Lamar Series in Western History – serie

From the author of Lakota America, an award-winning history of the rise and decline of the vast and imposing Comanche empire  “Cutting-edge revisionist western history.”—Larry McMurtry, New York Review of Books  “A landmark study that will make readers see the history of southwestern America in an entirely new way.”—David J. Weber, author of Bárbaros  In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a Native American empire rose to dominate the fiercely contested lands of the American Southwest, the southern Great Plains, and northern Mexico. This powerful empire, built by the Comanche Indians, eclipsed its various European rivals in military prowess, political prestige, economic power, commercial reach, and cultural influence. Yet until now the Comanche empire has gone unrecognized in American history.  This compelling and original book uncovers the lost story of the Comanches. It is a story that challenges the idea of Indigenous peoples as victims of European expansion and offers a new model for the history of colonial expansion, colonial frontiers, and Native-European relations in North America and elsewhere. Pekka Hämäläinen shows in vivid detail how the Comanches built their unique empire and resisted European colonization, and why they fell to defeat in 1875. With extensive knowledge and deep insight, the author brings into clear relief the Comanches’ remarkable impact on the trajectory of history.

García explores the relationship of class, race, and labor in El Paso, documenting  the evolution of work, housing, education, politics, and culture in the Mexican community. Desert Immigrants makes a significant contribution not only to Chicano and Mexican history, but to the history of immigration and labor and urban studies as well.

A pioneering political and intellectual history of the Chicano leaders who emerged from the barrios of the Southwest between 1930 and 1960—Ignacio L. López, George I. Sanchez, Josefina Fierro de Bright, and others—and of their effort to capture first-class citizenship for Mexican Americans.  Drawing extensively on archival material and oral history, Mario T. García discusses the key figures, organizations, and issues of the movement; in so doing he casts new light not only on Chicano history but also on the histories of American ethnicity and civil rights movements.

By 1860, twelve years after the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill, more than five thousand American blacks had made the difficult trek to California in search of quick wealth. The part that they played in this epic adventure has been too long ignored. Here for the first time Rudolph Lapp pieces together in a coherent and fascinating narrative this missing chapter of American history.

This classic work is an oral history of the Cheyenne Indians from legendary times to the early reservation years, a collaborative effort by the Cheyenne tribal historian, John Stands in Timber, and anthropologist Margot Liberty. Published in 1967, the book now has an updated bibliography and a new preface by Liberty, in which she shares her recollections of Stands in Timber and describes the circumstances of the Cheyenne over the past thirty years.Stands in Timber was born in 1882, a few years after his grandfather was killed in the Custer battle. In this book he recounts tribal myths and sacred rituals, conflict with traditional enemies and whites, and  eventual “civilization” and settlement on a reservation. The retelling of Cheyenne traditions formed an important part of Stands in Timber’s life from early childhood, and on his return from school in 1905 he became the primary keeper of the oral literature of his people, seeking out every elder who could contribute personal memories to Cheyenne lore. In 1956 he met Margot Liberty, then an Indian Affairs  Bureau teacher, who helped him tape-record more than thirty hours of recollections. From these she compiled this unique and lively folk history, one based on a longtime inside view that can never be duplicated.“This is an extraordinarily fascinating book,  . . . a book that all Americans, Indians as well as non-Indians, will treasure.”—Alvin M. Josephy, Jr.

Alfred Vincent Kidder’s Introduction to the Study of Southwestern Archaeology, a classic of New World archaeology, was the first regional synthesis and remains unsurpassed as a summary of Pueblo archaeology. It provides an excellent guide to historic and prehistoric sites of the Southwest, as they were known at the time, as well as a preliminary account of Kidder’s exemplary excavation at Pecos. Kidder was one of the pioneers of the technique of stratigraphy; he also broke new ground in approaches to the study of pottery and in the application of ethnological data to the interpretation of archaeological remains.In a new introduction to the book, Douglas W. Schwartz discusses the history of Pecos Pueblo, the development of southwestern archaeology, and the enduring significance of Kidder’s work.

