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18 books match the query 'Southwest, Old'

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A Whole Country in Commotion

The Louisiana Purchase and the American Southwest

Patrick G. Williams

University of Arkansas Press, 2005

Bringing together the work of prominent scholars and rising stars in southern, western, and Indian history, A Whole Country in Commotion explores lesser-known aspects of one of the better-known episodes in U.S. history. While the purchase has been seen as a great boon for the United States, doubling the size of the new nation and securing American navigation on the Mississippi River, it also brought turmoil to many. Looking past the triumphal aspects of the purchase, this book examines the “negotiations among peoples, nations and empires that preceded and followed the actual transfer of territory.” Its nine essays highlight the “commotion” the purchase stirred up—among nations, among Louisiana residents and newcomers, even among those who remained east of the Mississippi. Many of these essays look at the portion of the Louisiana territory that would become Arkansas to illustrate the profound impact of the purchase on the diverse populations of the American Southwest. Others explore the woeful commotion brought to many thousands of lives as Jefferson’s “noble bargain” set the stage for the forced migration of native and African Americans from the east to the west of the Mississippi.

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Captain W. W. Withenbury's 1838-1842 "Red River Reminiscences"

Jacques D. Bagur

University of North Texas Press, 2014

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Fetching the Old Southwest

Humorous Writing from Longstreet to Twain

James H. Justus

University of Missouri Press, 2004

For more than a quarter-century, despite the admirable excavations that have unearthed such humorists as John Gorman Barr and Marcus Lafayette, the most significant of the humorists from the Old Southwest have remained the same: Crockett, Longstreet, Thompson, Baldwin, Thorpe, Hooper, Robb, Harris, and Lewis. Forming a kind of shadow canon in American literature that led to Mark Twain’s early work, from 1834 to 1867 these authors produced a body of writing that continues to reward attentive readers.

James H. Justus’s Fetching the Old Southwest examines this writing in the context of other discourses contemporaneous with it: travel books, local histories, memoirs, and sports manuals, as well as unpublished private forms such as personal correspondence, daybooks, and journals. Like most writing, humor is a product of its place and time, and the works studied herein are no exception. The antebellum humorists provide an important look into the social and economic conditions that were prevalent in the southern “new country,” a place that would, in time, become the Deep South.

Justus’s study focuses mainly on the humor from the area categorized in the federal censuses of the mid-nineteenth century as the Southwest: Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, and, eventually, Arkansas and Texas. Where it is pertinent, he also includes North Carolina and Missouri in this cultural map. Although some of these pieces may not precisely reflect their cultural setting, they are assuredly refractions of it.

While previous books about Old Southwest humor have focused on individual authors, Justus has produced the first critical study to encompass all of the humor from this time period. Teachers and students of literary history will appreciate the incredible range of documentation, both primary and secondary.

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General Thomas Posey

Son of the American Revolution

John Thornton Posey

Michigan State University Press, 1992

Revolutionary War general Thomas Posey (1750-1818) lived his life against the backdrop of one of the most dramatic periods in American history. Posey, who played a minor role in the actual War for Independence, went on to participate in the development and foundation of several states in the transappalachian West. His experiences on the late 18th- and early 19th-century American frontier were varied and in a certain sense extraordinary; he served as Indian agent in Illinois Territory; as Lieutenant Governor of Kentucky, as U.S. Senator from Louisiana, and as Governor of Indiana during its transition from territorial status to statehood.
His biographer speculates on the contrasting influences of Thomas's ne'er-do-well father, Captain John Posey, and the family's close friend, General George Washington. Posey's progress is then followed as he raises his own family in the newly formed nation. Of particular interest is an appendix containing a detailed analysis of evidence available to support popular 29th-century speculation that Thomas Posey was, in fact, George Washington's illicit son.

