Plains Histories

Unsure which of its legacies are true and which to embrace, Texas grapples with an identity crisis. One camp insists that the state's roots in slavery, segregation, and cotton make it southern. Another argues that its Native and ranching history make it western. Outside Texas, southern and western historians who don't know what to make of the state ignore it altogether. In his innovative settling of the question, Glen Sample Ely examines the state's historical DNA, making sense of Lone Star identity west of the hundredth meridian and defining Texas's place in the American West. Focusing on the motives that shape how Texans appropriate their past-from cashing in on tourism to avoiding historical realities-Ely reveals the inner workings of a multiplicity of Texas identities.

African American women enslaved by the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Creek Nations led lives ranging from utter subjection to recognized kinship. Regardless of status, during Removal, they followed the Trail of Tears in the footsteps of their slaveholders, suffering the same life-threatening hardships and poverty. As if Removal to Indian Territory weren't cataclysmic enough, the Civil War shattered the worlds of these slave women even more, scattering families, destroying property, and disrupting social and family relationships. Suddenly they were freed, but had nowhere to turn. Freedwomen found themselves negotiating new lives within a labyrinth of federal and tribal oversight, Indian resentment, and intruding entrepreneurs and settlers. Remarkably they reconstructed their families and marshaled the skills to fashion livelihoods in a burgeoning capitalist environment. They sought education and forged new relationships with immigrant black women and men, managing to establish a foundation for survival. Linda Williams Reese is the first to trace the harsh and often bitter journey of these women from arrival in Indian Territory to free-citizen status in 1890. In doing so, she establishes them as no lesser pioneers of the American West than their Indian or other Plains sisters.

Amid the deadly racial violence of the 1960s, an unassuming student from a fundamentalist Christian home in Omaha emerged as a leader and nationally recognized black activist. Ernest Chambers, elected to the Nebraska State Legislature in 1970, eventually became one of the most influential legislators the state has ever known. As Chambers bids for reelection in 2012 to the office he held for thirty-eight years, Omaha native Tekla Agbala Ali Johnson illuminates his embattled career as a fiercely independent self-styled "defender of the downtrodden." Tracing the growth of the Black Power Movement in Nebraska and throughout the U.S., Ali Johnson discovers its unprecedented emphasis on electoral politics. For the first time since Reconstruction, voters catapulted hundreds of African American community leaders into state and national political arenas. Special-interest groups and political machines would curb the success of aspiring African American politicians, just as urban renewal would erode their geographical and political bases, compelling the majority to join the Democratic or Republican parties. Chambers was one of the few not to capitulate. In her revealing study of the man and those he represented, Ali Johnson portrays one intellectual's struggle alongside other African Americans to actualize their latent political power.

When Markku Henriksson was growing up in Finland, the song "(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66" was one of only two he could recognize-in English or Finnish. It was not until 1989 that Henriksson would catch his first glimpse of the legendary highway. It was enough to lure Henriksson four years later to the second international Route 66 festival in Flagstaff. There he realized that Route 66 was the perfect basis for a multidisciplinary American Studies course, one that he has been teaching at the University of Helsinki ever since. Forming the soul of this work-and yielding a more holistic and complex picture than any previous study-are Henriksson's 1996 (east to west) and 2002 (west to east) journeys along the full length of the Route and his mastery of the literature and film that illuminate the Route's place in Americana. Not a history of the road itself and the towns along the way, Henriksson's perspective offers insight into America and its culture as revealed in its peoples, their histories, cultures, and music as displayed along the Mother Road.

Zitkala-Ša, also known as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, was born on the Yankton Sioux reservation in 1876 and went on to become one of the most influential American Indian writer/activists of the twentieth century. "Help Indians Help Themselves": The Later Writings of Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Ša) is a critical collection of primary documents written by Bonnin who was principally known for the memoir of her boarding school experience, "Help Indians Help Themselves" expands the published work of Zitkala-Ša, adding insight to a life of writing and political activism on behalf of American Indians in the early twentieth century. Edited by P. Jane Hafen, "Help Indians Help Themselves" documents Bonnin's passion for justice in Indian America and outlines the broad scope of her life's work. In the American Indian Magazine, the publication of the Society of American Indians, and through her work for the National Council of American Indians, Bonnin developed her emphasis, as Hafen writes, on "resistance, tribal nationalism, land rights and call for civil rights." "Help Indians Help Themselves" also brings to light Bonnin's letters, speeches, and congressional testimony, which coincide with important developments of the relationship between American Indians and the U.S. federal government. Legislation such as the Citizenship Act of 1924, the Meriam Report of 1928, and the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 is reflected through the work collected in "Help Indians Help Themselves". In these writings, in newsletters, and in voluminous correspondence-most of which have never before been published-Bonnin advocates tirelessly for "the Indian Cause."

Urban Villages and Local Identities examines immigration to the Great Plains by surveying the experiences of three divergent ethnic groups-Volga Germans, Omaha Indians, and Vietnamese-that settled in enclaves in Lincoln, Nebraska, beginning in 1876, 1941, and 1975, respectively. These urban villages served as safe havens that protected new arrivals from a mainstream that often eschewed unfamiliar cultural practices. Lincoln's large Volga German population was last fully discussed in 1918; Omahas are rarely studied as urban people although sixy-five percent of their population lives in cities; and the growing body of work on Vietnamese tends to be conducted by social scientists rather than historians, few of whom contrast Southeast Asian experiences with those of earlier waves of immigration. As a comparative study, Urban Villages and Local Identities is inspired, in part, by Reinventing Free Labor, by Gunther Peck. By focusing on the experiences of three populations over the course of 130 years, Urban Villages connects two distinct eras of international border crossing and broadens the field of immigration to include Native Americans. Ultimately, the work yields insights into the complexity, flexibility, and durability of cultural identities among ethnic groups and the urban mainstream in one capital city.