“This book is the fascinating record of DeVoto’s crusade to save the West from itself. . . . His arguments, insights, and passion are as relevant and urgent today as they were when he first put them on paper.”—Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., from the Foreword Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955) was, according to the novelist Wallace Stegner, “a fighter for public causes, for conservation of our natural resources, for freedom of the press and freedom of thought.” A Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, DeVoto is best remembered for his trilogy, The Year of Decision: 1846, Across the Wide Missouri, and The Course of Empire. He also wrote a column for Harper’s Magazine, in which he fulminated about his many concerns, particularly the exploitation and destruction of the American West. This volume brings together ten of DeVoto’s acerbic and still timely essays on Western conservation issues, along with his unfinished conservationist manifesto, Western Paradox, which has never before been published. The book also includes a foreword by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who was a student of DeVoto’s at Harvard University, and a substantial introduction by Douglas Brinkley and Patricia Limerick, both of whom shed light on DeVoto’s work and legacy.

Over the course of his career, American explorer William Clark (1770–1838) wrote at least forty-five letters to his older brother Jonathan, including six that were written during the epic Lewis and Clark Expedition. This book publishes many of these letters for the first time, revealing important details about the expedition, the mysterious death of Meriwether Lewis, the status of Clark’s slave York (the first African American known to have crossed the continent from coast to coast), and other matters of historical significance.There are letters concerning the establishment of the Corps of Discovery’s first winter camp in December 1803, preparations for setting out into the country west of Fort Mandan in 1805, and Clark’s 1807 fossil dig at Big Bone Lick, Kentucky. There are also letters about Lewis’s disturbed final days that shed light on whether he committed suicide or was murdered. Still other letters chronicle the fate of York after the expedition; we learn the details of Clark and York’s falling out and subsequent alienation. Together the letters and the richly informative introductions and annotations by James J. Holmberg provide valuable insights into the lives of Lewis and Clark and the world of Jeffersonian America.Published in association with The Filson Historical Society

A compelling story of how the new medium of photography and the new American frontier came of age together—illustrated with scores of stunning imagesThis prize-winning book tells the intertwined stories of photography and the American West—a new medium and a new place that came of age together in the nineteenth century.“Excellent . . . rewarding . . . a provocative look at the limits of photography as recorder of history—and its role in perpetuating myth.”—Chris Vognar, Dallas Morning News“A sophisticated and engaging exploration of photography and the West . . . A really handsome work.”—James McWilliams, Austin Chronicle“A wonderful book.”—Vernon Peter, Sunday Oregonian“A deliciously intelligent new book . . . so engrossing you can’t stop reading.”—Michael More, Albuquerque Journal“Print the Legend belongs on that short shelf of essential books about the American West.”—James P. Ronda, University of Tulsa

“One of the finest books on the Indian wars of the West.”--Montana (on the original edition)This fascinating account tells what the Sioux were like when they first came to their reservation and how their reaction to the new system eventually led to the last confrontation between the Army and the Sioux at the Battle of Wounded Knee Creek. The Second Edition of this classic work features a new preface by the author that discusses his current thoughts about this tragic episode in American history.Praise for the earlier edition:"History as lively and gripping as good fiction.”—Christian Science Monitor“A well-told, easily read account that will be the standard reference for this phase of the Indian ‘problem.’”--American Historical Review“A major job . . . magnificently researched.”--San Francisco Chronicle“By far the best treatment of the complex and controversial relationship between the Sioux and their conquerors yet presented and should be must reading for serious students of Western Americana.”--St. Louis Dispatch (on the earlier edition)Winner of the Buffalo Award

A provocative history of wolves in America and of the humans who first destroyed them and now offer them protection“A shocking cultural study of our long, sadistic crusade against wolves. Moving brilliantly through history, economics, and biology, Coleman...explains America’s fevered obsession with these animals."—Ron Charles, Washington Post Book ClubOver a continent and three centuries, American livestock owners destroyed wolves to protect the beasts that supplied them with food, clothing, mobility, and wealth. The brutality of the campaign soon exceeded wolves’ misdeeds. Wolves menaced property, not people, but storytellers often depicted the animals as ravenous threats to human safety. Subjects of nightmares and legends, wolves fell prey not only to Americans’ thirst for land and resources but also to their deeper anxieties about the untamed frontier.Now Americans study and protect wolves and jail hunters who shoot them without authorization. Wolves have become the poster beasts of the great American wilderness, and the federal government has paid millions of dollars to reintroduce them to scenic habitats like Yellowstone National Park.Why did Americans hate wolves for centuries? And, given the ferocity of this loathing, why are Americans now so protective of the animals? In this ambitious history of wolves in America—and of the humans who have hated and then loved them—Jon Coleman investigates a fraught relationship between two species and uncovers striking similarities, deadly differences, and, all too frequently, tragic misunderstanding.

