Born of Lakes and Plains: Mixed-Descent Peoples and the Making of the American West

Born of Lakes and Plains: Mixed-Descent Peoples and the Making of the American West PDF Author: Anne F. Hyde
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393634108
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 493

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Book Description
Finalist for the 2023 Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize "Immersive and humane." —Jennifer Szalai, New York Times A fresh history of the West grounded in the lives of mixed-descent Native families who first bridged and then collided with racial boundaries. Often overlooked, there is mixed blood at the heart of America. And at the heart of Native life for centuries there were complex households using intermarriage to link disparate communities and create protective circles of kin. Beginning in the seventeenth century, Native peoples—Ojibwes, Otoes, Cheyennes, Chinooks, and others—formed new families with young French, English, Canadian, and American fur traders who spent months in smoky winter lodges or at boisterous summer rendezvous. These families built cosmopolitan trade centers from Michilimackinac on the Great Lakes to Bellevue on the Missouri River, Bent’s Fort in the southern Plains, and Fort Vancouver in the Pacific Northwest. Their family names are often imprinted on the landscape, but their voices have long been muted in our histories. Anne F. Hyde’s pathbreaking history restores them in full. Vividly combining the panoramic and the particular, Born of Lakes and Plains follows five mixed-descent families whose lives intertwined major events: imperial battles over the fur trade; the first extensions of American authority west of the Appalachians; the ravages of imported disease; the violence of Indian removal; encroaching American settlement; and, following the Civil War, the disasters of Indian war, reservations policy, and allotment. During the pivotal nineteenth century, mixed-descent people who had once occupied a middle ground became a racial problem drawing hostility from all sides. Their identities were challenged by the pseudo-science of blood quantum—the instrument of allotment policy—and their traditions by the Indian schools established to erase Native ways. As Anne F. Hyde shows, they navigated the hard choices they faced as they had for centuries: by relying on the rich resources of family and kin. Here is an indelible western history with a new human face.

Born of Lakes and Plains: Mixed-Descent Peoples and the Making of the American West

Born of Lakes and Plains: Mixed-Descent Peoples and the Making of the American West PDF Author: Anne F. Hyde
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393634108
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 493

Get Book Here

Book Description
Finalist for the 2023 Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize "Immersive and humane." —Jennifer Szalai, New York Times A fresh history of the West grounded in the lives of mixed-descent Native families who first bridged and then collided with racial boundaries. Often overlooked, there is mixed blood at the heart of America. And at the heart of Native life for centuries there were complex households using intermarriage to link disparate communities and create protective circles of kin. Beginning in the seventeenth century, Native peoples—Ojibwes, Otoes, Cheyennes, Chinooks, and others—formed new families with young French, English, Canadian, and American fur traders who spent months in smoky winter lodges or at boisterous summer rendezvous. These families built cosmopolitan trade centers from Michilimackinac on the Great Lakes to Bellevue on the Missouri River, Bent’s Fort in the southern Plains, and Fort Vancouver in the Pacific Northwest. Their family names are often imprinted on the landscape, but their voices have long been muted in our histories. Anne F. Hyde’s pathbreaking history restores them in full. Vividly combining the panoramic and the particular, Born of Lakes and Plains follows five mixed-descent families whose lives intertwined major events: imperial battles over the fur trade; the first extensions of American authority west of the Appalachians; the ravages of imported disease; the violence of Indian removal; encroaching American settlement; and, following the Civil War, the disasters of Indian war, reservations policy, and allotment. During the pivotal nineteenth century, mixed-descent people who had once occupied a middle ground became a racial problem drawing hostility from all sides. Their identities were challenged by the pseudo-science of blood quantum—the instrument of allotment policy—and their traditions by the Indian schools established to erase Native ways. As Anne F. Hyde shows, they navigated the hard choices they faced as they had for centuries: by relying on the rich resources of family and kin. Here is an indelible western history with a new human face.

Empires, Nations, and Families

Empires, Nations, and Families PDF Author: Anne Farrar Hyde
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803224052
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 647

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Book Description
To most people living in the West, the Louisiana Purchase made little difference: the United States was just another imperial overlord to be assessed and manipulated. This was not, as Empires, Nations, and Families makes clear, virgin wilderness discovered by virtuous Anglo entrepreneurs. Rather, the United States was a newcomer in a place already complicated by vying empires. This book documents the broad family associations that crossed national and ethnic lines and that, along with the river systems of the trans-Mississippi West, formed the basis for a global trade in furs that had operated for hundreds of years before the land became part of the United States. ø Empires, Nations, and Families shows how the world of river and maritime trade effectively shifted political power away from military and diplomatic circles into the hands of local people. Tracing family stories from the Canadian North to the Spanish and Mexican borderlands and from the Pacific Coast to the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, Anne F. Hyde?s narrative moves from the earliest years of the Indian trade to the Mexican War and the gold rush era. Her work reveals how, in the 1850s, immigrants to these newest regions of the United States violently wrested control from Native and other powers, and how conquest and competing demands for land and resources brought about a volatile frontier culture?not at all the peace and prosperity that the new power had promised.