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I Acted from Principle

The Civil War Diary of Dr. William M. McPheeters, Confederate Surgeon in the Trans-Mississippi

Cynthia DeHaven Pitcock

University of Arkansas Press, 2000

At the start of the Civil War, Dr. William McPheeters was a distinguished physician in St. Louis, conducting unprecedented public-health research, forging new medical standards, and organizing the state's first professional associations. But Missouri was a volatile border state. Under martial law, Union authorities kept close watch on known Confederate sympathizers. McPheeters was followed, arrested, threatened, and finally, in 1862, given an ultimatum: sign an oath of allegiance to the Union or go to federal prison. McPheeters "acted from principle" instead, fleeing by night to Confederate territory. He served as a surgeon under Gen. Sterling Price and his Missouri forces west of the Mississippi River, treating soldiers' diseases, malnutrition, and terrible battle wounds. From almost the moment of his departure, the doctor kept a diary. It was a pocket-size notebook which he made by folding sheets of pale blue writing paper in half and in which he wrote in miniature with his steel pen. It is the first known daily account by a Confederate medical officer in the Trans-Mississippi Department. It also tells his wife's story, which included harassment by Federal military officials, imprisonment in St. Louis, and banishment from Missouri with the couple's two small children. The journal appears here in its complete and original form, exactly as the doctor first wrote it, with the addition of the editors' full annotation and vivid introductions to each section.

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John McKinley and the Antebellum Supreme Court

Circuit Riding in the Old Southwest

Steven P. Brown

University of Alabama Press, 2012

A Southern voice on a national bench—McKinley’s legacy in antebellum law.

John McKinley and the Antebellum Supreme Court offers the first comprehensive biography of Justice John McKinley (1780–1852), a largely forgotten figure in American legal history who played a pivotal role during a formative period of the U.S. Supreme Court. Steven P. Brown rescues McKinley from historical obscurity, presenting a compelling portrait of a man deeply embedded in the political, legal, and financial life of the early 19th-century South.

Born in Kentucky and later settling in northern Alabama, McKinley served in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives before being appointed to the Supreme Court by President Martin Van Buren in 1837. His tenure on the bench coincided with the creation of the Ninth Circuit, a vast and challenging judicial territory encompassing Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Brown details McKinley’s arduous circuit-riding duties, which required extensive travel and exposed him to the legal complexities of a rapidly expanding frontier.

More than a biography, the book provides a penetrating analysis of antebellum legal culture, Alabama state politics, and the internal workings of the Supreme Court during a time of national transformation. Brown challenges the prevailing view of McKinley as a mediocre jurist, arguing instead that his contributions—particularly his dissents defending states’ rights—deserve renewed scholarly attention. With rich historical context and meticulous research, John McKinley and the Antebellum Supreme Court sheds light on the burdens of justice in a divided nation and the legacy of a justice whose career mirrored the tensions of his time.

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Kirby Smith's Confederacy

The TransMississippi South, 1863-1865

Robert L. Kerby

University of Alabama Press, 1991

Cut off, but not surrendered—one region’s desperate stand in the twilight of the Confederacy.

With the surrender of Vicksburg in July 1863, the Confederacy’s TransMississippi Department, which included Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, western Louisiana, and Indian Territory, was cut off from the remainder of the South. Robert Kerby’s insightful volume, originally published in 1972, “has gone far toward filling one of the most conspicuous gaps in the literature on the Confederacy,” according to The Journal of Southern History.

Kerby investigates the many factors that led to the Department’s disintegrating and offers a case study of a segment of American society that consumed itself by surrendering everything, including its principles and ideals, in pursuit of an unattainable military victory.

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Life beyond the Boundaries

Constructing Identity in Edge Regions of the North American Southwest

Karen Harry

University Press of Colorado, 2018

Life beyond the Boundaries explores identity formation on the edges of the ancient Southwest. Focusing on some of the more poorly understood regions, including the Jornada Mogollon, the Gallina, and the Pimería Alta, the authors use methods drawn from material culture science, anthropology, and history to investigate themes related to the construction of social identity along the perimeters of the American Southwest.

