Author: Richard Grant
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1668011026
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
The bestselling author of Dispatches from Pluto and The Deepest South of All turns his sharp wit and observational powers on the epicenter of America’s most divisive issues: Arizona. When Richard Grant and his wife moved with their four-year-old daughter back to Tucson, Arizona, where the couple first met, he expected to easily rekindle his love of the region. Instead, he found a housing market gone haywire, rampant election conspiracies, and right-wing political violence alarmingly close to his home and family. Undocumented immigration was surging, and the state was also on the front lines of climate change, breaking heat and drought records, and running out of long-term water supplies. Under these circumstances, Grant wondered how he might raise a happy, well-adjusted child who believes in the future. Yet these concerns weren’t keeping people away: Arizona was simultaneously experiencing some of the nation’s highest population growth. In A Race to the Bottom of Crazy, Grant mixes memoir, research, and reporting in a quest to understand what makes Arizona such a confounding and irresistible place. He visits the world’s largest machine-gun shoot; takes a sunset boat cruise with a US Congressman and a group of far-right patriots; rides through the desert with a Border Patrol agent; and goes camping with his family in breathtaking mountain ranges that rise out of the desert like islands in the sky. Interspersed with these adventures are recollections of his previous stint in the state, including his friendship with cult writer Charles Bowden and years living off the grid with smugglers, dope farmers, and outlaws on the Mexican border. Ultimately, Grant arrives at the conclusion that Arizona has always been a scattershot improvisation, with bizarre and extreme behavior in its DNA. This book is an entertaining, illuminating, and essential guide to understanding modern America at its most overheated.
Author: Bernadine Marie Hernández
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469667908
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 245
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Book Description
In this study of sex, gender, sexual violence, and power along the border, Bernadine Marie Hernandez brings to light under-heard stories of women who lived in a critical era of American history. Elaborating on the concept of sexual capital, she uses little-known newspapers and periodicals, letters, testimonios, court cases, short stories, and photographs to reveal how sex, violence, and capital conspired to govern not only women's bodies but their role in the changing American Southwest. Hernandez focuses on a time when the borderlands saw a rapid influx of white settlers who encountered elite landholding Californios, Hispanos, and Tejanos. Sex was inseparable from power in the borderlands, and women were integral to the stabilization of that power. In drawing these stories from the archive, Hernandez illuminates contemporary ideas of sexuality through the lens of the borderland's history of expansionist, violent, and gendered conquest. By extension, Hernandez argues that Mexicana, Nuevomexicana, Californiana, and Tejana women were key actors in the formation of the western United States, even as they are too often erased from the region's story.
Author: Venetia Hobson Lewis
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496235134
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
Changing Woman invokes one of the Southwest's most infamous massacres, the slaughter of Aravaipa Apaches near Camp Grant in 1871, through the eyes of Valeria Obregón, a settler in Tucson, and Nest Feather, a young Apache woman.
Author: Joseph Alton Sladen
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 9780806139784
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
In the autumn of 1872, Brigadier General Oliver O. Howard and his aid-de-camp, Lieutenant Joseph Alton Sladen, entered Arizona's rocky Dragoon Mountains in search of the elusive Chiricahua Apache chief, Cochise. They sought to convince him that the bloody fighting between his people and the Americans must stop. Cochise had already reached that conclusion, but he had found no American official he could trust.
Author: Richard Stott
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 080189137X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385
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Book Description
"Stott finds that male behavior could be strikingly similar in diverse locales, from taverns and boardinghouses to college campuses and sporting events. He explores the permissive attitudes that thrived in such male domains as the streets of New York City, California during the gold rush, and the Pennsylvania oil fields, arguing that such places had an important influence on American society and culture. Stott recounts how the cattle and mining towns of the American West emerged as centers of resistance to Victorian propriety. It was here that unrestrained male behavior lasted the longest, before being replaced with a new convention that equated manliness with sobriety and self-control.".
Author: David Devine
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476614601
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 307
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Book Description
Once considered the "Metropolis of Arizona," Tucson is in many respects a college town with a major military base onto which a retirement community has been grafted. A sprawling city of one million in the Sonoran Desert, Tucson was developed during and especially for the second half of the 20th century, a reality which has left it possibly unprepared for the challenges of the 21st century. Tracing the remarkable history of Tucson since 1854, this book describes many aspects of the community--its ceremonies and customs, its early bitter battle to secure the University of Arizona, its multitude of problems, its noteworthy successes and its racial divides. The recollections of those who have made Tucson such a memorable place are included, from political leaders to celebrities to ordinary residents.
