It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own

It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own PDF Author: Richard White
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806174234
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 665

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Book Description
A centerpiece of the New History of the American West, this book embodies the theme that, as succeeding groups have occupied the American West and shaped the land, they have done so without regard for present inhabitants. Like the cowboy herding the dogies, they have cared little about the cost their activities imposed on others; what has mattered is the immediate benefit they have derived from their transformation of the land. Drawing on a recent flowering of scholarship on the western environment, western gender relations, minority history, and urban and labor history, as well as on more traditional western sources, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own is about the creation of the region rather than the vanishing of the frontier. Richard White tells how the various parts of the West—its distinct environments, its metropolitan areas and vast hinterlands, the various ethnic and racial groups and classes—are held together by a series of historical relationships that are developed over time. Widespread aridity and a common geographical location between the Missouri River and the Pacific Ocean would have provided but weak regional ties if other stronger relationships had not been created. A common dependence on the deferral government and common roots in a largely extractive and service-based economy were formative influences on western states and territories. A dual labor system based on race and the existence of minority groups with distinctive legal status have helped further define the region. Patterns of political participation and political organization have proved enduring. Together, these relationships among people, and between people and place, have made the West a historical creation and a distinctive region. From Europeans contact and subsequent Anglo-American conquest, through the civil-rights movement, the energy crisis, and the current reconstructing of the national and world economies, the West has remained a distinctive section in a much larger nation. In the American imagination the West still embodies possibilities inherent in the vastness and beauty of the place itself. But, Richard White explains, the possibilities many imagined for themselves have yielded to the possibilities seized by others. Many who thought themselves cowboys have in the end turned out to be dogies.

It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own

It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own PDF Author: Richard White
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806174234
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 665

Get Book Here

Book Description
A centerpiece of the New History of the American West, this book embodies the theme that, as succeeding groups have occupied the American West and shaped the land, they have done so without regard for present inhabitants. Like the cowboy herding the dogies, they have cared little about the cost their activities imposed on others; what has mattered is the immediate benefit they have derived from their transformation of the land. Drawing on a recent flowering of scholarship on the western environment, western gender relations, minority history, and urban and labor history, as well as on more traditional western sources, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own is about the creation of the region rather than the vanishing of the frontier. Richard White tells how the various parts of the West—its distinct environments, its metropolitan areas and vast hinterlands, the various ethnic and racial groups and classes—are held together by a series of historical relationships that are developed over time. Widespread aridity and a common geographical location between the Missouri River and the Pacific Ocean would have provided but weak regional ties if other stronger relationships had not been created. A common dependence on the deferral government and common roots in a largely extractive and service-based economy were formative influences on western states and territories. A dual labor system based on race and the existence of minority groups with distinctive legal status have helped further define the region. Patterns of political participation and political organization have proved enduring. Together, these relationships among people, and between people and place, have made the West a historical creation and a distinctive region. From Europeans contact and subsequent Anglo-American conquest, through the civil-rights movement, the energy crisis, and the current reconstructing of the national and world economies, the West has remained a distinctive section in a much larger nation. In the American imagination the West still embodies possibilities inherent in the vastness and beauty of the place itself. But, Richard White explains, the possibilities many imagined for themselves have yielded to the possibilities seized by others. Many who thought themselves cowboys have in the end turned out to be dogies.

The Frontier in American Culture

The Frontier in American Culture PDF Author: Richard White
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520915321
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
Log cabins and wagon trains, cowboys and Indians, Buffalo Bill and General Custer. These and other frontier images pervade our lives, from fiction to films to advertising, where they attach themselves to products from pancake syrup to cologne, blue jeans to banks. Richard White and Patricia Limerick join their inimitable talents to explore our national preoccupation with this uniquely American image. Richard White examines the two most enduring stories of the frontier, both told in Chicago in 1893, the year of the Columbian Exposition. One was Frederick Jackson Turner's remarkably influential lecture, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History"; the other took place in William "Buffalo Bill" Cody's flamboyant extravaganza, "The Wild West." Turner recounted the peaceful settlement of an empty continent, a tale that placed Indians at the margins. Cody's story put Indians—and bloody battles—at center stage, and culminated with the Battle of the Little Bighorn, popularly known as "Custer's Last Stand." Seemingly contradictory, these two stories together reveal a complicated national identity. Patricia Limerick shows how the stories took on a life of their own in the twentieth century and were then reshaped by additional voices—those of Indians, Mexicans, African-Americans, and others, whose versions revisit the question of what it means to be an American. Generously illustrated, engagingly written, and peopled with such unforgettable characters as Sitting Bull, Captain Jack Crawford, and Annie Oakley, The Frontier in American Culture reminds us that despite the divisions and denials the western movement sparked, the image of the frontier unites us in surprising ways.

