with additional information on industry trading techniques, traders’ economic decisions, broad changes in regional social and economic conditions, and interactions with indigenous peoples.
 
Fidler’s journals are an exceptional record of the fur trade’s western expansion and the daily life of a Plains nation at the height of its power and prosperity. With its rich analysis of primary source documents and painstaking reproduction of historical trade routes, Peter Fidler: From York Factory to the Rocky Mountains will be of great value to students and scholars in the fields of fur trade studies, cartography, travel literature, and Canadian history, as well as general readers interested in westward expansion, exploration, commerce, and indigenous-colonial relations.
 
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cover of Photographed All the Best Scenery

Photographed All the Best Scenery

Don Fowler

University of Utah Press, 1972

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cover of Platte River Road Narratives: A Descriptive Bibliography of Travel Over the Great Central Overland Route to Oregon, California, Utah, Colorado, Montana, and Other Western States and Territories, 1812-1866

Platte River Road Narratives

A Descriptive Bibliography of Travel Over the Great Central Overland Route to Oregon, California, Utah, Colorado, Montana, and Other Western States and Territories, 1812-1866

Merrill J. Mattes

University of Illinois Press, 1988

This massive annotated bibliography of all known significant eyewitness accounts of nineteenth-century central overland travel fills a conspicuous gap in historical literature, and will greatly accelerate research, writing, and collecting.

Platte River Road Narratives includes not only all identifiable overland accounts, but also a number of those identifiable in manuscript form only. Over 2,000 entries identify the author, the form of the passage, overland trip, and give Matte's authoritative commentary and evaluation, as well as identification of the repository of the source material.
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cover of Playing House in the American West: Western Women's Life Narratives, 1839–1987

Playing House in the American West

Western Women's Life Narratives, 1839–1987

Cathryn Halverson

University of Alabama Press, 2013

How domestic life shaped identity, gender, and power in the American West

The controlling metaphor Cathryn Halverson uses in her engrossing study is “playing house.”  From Caroline Kirkland and Laura Ingalls Wilder to Willa Cather and Marilynne Robinson, from the mid-nineteenth to the late-twentieth centuries, western authors have persistently embraced wayward or eccentric housekeeping to prove a woman’s difference from western neighbors and eastern readers alike.

The readings in Playing House investigate the surprising textual ends to which westerners turn the familiar terrain of the home: evaluating community; arguing for different conceptions of race and class; and perhaps most especially, resisting traditional gender roles.  Western women writers, Halverson argues, render the home as a stage for autonomy, resistance, and imagination rather than as a site of sacrifice and obligation.

The western women examined in Playing House in the American West are promoted and read as representatives of a region, as insiders offering views of distant and intriguing ways of life, even as they conceive of themselves as outsiders. By playing with domestic conventions, they recast the region they describe, portraying the West as a place that fosters female agency, individuality, and subjectivity.

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cover of Pole Raising and Speech Making: Modalities of Swedish American Summer Celebration

Pole Raising and Speech Making

Modalities of Swedish American Summer Celebration

Jennifer Eastman Attebery

Utah State University Press, 2015

In Pole Raising and Speech Making, author Jennifer Eastman Attebery focuses on the beginnings of the traditional Scandinavian Midsummer celebration and the surrounding spring-to-summer seasonal festivities in the Rocky Mountain West during the height of Swedish immigration to the area—1880–1917.

Combining research in folkloristics and history, Attebery explores various ways that immigrants blended traditional Swedish Midsummer-related celebrations with local civic celebrations of American Independence Day on July 4 and the Mormons’ Pioneer Day on July 24. Functioning as multimodal observances with multiple meanings, these holidays represent and reconsider ethnicity and panethnicity, sacred and secular relationships, and the rural and the urban, demonstrating how flexible and complex traditional celebrations can be.

Providing a wealth of detail and information surrounding little-studied celebrations and valuable archival and published primary sources—diaries, letters, speeches, newspaper reports, and images—Pole Raising and Speech Making is proof that non-English immigrant culture must be included when discussing “American” culture. It will be of interest to scholars and graduate students in ethnic studies, folklore, ritual and festival studies, and Scandinavian American cultural history.