In this fascinating book Monica Rico explores the myth of the American West in the nineteenth century as a place for men to assert their masculinity by “roughing it” in the wilderness and reveals how this myth played out in a transatlantic context. Rico uncovers the networks of elite men—British and American—who circulated between the West and the metropoles of London and New York.Each chapter tells the story of an individual who, by traveling these transatlantic paths, sought to resolve anxieties about class, gender, and empire in an era of profound economic and social transformation. All of the men Rico discusses—from the well known, including Theodore Roosevelt and Buffalo Bill Cody, to the comparatively obscure, such as English cattle rancher Moreton Frewen—envisioned the American West as a global space into which redemptive narratives of heroic upper-class masculinity could be written.

Thomas L. Kane (1822–1883), a crusader for antislavery, women’s rights, and the downtrodden, rose to prominence in his day as the most ardent and persuasive defender of Mormons’ religious liberty. Though not a Mormon, Kane sought to defend the much-reviled group from the “Holy War” waged against them by evangelical America. His courageous personal intervention averted a potentially catastrophic bloody conflict between federal troops and Mormon settlers in the now nearly forgotten Utah War of 1857–58. Drawing on extensive, newly available archives, this book is the first to tell the full story of Kane’s extraordinary life. The book illuminates his powerful Philadelphia family, his personal life and eccentricities, his reform achievements, his place in Mormon history, and his career as a Civil War general. Further, the book revises previous understandings of nineteenth-century reform, showing how Kane and likeminded others fused Democratic Party ideology, anti-evangelicalism, and romanticism.

A concise edition of the authors' definitive history of the American West, updated and rewritten for a popular audience"From the Caribbean to Canada and from the Atlantic to the Pacific, this marvelous survey spotlights the unexpected twists and turns that occurred when peoples met and mingled and how from these cultural encounters emerged today's American West. Hine and Faragher find in our frontier history the key to 'our common past' and a 'blueprint for our common future.'"—Stephen Aron, Department of History, UCLAPublished in 2000 to critical acclaim, The American West: A New Interpretive History quickly became the standard in college history classrooms. Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher here offer a concise edition of their classic text, freshly updated. Lauded for their lively and elegant writing, the authors provide a grand survey of the colorful history of the American West, from the first contacts between Native Americans and Europeans to the beginning of the twenty-first century.Frontiers introduces the diverse peoples and cultures of the American West and explores how men and women of different ethnic groups were affected when they met, mingled, and often clashed. Hine and Faragher present the complexities of the American West—as frontier and region, real and imagined, old and new. Showcasing the distinctive voices and experiences of frontier characters, they explore topics ranging from early exploration to modern environmentalism, drawing expansively from a wide range of sources. With four galleries of fascinating illustrations drawn from Yale University's premier Collection of Western Americana, some published here for the first time, this book will be treasured by every reader with an interest in the unique saga of the American West.

William Clark, co-captain of the famous Lewis and Clark Expedition, devoted his adult life to describing the American West. But this task raised a daunting challenge: how best to bring an unknown continent to life for the young republic? Through Clark's life and career, this book explores how the West entered the American imagination. While he never called himself a writer or an artist, Clark nonetheless drew maps, produced books, drafted reports, surveyed landscapes, and wrote journals that made sense of the West for a new nation fascinated by the region’s potential but also fearful of its dangers. William Clark’s World presents a new take on the manifest destiny narrative and on the way the West took shape in the national imagination in the early nineteenth century.

