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Confederate general Joseph O. Shelby and his legendary Iron Brigade refused to acknowledge the end of the Civil War. Instead, they fought their way to Mexico in search of a place where they could continue to defy the U.S. government. These veteran Missouri cavalrymen clawed their way for fifteen hundred miles, fighting Juaristas, Indians, desperados, and disgruntled gringos. They disbanded only after they had offered their services to Emperor Maximilian and were turned down.

Shelby’s adjutant, journalist John N. Edwards, first published his story of the exploits of this superb mounted brigade and its quixotic final march in 1872. Conger Beasley provides a lively introduction that includes the first biographical sketch of the author. The 1969 movie The Undefeated starring John Wayne and Rock Hudson was based upon Shelby’s expedition.

Modern tourism in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri and Arkansas is concentrated around the area’s glistening man-made lakes, its fish-filled streams and rivers, and the entertainment mecca of Branson. But recreational excursions into this part of the country began over one hundred years ago as urban Midwesterners, many of them captivated by Harold Bell Wright’s novel The Shepherd of the Hills, sought the outdoors for spiritual and physical regeneration.

Morrow and Myers-Phinney excavate the beginnings of commercial tourism in the region and follow it through six decades as the influx of visitors who became familiar with the Ozarks and its investment opportunities brought capital, new commerce, and additional residents to the hills. Chapters focus on float fishing, game parks, cave exploration, the influence of the railroad, and the men who were instrumental in the region’s transformation. The authors discuss traditional lifestyles rooted in “living off the land,” with stock raising and lumbering providing basic subsistence, and changes wrought by tourism, which affected all classes of people across the White River landscape. They describe the flowering of “Ozarks folklore”—how stories told around gravel-bar fishing camps and retold by newspaper journalists translated the hills’ oral tradition for mass audiences.

While the main theme of this study is the development of tourism, it is also a social history of the interior highlands of the Ozarks. We see how the residents and their way of life were discovered, exploited, and changed by new opportunities and the demands of tourism and increasing trade. As such, this book is a valuable new addition to the University of Arkansas Press’s Ozarks Collection.

Henry Warner Slocum, a Union major general who was a corps and army commander in the Civil War, served from the first call for troops until he stood with William Tecumseh Sherman to receive Joseph E. Johnston’s surrender after Appomattox. He saw action at Bull Run, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg, and by the end of the war he had taken command of the Army of Georgia, yet historians have largely overlooked this key commander.

            Brian Melton has written the first scholarly account of this important general—the first full-length biography in nearly a century—who as one of Sherman’s most trusted commanders exercised significant influence during the Civil War. Although Slocum is remembered primarily for his lackluster performance at Gettysburg, Melton discloses that there is more to him than current history credits, offering a holistic account of his life to show that his career was much more significant than has been supposed.

            Slocum took on the characteristics of the leaders he served, and Melton reveals how Slocum’s attitudes and tactics changed dramatically between commanders to explain why he proved to be of little help to George McClellan and almost a liability while serving under “Fighting Joe” Hooker and yet was an effective commander under Sherman. Slocum became Sherman’s “left arm” and adapted so thoroughly to his style of generalship that he anticipated the general’s intentions on two important occasions, and Melton contends that Slocum was a much more important contributor to the success of Sherman’s later campaigns than has been acknowledged, becoming at times more aggressive and driving than Sherman himself.

            Melton ultimately considers Slocum’s fate as one of the forgotten generals of the Civil War—brought on largely by his joining the Democratic Party in 1865—and demonstrates why previous simplistic depictions of Slocum miss the mark. By providing the first detailed look at this important second-tier commander, Sherman’s Forgotten General illuminates the influences, events, and individuals of Slocum’s career to show that, while he may not have changed the course of the war, he played a conspicuous and important role in its successful execution that has long deserved to be recognized.

The life of a Mormon intellectual in the secular academic community is likely to include some contradictions between belief, scholarship, and the changing times. In his memoir, Armand L. Mauss recounts his personal and intellectual struggles—inside and outside the LDS world—from his childhood to his days as a graduate student at UC Berkeley in the 1960s through his many years as a professor.

