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"Frontier and pioneer life in art."
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Pioneer mother monuments : constructing cultural memory
\"Analyzes the ways in which public monuments to early white settlers in the western United States were erected, forgotten, and rediscovered from the late 1880s to the early 21st century in response to western race relations, shifting gender norms, and religious and regional identity\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The American artist : the life & times of George Caleb Bingham
A historical documentary on George Caleb Bingham, a respected early American portrait painter. His reputation was forever damaged by his choice to make a courageous stand following the Civil War. Upon his death, his legacy was scattered, his work written off as quaint, and nearly forgotten entirely.
Streaming Video
Imperial Plots
WINNER Governor General's History Award for Scholarly Research, 2017 WINNER Best Scholarly Book in Canadian History Prize, Canadian Historical Association, 2017 WINNER CLIO History Prize (Prairies), Canadian Historical Association, 2017 WINNER Gita Chaudhuri Prize, Western Association of Women Historians, 2017 Sarah Carter's Imperial Plots: Women, Land, and the Spadework of British Colonialism on the Canadian Prairies examines the goals, aspirations, and challenges met by women who sought land of their own. Supporters of British women homesteaders argued they would contribute to the \"spade-work\" of the Empire through their imperial plots, replacing foreign settlers and relieving Britain of its \"surplus\" women. Yet far into the twentieth century there was persistent opposition to the idea that women could or should farm: British women were to be exemplars of an idealized white femininity, not toiling in the fields. In Canada, heated debates about women farmers touched on issues of ethnicity, race, gender, class, and nation. Despite legal and cultural obstacles and discrimination, British women did acquire land as homesteaders, farmers, ranchers, and speculators on the Canadian prairies. They participated in the project of dispossessing Indigenous people. Their complicity was, however, ambiguous and restricted because they were excluded from the power and privileges of their male counterparts. Imperial Plots depicts the female farmers and ranchers of the prairies, from the Indigenous women agriculturalists of the Plains to the array of women who resolved to work on the land in the first decades of the twentieth century.
eBook
Seasons of Misery
The stories we tell of American beginnings typically emphasize colonial triumph in the face of adversity. But the early years of English settlement in America were characterized by catastrophe: starvation, disease, extreme violence, ruinous ignorance, and serial abandonment.Seasons of Miseryoffers a provocative reexamination of the British colonies' chaotic and profoundly unstable early days, placing crisis-both experiential and existential-at the center of the story. At the outposts of a fledgling empire and disconnected from the social order of their home society, English settlers were both physically and psychologically estranged from their European identities. They could not control, or often even survive, the world they had intended to possess. According to Kathleen Donegan, it was in this cauldron of uncertainty that colonial identity was formed. Studying the English settlements at Roanoke, Jamestown, Plymouth, and Barbados, Donegan argues that catastrophe marked the threshold between an old European identity and a new colonial identity, a state of instability in which only fragments of Englishness could survive amid the upheavals of the New World. This constant state of crisis also produced the first distinctively colonial literature as settlers attempted to process events that they could neither fully absorb nor understand. Bringing a critical eye to settlers' first-person accounts, Donegan applies a unique combination of narrative history and literary analysis to trace how settlers used a language of catastrophe to describe unprecedented circumstances, witness unrecognizable selves, and report unaccountable events.Seasons of Miseryaddresses both the stories that colonists told about themselves and the stories that we have constructed in hindsight about them. In doing so, it offers a new account of the meaning of settlement history and the creation of colonial identity.
eBook
The First Migrants
The First Migrants recounts the largely unknown story of
Black people who migrated from the South to the Great Plains
between 1877 and 1920 in search of land and freedom. They exercised
their rights under the Homestead Act to gain title to 650,000
acres, settling in all of the Great Plains states. Some created
Black homesteader communities such as Nicodemus, Kansas, and
DeWitty, Nebraska, while others, including George Washington Carver
and Oscar Micheaux, homesteaded alone. All sought a place where
they could rise by their own talents and toil, unencumbered by
Black codes, repression, and violence. In the words of one
Nicodemus descendant, they found \"a place they could experience
real freedom,\" though in a racist society that freedom could never
be complete. Their quest foreshadowed the epic movement of Black
people out of the South known as the Great Migration. In this first
account of the full scope of Black homesteading in the Great
Plains, Richard Edwards and Jacob K. Friefeld weave together two
distinct strands: the narrative histories of the six most important
Black homesteader communities and the several themes that
characterize homesteaders' shared experiences. Using homestead
records, diaries and letters, interviews with homesteaders'
descendants, and other sources, Edwards and Friefeld illuminate the
homesteaders' fierce determination to find freedom-and their
greatest achievements and struggles for full equality.
