Author: David Lavender
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803279155
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 450
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Book Description
?In one very real sense,? David Lavender writes, ?the story of the Oregon Trail begins with Columbus.? This opening suggests the panoramic sweep of his history of that famous trail. In chiseled, colorful prose, Lavender illustrates the ?westward vision? that impelled the early explorers of the American interior looking for a northwest passage and send fur trappers into the region charted by Lewis and Clark. For the emigrants following the trappers? routes, that vision gradually grew into a sense of a manifest American destiny. ø Lavender describes the efforts of emigration societies, of missionaries like Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, and of early pioneer settlers like Hall Jackson Kelley, Jason Lee, and Thomas Jefferson Farnham, as well as the routes they took to the ?Promised Land.? He concludes by recounting the first large-scale emigrations of 1843?45, which steeled the U. S. government for war with Mexico and agreements with Britain over the Oregon boundary. ø
Author: Sarah Gilbert White Smith
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803266216
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338
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Book Description
Four newlywed couples, along with one single man, were sent to Oregon in 1838 to reinforce the two-year-old mission established by Marcus Whitman and Henry Spalding. These reinforcements were to become legendary in the history of the Pacific Northwest for the incessant bickering and petty jealousies that eventually caused the deaths of Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and forced the abandonment of the mission effort. ø Uncertainty and conflict as well as willpower and endurance mark the story of the Oregon Mission and its charismatic, though contentious, missionaries. Simply getting to Oregon in the 1830s was a feat. Once they arrived, their efforts were doomed by their inability to agree on strategies for converting the Nez Percä and Spokane Indians. ø This Bison Books edition contains the very personal diary of Sarah Smith, ?the weeping one? as the Indians remembered her. When read in chronological sequence with the nearly one hundred letters written by her husband, Asa, a compelling picture of their journey to Oregon and subsequent life at the mission emerges. Other letters, documents, and biographical sketches enhance the volume.
Author: Mary Richardson Walker
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803266131
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 394
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Book Description
In 1833 two missionary couples, the Walkers and the Eellses, joined a party going west as a reinforcement to the Oregon Mission. Mary Walker and Myra Eells kept diaries throughout the months on the hazardous trail. Throughout this combined account, the presence of Myra Fairbanks Eells is deeply felt, but it is Mary Richardson Walker who brings the trail alive again. 21 photos.
Author: Sarah Koenig
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300258585
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 293
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Book Description
How providential history—the conviction that God is an active agent in human history—has shaped the American historical imagination In 1847, Protestant missionary Marcus Whitman was killed after a disastrous eleven-year effort to evangelize the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest. By 1897, Whitman was a national hero, celebrated in textbooks, monuments, and historical scholarship as the “Savior of Oregon.” But his fame was based on a tall tale—one that was about to be exposed. Sarah Koenig traces the rise and fall of Protestant missionary Marcus Whitman’s legend, revealing two patterns in the development of American history. On the one hand is providential history, marked by the conviction that God is an active agent in human history and that historical work can reveal patterns of divine will. On the other hand is objective history, which arose from the efforts of Catholics and other racial and religious outsiders to resist providentialists’ pejorative descriptions of non†‘Protestants and nonwhites. Koenig examines how these competing visions continue to shape understandings of the American past and the nature of historical truth.
Author: Laurie M. Carlson
Publisher: Caxton Press
ISBN: 0870043846
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270
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Book Description
Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Caxton Press Laurie Winn Carlson analyzes the lives of the first six white women—missionary wives—to cross the Rocky Mountains, offering a fresh and sometimes startling view of these pioneers. At a time when a woman's fortune and future was tied to the man she married, four of the six women married virtual strangers, on short notice, with no financial security. Why did they take such a gamble?