The Roots of Dependency

The Roots of Dependency PDF Author: Richard White
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803297241
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 460

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Book Description
"Richard White's study of the collapse into 'dependency' of three Native American subsistence economies represents the best kind of interdisciplinary effort. Here ideas and approaches from several fields--mainly anthropology, history, and ecology--are fruitfully combined in one inquiring mind closely focused on a related set of large, salient problems. . . . A very sophisticated study, a 'best read' in Indian history."--American Historical Review "The book is original, enlightening, and rewarding. It points the way to a holistic manner in which tribal histories and studies of Indian-white relations should be written in the future. It can be recommended to anyone interested in Indian affairs, particularly in the question of the present-day dependency plight of the tribes."--Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., Western Historical Quarterly "The Roots of Dependency is a model study. With a provocative thesis tightly argued, it is extensively researched and well written. The nonreductionist, interdisciplinary approach provides insight heretofore beyond the range of traditional methodologies. . . . To the historiography of the American Indian this book is an important addition."--W. David Baird, American Indian Quarterly Richard White is a professor of history at the University of Washington. He is the winner of the Albert J. Beveridge Award of the American Historical Asso-ciation, the James A. Rawley Prize presented by the Organization of Ameri-can Historians and the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians. His books include The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815, "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own": A History of the American West and The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River

Remembering Ahanagran

Remembering Ahanagran PDF Author: Richard White
Publisher: Ewha Womans University Press
ISBN: 9780295983554
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Sara Walsh was born in 1919 in the west of Ireland, in a land of storytellers. In prose that is neither history nor memoir but something larger and brighter than both,Remembering Ahanagrancaptures her memories of her early years in Ireland, her migration to the United States, and her marriage to Harry White, the Harvard-educated son of Russian Jewish emigrants. Her son, eminent historian Richard White, in collaboration with Sara, forces history as it is traditionally written into conversation with personal recollections. Richard Whiteis Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford University. "Richard White gives us a beautifully rendered account of his mother's life, tracing her journey as a young girl from Ireland toward the new identities she forged for herself in Boston and Chicago. Subtly weaving memory and history to suggest how the two reinforce but also challenge each other,Remembering Ahanagranis a powerful meditation on the immigrant experience in America. It is an absolutely wonderful book." - William Cronon "In this brilliant book, Richard White proves that he is not only one of the finest historians in America but also one of the most eloquent and ambitious. Through a loving but clear-eyed examination of the tales his immigrant mother tells of her early life in Ireland and the United States, he has managed to uncover a host of surprising truths--about his own family, about the complex, often poignant relationship between history and memory, and about what it means to be an American." - Geoffrey C. Ward "Remembering Ahanagranis a rare and remarkable achievement: a book that carries as great a charge in emotional power as it does in intellectual energy. Sara Walsh's 'memory' and Richard White's 'history' travel through terrain from the most urgent American concerns of immigration and intermarriage to the most elemental, universal issues of love and death. This book gives its readers access to the company of two people with extraordinary gifts for life's basic enterprise: taking in experience, and making sense of it." - Patricia Nelson Limerick "With equal and equally tender respect for document, memory, and lore, Richard White recreates and joins his Irish and his Jewish ancestry. An extraordinary book." - Lore Segal

Dreams of El Dorado

Dreams of El Dorado PDF Author: H. W. Brands
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 1541672534
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 503

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Book Description
"Epic in its scale, fearless in its scope" (Hampton Sides), this masterfully told account of the American West from a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist sets a new standard as it sweeps from the California Gold Rush and beyond. In Dreams of El Dorado, H. W. Brands tells the thrilling, panoramic story of the settling of the American West. He takes us from John Jacob Astor's fur trading outpost in Oregon to the Texas Revolution, from the California gold rush to the Oklahoma land rush. He shows how the migrants' dreams drove them to feats of courage and perseverance that put their stay-at-home cousins to shame-and how those same dreams also drove them to outrageous acts of violence against indigenous peoples and one another. The West was where riches would reward the miner's persistence, the cattleman's courage, the railroad man's enterprise; but El Dorado was at least as elusive in the West as it ever was in the East. Balanced, authoritative, and masterfully told, Dreams of El Dorado sets a new standard for histories of the American West.