eBook
Abraham in Arms
In 1678, the Puritan minister Samuel Nowell preached a sermon he called \"Abraham in Arms,\" in which he urged his listeners to remember that \"Hence it is no wayes unbecoming a Christian to learn to be a Souldier.\" The title of Nowell's sermon was well chosen. Abraham of the Old Testament resonated deeply with New England men, as he embodied the ideal of the householder-patriarch, at once obedient to God and the unquestioned leader of his family and his people in war and peace. Yet enemies challenged Abraham's authority in New England: Indians threatened the safety of his household, subordinates in his own family threatened his status, and wives and daughters taken into captivity became baptized Catholics, married French or Indian men, and refused to return to New England. In a bold reinterpretation of the years between 1620 and 1763, Ann M. Little reveals how ideas about gender and family life were central to the ways people in colonial New England, and their neighbors in New France and Indian Country, described their experiences in cross-cultural warfare. Little argues that English, French, and Indian people had broadly similar ideas about gender and authority. Because they understood both warfare and political power to be intertwined expressions of manhood, colonial warfare may be understood as a contest of different styles of masculinity. For New England men, what had once been a masculinity based on household headship, Christian piety, and the duty to protect family and faith became one built around the more abstract notions of British nationalism, anti-Catholicism, and soldiering for the Empire. Based on archival research in both French and English sources, court records, captivity narratives, and the private correspondence of ministers and war officials,Abraham in Armsreconstructs colonial New England as a frontier borderland in which religious, cultural, linguistic, and geographic boundaries were permeable, fragile, and contested by Europeans and Indians alike.
eBook
Cultural Construction of Empire
From 1866 through 1886, the U.S. Army occupied southern Arizona and New Mexico in an attempt to claim it for settlement by Americans. Through a postcolonial lens, Janne Lahti examines the army, its officers, their wives, and the enlisted men as agents of an American empire whose mission was to serve as a group of colonizers engaged in ideological as well as military, conquest.
Cultural Construction of Empireexplores the cultural and social representations of Native Americans, Hispanics, and frontiersmen constructed by the officers, enlisted men, and their dependents. By differentiating themselves from these \"less civilized\" groups, white military settlers engaged various cultural processes and practices to accrue and exercise power over colonized peoples and places for the sake of creating a more \"civilized\" environment for other settlers. Considering issues of class, place, and white ethnicity, Lahti shows that the army's construction of empire took place not on the battlefield alone but also in representations of and social interactions in and among colonial places, peoples, settlements, and events, and in the domestic realm and daily life inside the army villages.
eBook
Settlement and Civility as Pre-Requisite of Evangelization in the Chichimeca Frontier
This paper delves into the process of evangelization undertaken by the Spanish in the northern frontier of New Spain during the 16th century, specifically targeting the nomadic Indigenous populations known as Chichimecas. Missionaries encountered unique challenges due to the absence of religious infrastructure, robust political authorities, and the nomadic lifestyle of these groups. To overcome these hurdles, the Spanish implemented a strategy that intertwined evangelization with colonization. The text highlights the significance of constructing physical infrastructure in these frontier territories, such as churches, schools, and dwellings, to facilitate the process of evangelization and colonial control. Moreover, it emphasizes the need to impose a social and political structure on these nomadic communities, transforming them into obedient colonial subjects.
Journal Article
Johnny Appleseed and the American orchard : a cultural history
A fresh look at American icon Johnny \"Appleseed\" Chapman and the story of the apple. Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard illuminates the meaning of Johnny \"Appleseed\" Chapman's life and the environmental and cultural significance of the plant he propagated. Creating a startling new portrait of the eccentric apple tree planter, William Kerrigan carefully dissects the oral tradition of the Appleseed myth and draws upon material from archives and local historical societies across New England and the Midwest. The character of Johnny Appleseed stands apart from other frontier heroes like Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone, who employed violence against Native Americans and nature to remake the West. His apple trees, nonetheless, were a central part of the agro-ecological revolution at the heart of that transformation. Yet men like Chapman, who planted trees from seed rather than grafting, ultimately came under assault from agricultural reformers who promoted commercial fruit stock and were determined to extend national markets into the West. Over the course of his life John Chapman was transformed from a colporteur of a new ecological world to a curious relic of a pre-market one. Weaving together the stories of the Old World apple in America and the life and myth of John Chapman, Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard casts new light on both.
eBook
The Political Economy of the American Frontier
This book offers an analytical explanation for the origins of and change in property institutions on the American frontier during the nineteenth century. Its scope is interdisciplinary, integrating insights from political science, economics, law and history. This book shows how claim clubs - informal governments established by squatters in each of the major frontier sectors of agriculture, mining, logging and ranching - substituted for the state as a source of private property institutions and how they changed the course of who received a legal title, and for what price, throughout the nineteenth century. Unlike existing analytical studies of the frontier that emphasize one or two sectors, this book considers all major sectors, as well as the relationship between informal and formal property institutions, while also proposing a novel theory of emergence and change in property institutions that provides a framework to interpret the complicated history of land laws in the United States.
eBook