A compact synthesis of David J. Weber’s prize-winning history of colonial Spanish North America, from the first Spanish-Indian contact through Spain’s gradual retreatPraise for the previous edition:"I cannot imagine a single book giving a more comprehensive and balanced study of Spain's presence in North America."—Louis Kleber, History Today"For readers seeking to understand the larger meaning of the Spanish heritage in North America, Weber's vivid narrative is a must. This is social and cultural history at its best."—Howard R. Lamar, Yale University"A superb study."—Choice"[A] deeply researched and splendidly conceived and written survey."—Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., New York Times Book Review

David Torres-Rouff significantly expands borderlands history by examining the past and original urban infrastructure of one of America’s most prominent cities; its social, spatial, and racial divides and boundaries; and how it came to be the Los Angeles we know today. It is a fascinating study of how an innovative intercultural community developed along racial lines, and how immigrants from the United States engineered a profound shift in civic ideals and the physical environment, creating a social and spatial rupture that endures to this day.

On America’s western frontier, myths of prosperity concealed the brutal conditions endured by women, slaves, orphans, and the poor. As poverty and unrest took root in eighteenth-century Kentucky, western lawmakers championed ideas about whiteness, manhood, and patriarchal authority to help stabilize a politically fractious frontier. Honor Sachs combines rigorous scholarship with an engaging narrative to examine how conditions in Kentucky facilitated the expansion of rights for white men in ways that would become a model for citizenship in the country as a whole. Endorsed by many prominent western historians, this groundbreaking work is a major contribution to frontier scholarship.

An award-winning look at how Apaches, Navajos, Kiowas, and especially Comanches played a decisive role in America’s watershed victory over Mexico"An engaging book that enlivens the debate over the clash between Indians, Mexicans, and Americans in the Southwest."—Gary Clayton Anderson, Western Historical Quarterly"Action-packed and densely argued."—Larry McMurtry, New York Review of BooksIn the early 1830s, after decades of relative peace, northern Mexicans and the Indians whom they called “the barbarians” descended into a terrifying cycle of violence. For the next fifteen years, owing in part to changes unleashed by American expansion, Indian warriors launched devastating attacks across ten Mexican states. Raids and counter-raids claimed thousands of lives, ruined much of northern Mexico’s economy, depopulated its countryside, and left man-made “deserts” in place of thriving settlements. Just as important, this vast interethnic war informed and emboldened U.S. arguments in favor of seizing Mexican territory while leaving northern Mexicans too divided, exhausted, and distracted to resist the American invasion and subsequent occupation.       Exploring Mexican, American, and Indian sources ranging from diplomatic correspondence and congressional debates to captivity narratives and plains Indians’ pictorial calendars, War of a Thousand Deserts recovers the surprising and previously unrecognized ways in which economic, cultural, and political developments within native communities affected nineteenth-century nation-states. In the process this ambitious book offers a rich and often harrowing new narrative of the era when the United States seized half of Mexico’s national territory.

Histories tend to emphasize conquest by Anglo-Americans as the driving force behind the development of the American West. In this fresh interpretation, Jay Gitlin argues that the activities of the French are crucial to understanding the phenomenon of westward expansion. The Seven Years War brought an end to the French colonial enterprise in North America, but the French in towns such as New Orleans, St. Louis, and Detroit survived the transition to American rule. French traders from Mid-America such as the Chouteaus and Robidouxs of St. Louis then became agents of change in the West, perfecting a strategy of “middle grounding” by pursuing alliances within Indian and Mexican communities in advance of American settlement and re-investing fur trade profits in land, town sites, banks, and transportation. The Bourgeois Frontier provides the missing French connection between the urban Midwest and western expansion.

The California Gold Rush began in 1848 and incited many “wagons west.” However, only half of the 300,000 gold seekers traveled by land. The other half traveled by sea. And it’s the story of this second group that interests Malcolm Rohrbough in his authoritative new book, The Rush to Gold. He examines the California Gold Rush through the eyes of 30,000 French participants. In so doing, he offers a completely original analysis of an important—but previously neglected—chapter in the history of the Gold Rush, which occurred at a time of sweeping changes in France. Rohrbough is the author of Days of Gold, which is generally accepted as the essential text on the subject. This new book comes out of his extended research in French archives. He is the first to provide an international focus to these pivotal events in mid-nineteenth-century America. The Rush to Gold is an important contribution to the fast-growing field of transnational American history.

