Howard R. Lamar – författare

“A splendid piece of Americana, for Perlot was a witty, gingery, intelligent man with a sharp eye for significant detail. . . . His book . . . has been translated and thoroughly annotated by the late Helen Harding Bretnor, who deserves the gratitude of all readers with a taste for the history of the Old West.”—Atlantic Monthly“A lively memoir.”—Evan S. Connell, New York Times Book Review“Provides a narrative as amusing as it is informative. Perlot is real gold, dug belatedly from the California mines.”—Gerald Weales, Smithsonian“A marvelous book. . . . Perlot’s observations, both as a foreign miner and a settler in the pioneer West, give new meaning to a familiar historical experience.”—Mary McDougall Gordon, Pacific Historical Review In 1850, Jean-Nicolas Perlot, a 26-year-old Belgian, joined a French mining company bound for the gold fields of California. This book is Perlot’s witty and informative account of his life in California and his subsequent career in the newly rich town of Portland, Oregon.

The hypothesis advanced in Frederick Jackson Turner's famous 1893 essay, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, has been debated by three generations of scholars. The pioneering experience, Turner suggested, accounted for some of the distinctive characteristics of the American people: during three centuries of expansion their attitudes toward democracy, nationalism and individualism were altered, and they developed distinctively American traits, such as wastefulness, inventiveness, mobility, and a dozen more.After opening with a summary of the appearance, acceptance, and subsequent dismissal of the theory, the author carefully defines the ""frontier"" and reviews recent evidence on its political, social, and economic characteristics. He discusses the compulsion to migrate and examines other behavioral patterns and traits in his explanation of how and why pioneers moved west. His extensive bibliographic notes constitute a remarkable guide to the literature of many disciplines dealing with the frontier concept.

Charlie Siringo (1855-1928) lived the quintessential life of adventure on the American frontier as a cowboy, Pinkerton detective, writer, and later as a consultant for early western films. Siringo was one of the most attractive, bold, and original characters to live and flourish in the final decades of the Wild West. His love of the cattle business and of cowboy life were so great that in 1885 he published A Texas Cowboy, or Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony--Taken From Real Life, which Will Rogers dubbed the "Cowboy's Bible."Howard R. Lamar's biography deftly shares Siringo's story within seventy-five pivotal years of western history. Siringo was not a mere observer but a participant in major historical events including the Coeur d'Alene mining strikes of the 1890s and Big Bill Haywood's trial in 1907. Lamar focuses on Siringo's youthful struggles to employ his abundant athleticism and ambitions and how Siringo's varied experiences helped develop the compelling national myth of the cowboy.

"Texas is not a place, it is a commotion!" exclaimed one early visitor to the state, underscoring the mobility and "get-ahead" spirit that have always characterized Texas and its people. In these thought-provoking essays, Howard R. Lamar looks specifically at the "crossings" that have characterized Texas history to see what effect these migrations to and through Texas have had on Texas, the Southwest, and links between Texas and California.Originally presented in 1986 at the University of Texas at Austin as the first George W. Littlefield Lectures in American History, these essays explore a previously neglected aspect of the western story: the influence of Texans—and other Southerners—on the character and history of the southwestern states. Lamar discusses the many efforts to establish overland trails, and later railroads, to California and how those efforts were fueled by the gold rush era of 1849–1850. He traces the influence of immigrant Texans and the flourishing southern community in California, particularly during the Civil War years. He follows the twentieth-century migration of "Okies," whose desire to settle and resume their agricultural lifeways clashed with Californians' preference for migrant workers. And he reveals how the discovery of oil, not only in Texas but also in California, western Canada, and Alaska, continues to link these regions.Texas has always been a place that people pass through, going either east-west or north-south. Texas Crossings explains what brought the people to Texas and what they carried away with them to California and the West.