Author: Peter H. Hassrick
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806152680
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 439
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Book Description
Artist-explorer John Mix Stanley (1814–1872), one of the most celebrated chroniclers of the American West in his time, was in a sense a victim of his own success. So highly regarded was his work that more than two hundred of his paintings were held at the Smithsonian Institution—where in 1865 a fire destroyed all but seven of them. This volume, featuring a comprehensive collection of Stanley’s extant art, reproduced in full color, offers an opportunity—and ample reason—to rediscover the remarkable accomplishments of this outsize figure of nineteenth-century American culture. Originally from New York State, Stanley journeyed west in 1842 to paint Indian life. During the U.S.-Mexican War, he joined a frontier military expedition and traveled from Santa Fe to California, producing sketches and paintings of the campaign along the way—work that helped secure his fame in the following decades. He was also appointed chief artist for Isaac Stevens’s survey of the 48th parallel for a proposed transcontinental railroad. The essays in this volume, by noted scholars of American art, document and reflect on Stanley’s life and work from every angle. The authors consider the artist’s experience on government expeditions; his solo tours among the Oregon settlers and western and Plains Indians; and his career in Washington and search for government patronage, as well as his individual works. With contributions by Emily C. Burns, Scott Manning Stevens, Lisa Strong, Melissa Speidel, Jacquelyn Sparks, and Emily C. Wilson, the essays in this volume convey the full scope of John Mix Stanley’s artistic accomplishment and document the unfolding of that uniquely American vision throughout the artist’s colorful life. Together they restore Stanley to his rightful place in the panorama of nineteenth-century American life and art.
Author: Francis Paul Prucha
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803287051
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 192
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Book Description
A tool for scholars working in the field of Indian studies. This title covers the topic of Indian-white relations with breadth and depth.
Author: United States. Bureau of Naval Personnel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Chaplains, Military
Languages : en
Pages : 350
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Book Description
Author: Richard D. Scheuerman
Publisher: Washington State University Press
ISBN: 0874223970
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 522
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Book Description
Using imported heirloom grains and fruits, Spanish explorers, fur traders, missionaries, and some Native Americans planted subsistence gardens in the Pacific Northwest. After immigration surged in 1843, it took a surprisingly short time for the region’s fertile lands to become a commercial agricultural powerhouse. Demand for food exploded with the industrial revolution as well as the urbanization of Europe and eastern America, and the doors of international export opened wide. Agribusiness expanded to meet the need. By 1890, advancements in mechanization, seed quality, irrigation, and sustainable practices had spurred a farming boom. Columbia Basin irrigation and the development of synthetic fertilizers, as well as Cooperative Extension efforts and impressive work by agricultural researchers greatly boosted regional production. Harvest Heritage explores the people, history, and major influences that shaped and transformed the Pacific Northwest’s flourishing agrarian economy.
Author: Karen Lystra
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019536063X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 350
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Book Description
In January 1862, Charles Godwin courted Harriet Russell, ultimately unsuccessfully, with the following lines: "Like cadences of inexpressibly sweet music, your kind words came to me: causing every nerve to vibrate as though electrified by some far off strain of heavenly harmony." Almost ten years later, Albert Janin, upon receiving a letter from his beloved Violet Blair, responded with, "I kissed your letter over and over again, regardless of the small-pox epidemic at New York, and gave myself up to a carnival of bliss before breaking the envelope." And in October 1883, Dorothea Lummis wrote candidly to her husband Charles, "I like you to want me, dear, and if I were only with you, I would embrace more than the back of your neck, be sure." In Karen Lystra's richly provocative book, Searching the Heart, we hear the voices of Charles, Albert, Dorothea, and nearly one hundred other nineteenth-century Americans emerge from their surprisingly open, intimate, and emotional love letters. While historians of nineteenth-century America have explored a host of private topics, including courtship, marriage, birth control, sexuality, and sex roles, they have consistently neglected the study of romantic love. Lystra fills this gap by describing in vivid detail what it meant to fall in love in Victorian America. Based on a vast array of love letters, the book reveals the existence of a real openness--even playfulness--between male and female lovers which challenges and expands more traditional views of middle-class private life in Victorian America. Lystra refutes the common belief that Victorian men and women held passionlessness as an ideal in their romantic relationships. Enabling us to enter the hidden world of Victorian lovers, the letters they left behind offer genuine proof of the intensity of their most private interactions, feelings, behaviors, and judgments. Lystra discusses how Victorians anthropomorphized love letters, treating them as actual visits from their lovers, insisting on reading them in seclusion, sometimes kissing them (as Albert does with Violet's), and even taking them to bed. She also explores how courtship rituals--which included the setting and passing of tests of love--succeeded in building unique, emotional bonds between lovers, and how middle-class views of romantic love, which encouraged sharing knowledge and intimacy, gave women more power in the home. Through the medium of love letters, Searching the Heart allows us to enter, unnoticed, the Victorian bedroom and parlor. We will leave with a different view of middle-class Victorian America.