A fully revised and updated new edition of the classic history of western America  “A classic for the twenty-first century, The American West stands as the best one volume treatment of the American West in a generation—a masterful overview, replete with triumph and tragedy, pain and possibility.”—Karl Jacoby, Columbia University  “This new edition of The American West is, quite simply, stunning. Incorporating cutting-edge scholarship without losing the vision and clarity of the original, it weaves a cast of protagonists around a clear and gripping narrative. Comprehensive, bold, punchy, this is a textbook that reads like a novel.”—Pekka Hämäläinen, Oxford University  The newly revised second edition of this concise, engaging, and unorthodox history of America’s West has been updated to incorporate new research, including recent scholarship on Native American lives and cultures. An ideal text for course work, it presents the West as both frontier and region, examining the clashing of different cultures and ethnic groups that occurred in the western territories from the first Columbian contacts between Native Americans and Europeans up to the end of the twentieth century.

An original study of Shadwell, Thomas Jefferson's boyhood home, providing new insights into the founding father’s formative yearsMerging archaeology, material culture, and social history, historian Susan Kern reveals the fascinating story of Shadwell, the birthplace of Thomas Jefferson and home to his parents, Jane and Peter Jefferson, their eight children, and over sixty slaves. Located in present-day Albemarle County, Virginia, Shadwell was at the time considered "the frontier." However, Kern demonstrates that Shadwell was no crude log cabin; it was, in fact, a well-appointed gentry house full of fashionable goods, located at the center of a substantial plantation.Kern’s scholarship offers new views of the family’s role in settling Virginia as well as new perspectives on Thomas Jefferson himself. By examining a variety of sources, including account books, diaries, and letters, Kern re-creates in rich detail the daily lives of the Jeffersons at Shadwell—from Jane Jefferson’s cultivation of a learned and cultured household to Peter Jefferson’s extensive business network and oversight of a thriving plantation.Shadwell was Thomas Jefferson’s patrimony, but Kern asserts that his real legacy there came from his parents, who cultivated the strong social connections that would later open doors for their children. At Shadwell, Jefferson learned the importance of fostering relationships with slaves, laborers, and powerful office holders, as well as the hierarchical structure of large plantations, which he later applied at Monticello. The story of Shadwell affects how we interpret much of what we know about Thomas Jefferson today, and Kern’s fascinating book is sure to become the standard work on Jefferson's early years.

In this lively account of Arizona’s Rim Country War of the 1880s—what others have called "The Pleasant Valley War"—historian Daniel Justin Herman explores a web of conflict involving Mormons, Texas cowboys, New Mexican sheepherders, Jewish merchants, and mixed-blood ranchers. Their story, contends Herman, offers a fresh perspective on Western violence, Western identity, and American cultural history. At the heart of Arizona’s range war, argues Herman, was a conflict between cowboys’ code of honor and Mormons’ code of conscience. He investigates the sources of these attitudes, tracks them into the early twentieth century, and offers rich insights into the roots of American violence and peace. Published in Cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist UniversityPublished in Cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University

In examining how the United States gained control over the northern borderlands of Spanish America, this work reassesses the diplomacy of President James Madison. Historians have assumed Madison’s motive in sending agents into the Spanish borderlands between 1810 and 1813 was to subvert Spanish rule, but J. C. A. Stagg argues that his real intent was to find peaceful and legal resolutions to long-standing disputes over the boundaries of Louisiana at a time when the Spanish-American empire was in the process of dissolution. Drawing on an array of American, British, French, and Spanish sources, the author describes how a myriad cast of local leaders, officials, and other small players affected the borderlands diplomacy between the United States and Spain, and he casts new light on Madison’s contribution to early American expansionism.