Empires and Indigenous Peoples

Empires and Indigenous Peoples PDF Author: Michael Maas
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 080619510X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
The Romans who established their rule on three continents and the Europeans who first established new homes in North America interacted with communities of Indigenous peoples with their own histories and cultures. Sweeping in its scope and rigorous in its scholarship, Empires and Indigenous Peoples expands our understanding of their historical parallels and raises general questions about the nature of the various imperial encounters. In this book, leading scholars of ancient Roman and early anglophone North America examine the mutual perceptions of the Indigenous and the imperial actors. They investigate the rhetoric of civilization and barbarism and its expression in military policies. Indigenous resistance, survival, and adaptation form a major theme. The essays demonstrate that power relations were endlessly adjusted, identities were framed and reframed, and new mutual knowledge was produced by all participants. Over time, cultures were transformed across the board on political, social, religious, linguistic, ideological, and economic levels. The developments were complex, with numerous groups enmeshed in webs of aggression, opposition, cooperation, and integration. Readers will see how Indigenous and imperial identities evolved in Roman and American lands. Finally, the authors consider how American views of Roman activity influenced the development of American imperial expansion and accompanying Indigenous critiques. They show how Roman, imperial North American, and Indigenous experiences have contributed to American notions of race, religion, and citizenship, and given shape to problems of social inclusion and exclusion today.

Continental Reckoning

Continental Reckoning PDF Author: Elliott West
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496234448
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 679

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Book Description
Winner of Columbia University's 2024 Bancroft Prize in American History 2024 Spur Award Winner Named a Best Civil War Book of 2023 by Civil War Monitor In Continental Reckoning renowned historian Elliott West presents a sweeping narrative of the American West and its vital role in the transformation of the nation. In the 1840s, by which time the United States had expanded to the Pacific, what would become the West was home to numerous vibrant Native cultures and vague claims by other nations. Thirty years later it was organized into states and territories and bound into the nation and world by an infrastructure of rails, telegraph wires, and roads and by a racial and ethnic order, with its Indigenous peoples largely dispossessed and confined to reservations. Unprecedented exploration uncovered the West's extraordinary resources, beginning with the discovery of gold in California within days of the United States acquiring the territory following the Mexican-American War. As those resources were developed, often by the most modern methods and through modern corporate enterprise, half of the contiguous United States was physically transformed. Continental Reckoning guides the reader through the rippling, multiplying changes wrought in the western half of the country, arguing that these changes should be given equal billing with the Civil War in this crucial transition of national life. As the West was acquired, integrated into the nation, and made over physically and culturally, the United States shifted onto a course of accelerated economic growth, a racial reordering and redefinition of citizenship, engagement with global revolutions of science and technology, and invigorated involvement with the larger world. The creation of the West and the emergence of modern America were intimately related. Neither can be understood without the other. With masterful prose and a critical eye, West presents a fresh approach to the dawn of the American West, one of the most pivotal periods of American history.

American Visions: The United States, 1800-1860

American Visions: The United States, 1800-1860 PDF Author: Edward L. Ayers
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039388127X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
A leading historian’s absorbing narrative of America’s formative period, when voices of dissent and innovation challenged the nation. With so many of our histories falling into dour critique or blatant celebration, here is a welcome departure: a book that offers hope as well as honesty about the American past. The early decades of the nineteenth century saw the expansion of slavery, Native dispossession, mass immigration, and wars with continental neighbors. And yet eccentric visions altered the accepted wisdom; voices from the margins moved the center; acts of empathy defied self-interest. Edward L. Ayers’s rich history examines the visions that moved Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, and the Native American activist William Apess to challenge vastly powerful practices and beliefs. Melville and Thoreau, Joseph Smith and Samuel Morse were similarly moved to harness their creativity to forge new paths forward. These visionaries and critics built vigorous traditions of innovation and dissent into the very foundation of the nation.

Our Country/Whose Country?