Author: John Boessenecker
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806187743
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 797
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Book Description
One of the great lawmen of the Old West, Bob Paul (1830–1901) cast a giant shadow across the frontiers of California and Arizona Territory for nearly fifty years. Today he is remembered mainly for his friendship with Wyatt Earp and his involvement in the stirring events surrounding the famous 1881 gunfight near the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona. This long-overdue biography fills crucial gaps in Paul’s story and recounts a life of almost constant adventure. As told by veteran western historian John Boessenecker, this story is more than just a western shoot-’em-up, and it reveals Paul to be far more than a blood-and-thunder gunfighter. Beginning with Paul’s boyhood adventures as a whaler in the South Pacific, the author traces his journey to Gold Rush California, where he served respectively as constable, deputy sheriff, and sheriff in Calaveras County, and as Wells Fargo shotgun messenger and detective. Then, in the turbulent 1880s, Paul became sheriff of Pima County, Arizona, and a railroad detective for the Southern Pacific. In 1890 President Benjamin Harrison appointed him U.S. marshal of Arizona Territory. Transcending local history, Paul’s story provides an inside look into the rough-and-tumble world of frontier politics, electoral corruption, Mexican-U.S. relations, border security, vigilantism, and western justice. Moreover, issues that were important in Paul’s career—illegal immigration, smuggling on the Mexican border, youth gangs, racial discrimination, ethnic violence, and police-minority relations—are as relevant today as they were during his lifetime.
Author: Steve Kemper
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393285537
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 391
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Book Description
"Rich, detailed, and pitch-perfect, with the witty and wonderful skipping off every page." —Maxwell Carter, Wall Street Journal Frederick Russell Burnham’s (1861–1947) amazing story resembles a newsreel fused with a Saturday matinee thriller. One of the few people who could turn his garrulous friend Theodore Roosevelt into a listener, Burnham was once world-famous as “the American scout.” His expertise in woodcraft, learned from frontiersmen and Indians, helped inspire another friend, Robert Baden-Powell, to found the Boy Scouts. His adventures encompassed Apache wars and range feuds, booms and busts in mining camps around the globe, explorations in remote regions of Africa, and death-defying military feats that brought him renown and high honors. His skills led to his unusual appointment, as an American, to be Chief of Scouts for the British during the Boer War, where his daring exploits earned him the Distinguished Service Order from King Edward VII. After a lifetime pursuing golden prospects from the deserts of Mexico and Africa to the tundra of the Klondike, Burnham found wealth, in his sixties, near his childhood home in southern California. Other men of his era had a few such adventures, but Burnham had them all. His friend H. Rider Haggard, author of many best-selling exotic tales, remarked, “In real life he is more interesting than any of my heroes of romance.” Among other well-known individuals who figure in Burnham’s story are Cecil Rhodes and William Howard Taft, as well as some of the wealthiest men of the day, including John Hays Hammond, E. H. Harriman, Henry Payne Whitney, and the Guggenheim brothers. Failure and tragedy streaked his life as well, but he was endlessly willing to set off into the unknown, where the future felt up for grabs and values worth dying for were at stake. Steve Kemper brings a quintessential American story to vivid life in this gripping biography.
Author: John Warnock
Publisher: Wheatmark, Inc.
ISBN: 162787707X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432
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Book Description
This account of the drama in time that is Tucson begins not with the founding of the Presidio San Agustín on August 20, 1775, but with the emergence of Sentinel Peak in geologic deep time. It ends -- "To be continued"-- in 2014. It spans the periods of precontact with Europeans, Spanish colonization, Mexican nationhood, the territorial West, early and Depression era statehood, and the development of metropolitan Tucson after World War II. It offers not one definitive historical account but a collection of stories in which threads appear that may disappear beneath the surface for a while and reappear later, like some desert streams. It leaves spaces for, and invites the stories of, its readers. About the Author John Warnock was born in Tucson and graduated from Tucson High when it was one of the largest high schools in the nation. He attended Amherst College in Massachusetts, Oxford University in England, and the New York University School of Law. After teaching at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, he returned to Tucson in 1990 to join the English Department at the University of Arizona. He is now Professor Emeritus at UA and resides in Tucson.
Author: David Grassé
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476627355
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
In December 1883, five outlaws attempted to rob the A.A. Castaneda Mercantile establishment in the fledgling mining town of Bisbee in the Arizona Territory. The robbery was a disaster: four citizens shot dead, one a pregnant woman. The failed heist was national news, with the subsequent manhunt, trial and execution of the alleged perpetrators followed by newspapers from New York to San Francisco. The Bisbee Massacre was as momentous as the infamous blood feud between the Earp brothers and the cowboys two years earlier, and led to the only recorded lynching in the town of Tombstone--John Heath, a sporting man, who was thought to be the mastermind. New research indicates he may have been innocent. This comprehensive history takes a fresh look at the event that marked the end of the Wild West period in the Arizona Territory.