In the years following World War II many multi-national energy firms, bolstered by outdated U.S. federal laws, turned their attention to the abundant resources buried beneath Native American reservations. By the 1970s, however, a coalition of Native Americans in the Northern Plains had successfully blocked the efforts of powerful energy corporations to develop coal reserves on sovereign Indian land. This challenge to corporate and federal authorities, initiated by the Crow and Northern Cheyenne nations, changed the laws of the land to expand Native American sovereignty while simultaneously reshaping Native identities and Indian Country itself.  James Allison makes an important contribution to ethnic, environmental, and energy studies with this unique exploration of the influence of America’s indigenous peoples on energy policy and development. Allison’s fascinating history documents how certain federally supported, often environmentally damaging, energy projects were perceived by American Indians as potentially disruptive to indigenous lifeways. These perceived threats sparked a pan-tribal resistance movement that ultimately increased Native American autonomy over reservation lands and enabled an unprecedented boom in tribal entrepreneurship. At the same time, the author demonstrates how this movement generated great controversy within Native American communities, inspiring intense debates over culturally authentic forms of indigenous governance and the proper management of tribal lands.

The surprising connections between the American frontier and empire in southern Africa, and the people who participated in both“A valuable first step toward creating a global history of the concepts of the frontier, borderlands, and colonialism.”—Carol Higham, Reviews in American HistoryThis book begins in an era when romantic notions of American frontiering overlapped with Gilded Age extractive capitalism. In the late nineteenth century, the U.S.-Mexican borderlands constituted one stop of many where Americans chased capitalist dreams beyond the United States. Crisscrossing the American West, southern Africa, and northern Mexico, Andrew Offenburger examines how these frontier spaces could glitter with grandiose visions, expose the flawed and immoral strategies of profiteers, and yet reveal the capacity for resistance and resilience that indigenous people summoned when threatened. Linking together a series of stories about Boer exiles who settled in Mexico, a global network of protestant missionaries, and adventurers involved in the parallel displacements of indigenous peoples in Rhodesia and the Yaqui Indians in Mexico, Offenburger situates the borderlands of the Mexican North and the American Southwest within a global system, bound by common actors who interpreted their lives through a shared frontier ideology.Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University

A renowned biographer compares the lives and times of American outlaw Billy the Kid and his Australian counterpart Ned KellyThe oft-told exploits of Billy the Kid and Ned Kelly survive vividly in the public imaginations of their respective countries, the United States and Australia. But the outlaws’ reputations are so weighted with legend and myth, the truth of their lives has become obscure. In this adventure-filled double biography, Robert M. Utley reveals the true stories and parallel courses of the two notorious contemporaries who lived by the gun, were executed while still in their twenties, and remain compelling figures in the folklore of their homelands.Robert M. Utley draws sharp, insightful portraits of first Billy, then Ned, and compares their lives and legacies. He recounts the adventurous exploits of Billy, a fun-loving, expert sharpshooter who excelled at escape and lived on the run after indictment for his role in the Lincoln Country War. Bush-raised Ned, the son of an Irish convict father and Irish mother, was a man whose outrage against British colonial authority inspired him to steal cattle and sheep, kill three policemen, and rob banks for the benefit of impoverished Irish sympathizers. Utley recounts the exploits of the notorious young men with accuracy and appeal. He discovers their profound differences, despite their shared fates, and illuminates the worlds in which they lived on opposite sides of the globe.

The first full account of the government-sanctioned genocide of California Indians under United States rule  Winner of the 2016 Los Angeles Times Book Award for History and a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice  “Gruesomely thorough. . . . Others have described some of these campaigns, but never in such strong terms and with so much blame placed directly on the United States government.”—Alexander Nazaryan, Newsweek  Between 1846 and 1873, California’s Indian population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000. Benjamin Madley is the first historian to uncover the full extent of the slaughter, the involvement of state and federal officials, the taxpayer dollars that supported the violence, Indigenous resistance, who did the killing, and why the killings ended. This deeply researched book is a comprehensive and chilling history of an American genocide.   Madley describes pre-contact California and precursors to the genocide before explaining how the Gold Rush stirred vigilante violence against California Indians. He narrates the rise of a state-sanctioned killing machine and the broad societal, judicial, and political support for genocide. Many participated: vigilantes, volunteer state militiamen, U.S. Army soldiers, U.S. congressmen, California governors, and others. The state and federal governments spent at least $1.7 million on campaigns against California Indians. Besides evaluating government officials’ culpability, Madley considers why the slaughter constituted genocide and how other possible genocides within and beyond the Americas might be investigated using the methods presented in this groundbreaking book.