Westward Expansion

Westward Expansion PDF Author: Ray Allen Billington
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American Frontier
Languages : en
Pages : 893

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Book Description


The Republic for Which It Stands

The Republic for Which It Stands PDF Author: Richard White
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190619066
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 964

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Book Description
The Oxford History of the United States is the most respected multivolume history of the American nation. In the newest volume in the series, The Republic for Which It Stands, acclaimed historian Richard White offers a fresh and integrated interpretation of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age as the seedbed of modern America. At the end of the Civil War the leaders and citizens of the victorious North envisioned the country's future as a free-labor republic, with a homogenous citizenry, both black and white. The South and West were to be reconstructed in the image of the North. Thirty years later Americans occupied an unimagined world. The unity that the Civil War supposedly secured had proved ephemeral. The country was larger, richer, and more extensive, but also more diverse. Life spans were shorter, and physical well-being had diminished, due to disease and hazardous working conditions. Independent producers had become wage earners. The country was Catholic and Jewish as well as Protestant, and increasingly urban and industrial. The "dangerous" classes of the very rich and poor expanded, and deep differences -- ethnic, racial, religious, economic, and political -- divided society. The corruption that gave the Gilded Age its name was pervasive. These challenges also brought vigorous efforts to secure economic, moral, and cultural reforms. Real change -- technological, cultural, and political -- proliferated from below more than emerging from political leadership. Americans, mining their own traditions and borrowing ideas, produced creative possibilities for overcoming the crises that threatened their country. In a work as dramatic and colorful as the era it covers, White narrates the conflicts and paradoxes of these decades of disorienting change and mounting unrest, out of which emerged a modern nation whose characteristics resonate with the present day.

A Ladder to the Sky

A Ladder to the Sky PDF Author: John Boyne
Publisher: Hogarth
ISBN: 1984823035
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
“A satire of writerly ambition wrapped in a psychological thriller . . . An homage to Patricia Highsmith, Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe, but its execution is entirely Boyne’s own.”—Ron Charles, The Washington Post NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE Maurice Swift is handsome, charming, and hungry for fame. The one thing he doesn’t have is talent—but he’s not about to let a detail like that stand in his way. After all, a would-be writer can find stories anywhere. They don’t need to be his own. Working as a waiter in a West Berlin hotel in 1988, Maurice engineers the perfect opportunity: a chance encounter with celebrated novelist Erich Ackermann. He quickly ingratiates himself with the powerful – but desperately lonely – older man, teasing out of Erich a terrible, long-held secret about his activities during the war. Perfect material for Maurice’s first novel. Once Maurice has had a taste of literary fame, he knows he can stop at nothing in pursuit of that high. Moving from the Amalfi Coast, where he matches wits with Gore Vidal, to Manhattan and London, Maurice hones his talent for deceit and manipulation, preying on the talented and vulnerable in his cold-blooded climb to the top. But the higher he climbs, the further he has to fall. . . . Sweeping across the late twentieth century, A Ladder to the Sky is a fascinating portrait of a relentlessly immoral man, a tour de force of storytelling, and the next great novel from an acclaimed literary virtuoso. Praise for A Ladder to the Sky “Boyne's mastery of perspective, last seen in The Heart's Invisible Furies, works beautifully here. . . . Boyne understands that it's far more interesting and satisfying for a reader to see that narcissist in action than to be told a catchall phrase. Each step Maurice Swift takes skyward reveals a new layer of calumny he's willing to engage in, and the desperation behind it . . . so dark it seems almost impossible to enjoy reading A Ladder to the Sky as much as you definitely will enjoy reading it.”—NPR “Delicious . . . spins out over several decades with thrilling unpredictability, following Maurice as he masters the art of co-opting the stories of others in increasingly dubious ways. And while the book reads as a thriller with a body count that would make Highsmith proud, it is also an exploration of morality and art: Where is the line between inspiration and thievery? To whom does a story belong?”—Vanity Fair

Signing Their Lives Away

Signing Their Lives Away PDF Author: Denise Kiernan
Publisher: Quirk Books
ISBN: 1594744807
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
“Astonishing individual portraits” reveal the surprising and strange fates of the 56 Founding Fathers who signed the Declaration of Independence (School Library Journal)! In the summer of 1776, a group of 56 men risked their lives and livelihood to defy King George III and sign the Declaration of Independence—yet how many of them do we remember? Signing Their Lives Away introduces readers to the eclectic group of statesmen, soldiers, slaveholders, and scoundrels who signed this historic document—and the many strange fates that awaited them. To wit: • The Signer Who Was Poisoned By His Nephew • The Signer Who Was Killed In a Duel • The Signer Who Went to Prison • The Signer Who Was Lost at Sea • The Signer Who Achieved Fame as a Brewer Complete with portraits of every signatory, Signing Their Lives Away provides an entertaining and enlightening narrative for students, history buffs, politicos, and Hamilton fans alike.

Faces of the Frontier

Faces of the Frontier PDF Author: Frank H. Goodyear (III)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
Faces of the Frontier showcases more than 120 photographic portraits of leaders, statesmen, soldiers, laborers, activists, criminals, and others, all posed before the cameras that made their way to nearly every mining shanty-town and frontier outpost on the prairie. Drawing primarily on the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, this book depicts many of the people who helped transform the West between the end of the Mexican War and passage of the Indian Citizenship Act.