As an important and influential observer and author in the Mormon intellectual world, Mauss has witnessed how, in attempting to suppress independent and unsponsored scholarship during the final decades of the twentieth century, LDS leaders deliberately marginalized important intellectual support and resources that could have helped, in the twenty-first century, to refurbish the public image of the church. As a sociologist, he notes how the LDS Church, as a large, complex organization, strives to adjust its policies and practices in order to maintain an optimal balance between unique, appealing claims on the one hand and public acceptance on the other. He also discusses national and academic controversies over the New Religious Movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Writing in clear language, Mauss shows how he has navigated the boundaries where his faith and academic life intersect, and reveals why a continuing commitment to the LDS Church must be a product of choice more than of natural or supernatural “proof.”
 

"Like articles representing the positions of proponents of the measure, those representing opponents constructing the nation as potentially in danger as a result of undocumented immigration."

How do we learn to recognize the damning effects of good rhetorical intentions? And where will we find arguments which escape this trap that permeates the liberal social policy world? Shifting Borders uses an evaluation of the debate over California Proposition 187 to demonstrate how this quandary is best understood by close interrogation of mainstream reports and debates and by bringing to the fore voices that are often left out of mediated discussions.

It is these voices outside the mainstream, so-called "outlaw" discourses, that hold the best possibilities for real social change. To illustrate their claim, the authors present dominant and outlaw discourses around Proposition 187, from television reports, internet chat sites, and religious discourse to coverage of the Los Angeles Times. Their critique ably demonstrates how difficult it is to maintain a position outside the mainstream, but also how important it is for the press, citizens and scholars to actively search out such voices. The findings are organized through a model that provides an innovative method for understanding events and arguments through their rhetorical and communicative construction. In a world where the mediated word defines so much of what we know, Shifting Borders provides a lucid introduction to analyzing the spoken and written word that constitutes political debate in contemporary U.S. culture. In doing so, it makes an important contribution to any future development of progressive political strategy.

In the 2000s, new technologies transformed the experiences of movie-going and movie-making, giving us the first generation of stars to be just as famous on the computer screen as on the silver screen.

Shining in Shadows examines a wide range of Hollywood icons from a turbulent decade for the film industry and for America itself. Perhaps reflecting our own cultural fragmentation and uncertainty, Hollywood’s star personas sent mixed messages about Americans’ identities and ideals. Disheveled men-children like Will Ferrell and Jack Black shared the multiplex with debonair old-Hollywood standbys like George Clooney and Morgan Freeman. Iconic roles for women ranged from Renee Zellweger’s dithering romantics to Tina Fey’s neurotic professionals to Hilary Swank’s vulnerable boyish characters. And in this age of reality TV and TMZ, stars like Jennifer Aniston and “Brangelina” became more famous for their real-life romantic dramas—at the same time that former tabloid fixtures like Johnny Depp and Robert Downey Jr. reinvented themselves as dependable leading men. With a multigenerational, international cast of stars, this collection presents a fascinating composite portrait of Hollywood stardom today.

Ann Lewis's childhood was marked by an unusual rhythm. Each year the thawing and freezing of the Great Lakes signaled the beginning and end of the shipping season, months of waiting that were punctuated by brief trips to various ports to meet her father, the captain.

With lively storytelling and vivid details, Lewis captures the unusual life of shipping families whose days and weeks revolved around the shipping industry on the Great Lakes. She paints an intriguing and affectionate portrait of her father, a talented pianist whose summer job aboard an ore freighter led him to a life on the water. Working his way up from deckhand to ship captain, Willis Michler became the master of thirteen ships over a span of twenty-eight years. From the age of twelve, Ann accompanied the captain to the ports of Milwaukee, Chicago, Toledo, and Cleveland on the lower Great Lakes. She describes sailing through stormy weather and starry nights, visiting the engine room, dining at the captain's table, and wheeling the block-long ship with her father in the pilot house. Through her mother's stories and remarks, Lewis also reveals insights into the trials and rewards of being a ship captain's wife. The book is enhanced by the author's vintage snapshots, depicting this bygone lifestyle.