Through an archaeological lens, the volume examines the social experiences of people who lived in edge regions. Through mobility and the development of extensive social networks, people living in these areas were introduced to the ideas and practices of other cultural groups. As their spatial distances from core areas increased, the degree to which they participated in the economic, social, political, and ritual practices of ancestral core areas increasingly varied. As a result, the social identities of people living in edge zones were often—though not always—fluid and situational.

Drawing on an increase of available information and bringing new attention to understudied areas, the book will be of interest to scholars of Southwestern archaeology and other researchers interested in the archaeology of low-populated and decentralized regions and identity formation. Life beyond the Boundaries considers the various roles that edge regions played in local and regional trajectories of the prehistoric and protohistoric Southwest and how place influenced the development of social identity.

Contributors: Lewis Borck, Dale S. Brenneman, Jeffery J. Clark, Severin Fowles, Patricia A. Gilman, Lauren E. Jelinek, Myles R. Miller, Barbara J. Mills, Matthew A. Peeples, Kellam Throgmorton, James T. Watson

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Old Mobile

Fort Louis de la Louisiane, 1702-1711

Jay Higginbotham

University of Alabama Press, 1991

The definitive account of the French colonial settlement that became Mobile, Alabama.

Commissioned to mark the 275th anniversary of the founding of the city of Mobile, Old Mobile is award-winning historian Jay Higginbotham’s definitive history of the origins of French settlement on Mobile Bay and the birth of the city.

Higginbotham’s narrative is replete with memorable characters, such as the LeMoyne brothers: Iberville, the aristocratic adventurer who abandoned the settlement and the younger Bienville, whose iron determination and Catholic faith sustained the community through its first hardscrabble years 26 miles upriver, a disastrous flood in 1711, and the community’s retreat to the city’s current location, nearer the French supply depot on Dauphin Island.

The majestic sweep of Higginbotham’s fascinating account also takes in early Mobile’s relations with neighboring European settlements, such as their meddling French neighbors in Louisana to the west and the Spanish in Pensacola to the east. Despite being rivals of a sort, Mobile and Pensacola became, of dire necessity, allies in survival. Higginbotham consulted a wealth of previously unpublished sources in the national archives of the United States, Canada, Mexico, France, England, Spain, and Cuba, creating an authoritative account never likely to be equaled. A copious bibliography, excellent illustrations and figures, tables of relevant statistics, and a detailed index round out this magisterial edition.

Scholars and readers interested in the founding of Alabama, the history of Gulf Coast settlements, the French colonial empire, or related subjects will find Old Mobile essential reading.

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Peculiar Honor

A History of the 28th Texas Cavalry 1862-1865

Jane Johansson

University of Arkansas Press, 1998

This regimental history tells the story of the 28th Texas Cavalry (dismounted), a unit of Walker's Texas Division which campaigned throughout the Civil War in Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas. Part of the division known as "Walker's Greyhounds" because of their amazing mobility and stamina, the men of the 28th, helped preserve Texas from Federal invasion. 1997 Winner of the Ottis Lock Award for the Best Book on East Texas History

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Plainview

The Enigmatic Paleoindian Artifact Style of the Great Plains

Edited by Vance T. Holliday, Eileen Johnson, and Ruthann Knudson

University of Utah Press, 2017

The Plainview Paleoindian artifact style was first recognized in 1947, after numerous projectile points were found during excavations of a bison kill site near Plainview, Texas. In the decades that followed, however, Plainview became something of a catch-all category with artifacts from across the continent being lumped together based merely on gross similarities. This volume unravels the meaning of Plainview, detailing what is known about this particular technology and time period. Contributing authors from the United States and Mexico present new data gleaned from the reinvestigation of past excavations, notes, maps, and materials from the original Plainview site as well as reports from other Plainview Paleoindian sites across the Great Plains, northern Mexico, and the southwestern United States.