In 1876, the United States launched the Great Sioux War without a formal declaration of war by Congress. During the nineteenth century, the rights of American Indians were frequently violated by the president and ignored or denied enforcement by federal courts. However, Congress generally treated the Indians with good faith and honored due process, which prohibits the government from depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without a fair hearing before an impartial judge or jury. These due process requirements protect all Americans and apply to all branches of the government. Charles E. Wright analyzes the legal backdrop to the Great Sioux War, asking the hard questions of how treaties were to be honored and how the US government failed to abide by its sovereign word. Until now, little attention has been focused on how the events leading up to and during the Battle of Little Big Horn impacted American law. Though other authors have analyzed George Armstrong Custer's tactics and equipment, Wright is the first to investigate the legal and constitutional issues surrounding the United States' campaign against the American Indians. This is not just another Custer book. Its contents will surprise even the most accomplished Little Big Horn scholar.

From 1894 to 1934, a span of forty years that saw its parent company go from coal mining to oil drilling, the Texas Pacific Mercantile and Manufacturing Company operated and managed the various commercial and service enterprises essential to life in Thurber, Texas. Thurber was a company town, wholly owned by the Texas and Pacific Coal Company, and the inhabitants viewed the "company store" with suspicion before and after unionization in 1903, believing it monopolistic and exploitative. But to call the mercantile a monopoly, or a mere contrivance to exploit laborers, paints an incomplete portrait of the company store as it existed in Thurber and elsewhere. With a keen eye for context-honed by a career in banking-Tucker reads the pages of ledgers in the same way most historians read diaries or newspapers. In this thoroughgoing study he examines a wealth of company records, interviews, and newspaper accounts, presenting a case study not only of the microcosm of Thurber and TPM&M but of relations between labor and management in industrializing Texas, and a larger story of the complex role of the company store and company town in America.

(Volume 1 of 2) Killsback, a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Nation, reconstructs and rekindles an ancient Cheyenne world-ways of living and thinking that became casualties of colonization and forced assimilation. Spanning more than a millennium of antiquity and recovering stories and ideas interpreted from a Cheyenne worldview, the works' joint purpose is rooted as much in a decolonization roadmap as it is in preservation of culture and identity for the next generations of Cheyenne people. Dividing the story of the Cheyenne Nation into pre- and post-contact, A Sacred People and A Sovereign People lay out indigenously conceived possibilities for employing traditional worldviews to replace unhealthy and dysfunctional ones bred of territorial, cultural, and psychological colonization.

(Volume 2 of 2) Killsback, a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Nation, reconstructs and rekindles an ancient Cheyenne world-ways of living and thinking that became casualties of colonization and forced assimilation. Spanning more than a millennium of antiquity and recovering stories and ideas interpreted from a Cheyenne worldview, the works' joint purpose is rooted as much in a decolonization roadmap as it is in preservation of culture and identity for the next generations of Cheyenne people. Dividing the story of the Cheyenne Nation into pre- and post-contact, A Sacred People and A Sovereign People lay out indigenously conceived possibilities for employing traditional worldviews to replace unhealthy and dysfunctional ones bred of territorial, cultural, and psychological colonization.

In Texas, Wichita Falls lies at the nexus of many strains of American environmental history. Covering Progressive Era land ethics, water management, boom and bust oil towns, colorful municipal boosters, and many other topics. The Falls of Wichita Falls analyzes a local history with dramatically national implications. Beginning with Teddy Roosevelt's famous wolf hunt in Frederick, Oklahoma and covering the long twentieth century up through the emergence of Indian Casinos, Jahue Anderson's incisive book challenges the myth of rugged individualism as the central feature of the Red Rolling Plains cultural landscape. Crucially, Anderson examines how local indigenous environmental knowledge was washed out by moonshot plans to irrigate a valley, a project that ultimately failed to improve living conditions. The dreams of an "irrigated valley" gave way to a cultural landscape of oil derricks, military installations, suburbs, and a complex system of reservoirs and pumping stations built on the Little Wichita River to bring water to people living in the Big Wichita River Valley. The Falls of Wichita Falls sketches an environmental blueprint that encapsulates a thirsty city and its people, the commodification of natural resources, and the endemic ideological postures shaping how Americans attempt to subdue the land of the American west.

The long-intertwined communities of the Oglala Lakota Pine Ridge Reservation and the bordering towns in Sheridan County, Nebraska, mark their histories in sensational incidents and quiet human connections, many recorded in detail here for the first time. After covering racial unrest in the remote northwest corner of his home state of Nebraska in 1999, journalist Stew Magnuson returned four years later to consider the larger questions of its peoples, their paths, and the forces that separate them. Examining Raymond Yellow Thunder's death at the hands of four white men in 1972, Magnuson looks deep into the past that gave rise to the tragedy. Situating long-ranging repercussions within 130 years of context, he also recounts the largely forgotten struggles of American Indian Movement activist Bob Yellow Bird and tells the story of Whiteclay, Nebraska, the controversial border hamlet that continues to sell millions of cans of beer per year to the "dry" reservation. Within this microcosm of cultural conflict, Magnuson explores the odds against community's power to transcend misunderstanding, alcoholism, prejudice, and violence. "Like all good stories, The Death of Raymond Yellow Thunder spins against the way it drives. Even as the people of Sheridan County despise, scorn, exploit, assault, and kill one another, their lives, like objects slipping out of control, become more and more inseparable. Indians and whites coexist and, against all odds, somehow get along, sharing space they really don't want to share. This countercurrent is the source of the many unexpected stories Magnuson brings forth." -Pekka Hämäläinen, from the foreword