Tracing the western from its hazy silent-picture origins in the 1890s to the advent of talking pictures in the 1920s, Smith examines the ways in which silent westerns contributed to the overall development of the film industry.

Focusing on such early important production companies as Selig Polyscope, New York Motion Picture, and Essanay, Smith revises current thinking about the birth of Hollywood and the establishment of Los Angeles as the nexus of filmmaking in the United States. Smith also reveals the role silent westerns played in the creation of the white male screen hero that dominated American popular culture in the twentieth century.

Illustrated with dozens of historic photos and movie stills, this engaging and substantive story will appeal to scholars interested in Western history, film history, and film studies as well as general readers hoping to learn more about this little-known chapter in popular filmmaking.

 “Not long ago, people did not worry about the food they ate. They did not worry about the water they drank or the air they breathed. It never occurred to them that eating, drinking water, satisfying basic, mundane bodily needs might be a dangerous thing to do. Parents thought it was good for their kids to go outside, get some sun.

            “That’s all changed now.” —from the Introduction

Many Americans today rightly fear that they are constantly exposed to dangerous toxins in their immediate environment: tap water is contaminated with chemicals; foods contain pesticide residues, hormones, and antibiotics; even the air we breathe, outside and indoors, carries invisible poisons. Yet we have responded not by pushing for governmental regulation, but instead by shopping. What accounts for this swift and dramatic response?  And what are its unintended consequences?

Andrew Szasz examines this phenomenon in Shopping Our Way to Safety. Within a couple of decades, he reveals, bottled water and water filters, organic food, “green” household cleaners and personal hygiene products, and “natural” bedding and clothing have gone from being marginal, niche commodities to becoming mass consumer items. Szasz sees these fatalistic, individual responses to collective environmental threats as an inverted form of quarantine, aiming to shut the healthy individual in and the threatening world out.

Sharply critiquing these products’ effectiveness as well as the unforeseen political consequences of relying on them to keep us safe from harm, Szasz argues that when consumers believe that they are indeed buying a defense from environmental hazards, they feel less urgency to actually do something to fix them.  To achieve real protection, real security, he concludes, we must give up the illusion of individual solutions and together seek substantive reform.

Andrew Szasz is professor and chair of the department of sociology at the University of California at Santa Cruz and author of the award-winning EcoPopulism (Minnesota, 1994).

This compilation of Dale Morgan’s  historical work on Indians in the Intermountain West focuses primarily on the Shoshone who lived near the Oregon and California trails. Three connected works by Morgan are included: First is his classic article on the history of the Utah Superintendency of Indian Affairs. This is followed by an important set of government reports and correspondence from the National Archives concerning the Eastern Shoshone and their leader Washakie. Morgan heavily annotated these for serial publication in the Annals of Wyoming. He also wrote a previously unpublished history of early relations among the Western Shoshone, emigrants, and the government along the California Trail. Morgan biographer Richard L. Saunders introduced, edited, and further annotated this collection. His introduction includes an intellectual biography of Morgan that focuses on the place of the anthologized pieces in Morgan’s corpus. Gregory E. Smoak, a leading historian of the Shoshone, contributed an ethnohistorical essay as additional context for Morgan’s work.

Sick building syndrome embodied a politics of uncertainty that continues to characterize contemporary American environmental debates. Murphy explores the production of uncertainty by juxtaposing multiple histories, each of which explains how an expert or lay tradition made chemical exposures perceptible or imperceptible, existent or nonexistent. They show how uncertainty emerged from a complex confluence of feminist activism, office worker protests, ventilation engineering, toxicology, popular epidemiology, corporate science, and ecology. In an illuminating case study, she reflects on EPA scientists’ efforts to have their headquarters recognized as a sick building. Murphy brings all of these histories together in what is not only a thorough account of an environmental health problem but also a much deeper exploration of the relationship between history, materiality, and uncertainty.