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Southern Frontier Humor

An Anthology

Edited by M. Thomas Inge & Ed Piacentino

University of Missouri Press, 2010

If, as some suggest, American literature began with Huckleberry Finn, then the humorists of the Old South surely helped us to shape that literature. Twain himself learned to write by reading the humorists’ work, and later writers were influenced by it. This book marks the first new collection of humor from that region published in fifteen years—and the first fresh selection of sketches and tales to appear in over forty years.

Thomas Inge and Ed Piacentino bring their knowledge of and fondness for this genre to a collection that reflects the considerable body of scholarship that has been published on its major figures and the place of the movement in American literary history. They breathe new life into the subject, gathering a new selection of texts and adding Twain—the only major American author to contribute to and emerge from the movement—as well as several recently identified humorists.

All of the major writers are represented, from Augustus Baldwin Longstreet to Thomas Bangs Thorpe, as well as a great many lesser-known figures like Hamilton C. Jones, Joseph M. Field, and John S. Robb. The anthology also includes several writers only recently discovered to be a part of the tradition, such as Joseph Gault, Christopher Mason Haile, James Edward Henry, and Marcus Lafayette Byrn, and features authors previously overlooked, such as William Gilmore Simms, Ham Jones, Orlando Benedict Mayer, and Adam Summer.

Selections are timely, reflecting recent trends in literary history and criticism sensitive to issues of gender, race, and ethnicity. The editors have also taken pains to seek out first printings to avoid the kinds of textual corruptions that often occur in later versions of these sketches. Southern Frontier Humor offers students and general readers alike a broad perspective and new appreciation of this singular form of writing from the Old South—and provides some chuckles along the way.

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Spartan Band

Burnett's 13th Texas Cavalry in the Civil War

Thomas Reid

University of North Texas Press, 2005

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The Land between the Rivers

Thomas Nuttall's Ascent of the Arkansas, 1819

Russell M. Lawson

University of Michigan Press, 2004

An adventure story from the wilds of early America, The Land between the Rivers recreates the journeys of the English botanist Thomas Nuttall, one of American history's most well-traveled scientists.

During the early nineteenth century, Nuttall explored the waters, valleys, plains, and mountains of the Great Lakes, Ohio River, Mississippi River, as well as the Missouri, Arkansas, Red, and Canadian river valleys of the former Louisiana Territory.

In this fascinating account of Nuttall's travels through the wilderness of the middle west, author Russell Lawson-using Nuttall's own journal-captures the sense of excitement of the early wanderer. As much a delight for the mind as the senses, The Land between the Rivers details the unremitting weather and rugged geography of uncharted lands within the Louisiana Territory. A sense of discovery pervades the narrative as Nuttall's odyssey builds to its climax in the prairie wilderness of what is now Oklahoma. Sickened by "ague"-in his case, malaria-Nuttall at times was barely able to go on; yet he continued to search for and catalog plants and animals.

The Land between the Rivers expands our knowledge of the work of one of the country's earliest botanists. We also learn a great deal about the early explorers, the inhabitants of the unsettled land, and about the land and culture of the times.

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The Southern Frontier 1670-1732

Verner Crane, with a new introduction by Steven C. Hahn

University of Alabama Press, 2004

A classic resource on the struggle for dominance in southern North America during the colonial period

This volume recounts the clashes and intrigues that played out over the landscape of the Old Southwest and across six decades as the Spanish, French, British, and ultimately Americans vied for control. Rivalry began soon after initial discovery, mapping, and exploration as the world powers, particularly England and France, competed for control of the lucrative fur trade in the Mississippi valley. The French attempted to establish trade networks stretching from the Atlantic Ocean inland to the Mississippi River and northward from ports on the Gulf of Mexico to the Ohio River. But they found the British already entrenched there.

Verner Crane guides us through this multinational struggle and navigates the border wars and diplomatic intrigues that played crucial roles in the settlement of the South by Euro-Americans. In his new introduction, Steven Hahn places the work in the context of its time, sketches its publication history, and provides biographical information on Crane.

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