Our Country/Whose Country? PDF Author: Richard Abel
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197744044
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
"Even in the earliest "Wild West" subjects, the lens of settler colonialism reveals major tropes that will become characteristic of westerns in their depiction of "our country"'s expansion across the North American continent. Single and split-reel fiction films initially may not have captured the vistas of plains and mountains depicted in the large historical paintings and murals described in the Introduction. After all, up to 1904, those companies producing motion pictures for sale or rental chiefly were located in or around New York (Edison, AM&B), Philadelphia (Lubin), and Chicago (Selig Polyscope). Moreover, their cameras, especially the bulky Biograph camera (using 68mm filmstock until 1903), kept them from venturing beyond their spartan studios, except for shooting travel films. The stories and characters that had long circulated in popular dime novels, however, proved a welcome source of inspiration. One figure was particularly notable. Kit Carson (1809-1868) was known as a trail-blazing hunter, trapper, scout, and Indian fighter whose frontier adventures led him frequently across the plains and into the western mountains in the mid-19th century. He had guided John Charles Frémont on no fewer than three expeditions (1842, 1843, 1845) through the Rocky Mountains into California on the Oregon and Santa Fe trails. Together they mounted an uprising against Mexico and prepared the way for California to become a state. Later the frontiersman led several campaigns against the Apaches, Navajos, and Kiowas in what became New Mexico. Carson's legendary stature as an American pioneer came largely from dime novels such as Kit Carson, the Prince of the Gold Hunters (1849) and The Prairie Flower, or the Adventures of the Far West (1849) as well as his "memoir," The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains (1858). Scores of novels featuring his fictional exploits were published and republished through the turn of the century. Even in its book cover design, The Fighting Trapper, Kit Carson to the Rescue (1874), for instance, graphically depicts his skill at hand-to-hand combat. Perhaps it is no wonder that AM&B made him the hero of its early story films, Kit Carson and The Pioneers (both 1903), shot with a more standardized camera (using 35mm filmstock) in the Adirondack Mountains, "amid scenery of the wildest natural beauty and enacted with the greatest fidelity to the original.""--

Reconsidering Regions in an Era of New Nationalism

Reconsidering Regions in an Era of New Nationalism PDF Author: Alex Finkelstein
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496238397
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description


Maya Lin, Public Art, and the Confluence Project

Maya Lin, Public Art, and the Confluence Project PDF Author: Matthew Reynolds
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040028608
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 129

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Book Description
The first scholarly monograph devoted exclusively to this vital work of contemporary public art, this book examines Maya Lin’s Confluence Project through the lens of environmental humanities and Indigenous studies. Matthew Reynolds provides a detailed analysis of each earthwork, along with a discussion of the proposed final project at Celilo Falls near The Dalles, Oregon. The book assesses the artist’s longtime engagement with the region of the Pacific Northwest and explores the Confluence Project within Lin’s larger oeuvre. Several consistent themes and experiences are common amongst all the sites. These include an emphasis on individual, multisensory encounters with the earthworks and their surrounding contexts; sound as an experiential dimension of landscape; indexical accounts of the multicultural, multispecies histories of each place; and an evocation of loss. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, environmental studies, environmental humanities, and Native American studies.

Citizens of a Stolen Land

Citizens of a Stolen Land PDF Author: Stephen Kantrowitz
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469673614
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
This concise and revealing history reconsiders the Civil War era by centering one Native American tribe's encounter with citizenship. In 1837, eleven years before Wisconsin's admission as a state, representatives of the Ho-Chunk people yielded under immense duress and signed a treaty that ceded their remaining ancestral lands to the U.S. government. Over the four decades that followed, as "free soil" settlement repeatedly demanded their further expulsion, many Ho-Chunk people lived under the U.S. government's policies of "civilization," allotment, and citizenship. Others lived as outlaws, evading military campaigns to expel them and adapting their ways of life to new circumstances. After the Civil War, as Reconstruction's vision of nonracial, national, birthright citizenship excluded most Native Americans, the Ho-Chunk who remained in their Wisconsin homeland understood and exploited this contradiction. Professing eagerness to participate in the postwar nation, they gained the right to remain in Wisconsin as landowners and voters while retaining their language, culture, and identity as a people. This history of Ho-Chunk sovereignty and citizenship offer a bracing new perspective on citizenship's perils and promises, the way the broader nineteenth-century conflict between "free soil" and slaveholding expansion shaped Indigenous life, and the continuing impact of Native people's struggles and claims on U.S. politics and society.

Bad Subjects

Bad Subjects PDF Author: Jennifer J. Davis
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496236629
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
In a lively account that spans continents, Jennifer J. Davis considers what it meant to be called a libertine in early modern France and its colonies. Libertinage was a polysemous term in early modern Europe and the Atlantic World, generally translated as “debauchery” or “licentiousness” in English. Davis assesses the changing fortunes of the quasi-criminal category of libertinage in the French Atlantic, based on hundreds of cases drawn from the police and judicial archives of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France and its Atlantic colonies alongside the literature inspired by those proceedings. The libertine life was not merely a subject for fiction nor a topos against which to play out potential revolutions. It was a charge authorities imposed on a startlingly wide array of behaviors, including gambling, selling alcohol to Native Americans, and secret marriages. Once invoked by family and state authorities, the charge proved nearly impossible for the accused to contest, for a libertine need not have committed any crimes to be perceived as disregarding authority and thereby threatening families and social institutions. The research in Bad Subjects provides a framework for analysis of libertinage as a set of anti-authoritarian practices and discourses that circulated among the peoples of France and the Atlantic World, ultimately providing a compelling blueprint for alternative social and economic order in the Revolutionary period.