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cover of Portraits of Basques in the New World

Portraits of Basques in the New World

Richard W. Etulain

University of Nevada Press, 1999

A collection of new essays on notable historic and contemporary Basques of America's Far West that offers a perceptive and lively examination of the lives of one of the West's most resilient and successful ethnic minorities. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the Basque people or those interested in the process of immigration and assimilation: these profiles illustrate how America's Basque immigrants have achieved success in mainstream society while retaining strong ties to their ancient Old World culture.

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cover of Pottery of the Great Basin and Adjacent Areas: UUAP 111

Pottery of the Great Basin and Adjacent Areas

UUAP 111

Suzanne Griset

University of Utah Press, 1986

This volume is compilation of individual papers from the Great Basin/California Pottery Workshop of April 1983. The papers include data reports, literature reviews, statements of theoretical positions, and analytical methodology. All address ceramics, primarily of undecorated wares, from the Great Basin and nearby areas. 
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cover of Predatory Bureaucracy: The Extermination of Wolves and the Transformation of the West

Predatory Bureaucracy

The Extermination of Wolves and the Transformation of the West

Michael Robinson

University Press of Colorado, 2005

Predatory Bureaucracy is the definitive history of America's wolves and our policies toward predators. Tracking wolves from the days of the conquistadors to the present, author Michael Robinson shows that their story merges with that of the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey. This federal agency was chartered to research insects and birds but - because of various pressures - morphed into a political powerhouse dedicated to killing wolves and other wildlife.

Robinson follows wolves' successful adaptation to the arrival of explorers, mountain men, and bounty hunters, through their disastrous century-long entanglement with the federal government. He shares the parallel story of the Biological Survey's rise, detailing the personal, social, geographic, and political forces that allowed it to thrive despite opposition from hunters, animal lovers, scientists, environmentalists, and presidents.

Federal predator control nearly eliminated wolves throughout the United States and Mexico and radically changed American lands and wildlife populations. It undercut the livelihoods of countless homestead families in order to benefit an emerging western elite of livestock owners. The extermination of predators led to problems associated with prey overpopulation, but, as Robinson reveals, extermination and control programs still continue. Predatory Bureaucracy will fascinate readers interested in wildlife, ecosystems, agriculture, and environmental politics.

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cover of Punjabi Rebels of the Columbia River: The Global Fight for Indian Independence and Citizenship

Punjabi Rebels of the Columbia River

The Global Fight for Indian Independence and Citizenship

Johanna Ogden

Oregon State University Press, 2024

Oregon is commonly perceived to have little, let alone notable, South Asian history. Yet in the early 1900s Oregon was at the center of two entwined quests for Indian independence and civic belonging that rocked the world.

Punjabi Rebels of the Columbia River traces the stories of the radical Indian independence organization known as Ghadar and Bhagat Singh Thind’s era-defining US Supreme Court citizenship case. Ghadar sought the overthrow of India’s British colonizers while Thind utilized sanctioned legal channels to do so. Despite widely differing strategies, both the movement and the man were targeted, often in coordination, by the highest levels of the US and British governments. The empires’ united message: India would not be an independent country and Indians could not be citizens. In the decades that followed, it was a verdict Indians refused to abide.

Johanna Ogden’s detailed history of migrants’ experience expands the time frame, geographic boundaries, and knowledge of the conditions and contributions of Indians in North America. It is the story of a people’s awakening amid a rich community of international workers in an age of nationalist uprisings. To understand why one of the smallest western Indian settlements became a resistance center, Punjabi Rebels mines the colonial underpinnings of labor, race, and place-making and their regional and global connections, rendering a history of whiteness and labor as much as of Indian-ness and migration. The first work to rejoin the lived experience of Thind and Ghadar activists, Punjabi Rebels complicates our understanding not just of the global fight for Indian political rights but of multi-racial democracy.

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