Class and Community in Frontier Colorado


Book Description

'A significant contribution to historical sociology that shows how economic/class relations within frontier communities determined the shape of the political system.' -Scott G. McNall




Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier


Book Description

This book tells the story of Ebenezer, a frontier community in colonial Georgia founded by a mountain community fleeing religious persecution in its native Salzburg. This study traces the lives of the settlers from the alpine world they left behind to their struggle for survival on the southern frontier of British America. Exploring their encounters with African and indigenous peoples with whom they had had no previous contact, this book examines their initial opposition to slavery and why they ultimately embraced it. Transatlantic in scope, this study will interest readers of European and American history alike.




The Newark Frontier


Book Description

To many, Newark seems a profound symbol of postwar liberalism’s failings: an impoverished, deeply divided city where commitments to integration and widespread economic security went up in flames during the 1967 riots. While it’s true that these failings shaped Newark’s postwar landscape and economy, as Mark Krasovic shows, that is far from the whole story. The Newark Frontier shows how, during the Great Society, urban liberalism adapted and grew, defining itself less by centralized programs and ideals than by administrative innovation and the small-scale, personal interactions generated by community action programs, investigative commissions, and police-community relations projects. Paying particular attention to the fine-grained experiences of Newark residents, Krasovic reveals that this liberalism was rooted in an ethic of experimentation and local knowledge. He illustrates this with stories of innovation within government offices, the dynamic encounters between local activists and state agencies, and the unlikely alliances among nominal enemies. Krasovic makes clear that postwar liberalism’s eventual fate had as much to do with the experiments waged in Newark as it did with the violence that rocked the city in the summer of 1967.




Mohawk Frontier, Second Edition


Book Description

This is the fascinating story of the Dutch community at Schenectady, a village that grew out of the wilderness along the northern frontier of New Netherland in the 1660s. Drawing upon a wealth of original documents, Thomas Burke renders an engaging portrait of a small but dynamic Dutch village in the twilight years of the New Netherland colony. Despite the proximity of the Mohawks, Schenectady's residents—when they were not quarreling amongst themselves—made their living more from farming and raising livestock than trading. Due to a scarcity of labor, Schenectady became one of the most diverse and energized communities in the region, attracting servants and tenant farmers, and paving the way for slavery. Its northern frontier location however made it a vulnerable target during the many conflicts between the French and English that erupted in the late seventeenth century. Bringing Schenectady fully out of the historical shadow of its large neighbor Albany, Thomas Burke reveals both the intricate depths of a small Dutch village and how many aspects of its story mirrored the broader histories of New Netherland and New York.This second edition of the classic history features a new introduction by William Starna, which updates key research and issues that have arisen since its initial publication.




The Virtual Community, revised edition


Book Description

Howard Rheingold tours the "virtual community" of online networking. Howard Rheingold has been called the First Citizen of the Internet. In this book he tours the "virtual community" of online networking. He describes a community that is as real and as much a mixed bag as any physical community—one where people talk, argue, seek information, organize politically, fall in love, and dupe others. At the same time that he tells moving stories about people who have received online emotional support during devastating illnesses, he acknowledges a darker side to people's behavior in cyberspace. Indeed, contends Rheingold, people relate to each other online much the same as they do in physical communities. Originally published in 1993, The Virtual Community is more timely than ever. This edition contains a new chapter, in which the author revisits his ideas about online social communication now that so much more of the world's population is wired. It also contains an extended bibliography.




San Antonio de Béxar


Book Description

A beautifully written history of the development of San Antonio in colonial Texas.




Language, Coffee, and Migration on an Andean-Amazonian Frontier


Book Description

Extraordinary change is under way in the Alto Urubamba Valley, a vital and turbulent corner of the Andean-Amazonian borderland of southern Peru. Here, tens of thousands of Quechua-speaking farmers from the rural Andes have migrated to the territory of the Indigenous Amazonian Matsigenka people in search of land for coffee cultivation. This migration has created a new multilingual, multiethnic agrarian society. The rich-tasting Peruvian coffee in your cup is the distillate of an intensely dynamic Amazonian frontier, where native Matsigenkas, state agents, and migrants from the rural highlands are carving the forest into farms. Language, Coffee, and Migration on an Andean-Amazonian Frontier shows how people of different backgrounds married together and blended the Quechua, Matsigenka, and Spanish languages in their day-to-day lives. This frontier relationship took place against a backdrop of deforestation, cocaine trafficking, and destructive natural gas extraction. Nicholas Q. Emlen’s rich account—which takes us to remote Amazonian villages, dusty frontier towns, roadside bargaining sessions, and coffee traders’ homes—offers a new view of settlement frontiers as they are negotiated in linguistic interactions and social relationships. This interethnic encounter was not a clash between distinct groups but rather an integrated network of people who adopted various stances toward each other as they spoke. The book brings together a fine-grained analysis of multilingualism with urgent issues in Latin America today, including land rights, poverty, drug trafficking, and the devastation of the world’s largest forest. It offers a timely on-the-ground perspective on the agricultural colonization of the Amazon, which has triggered an environmental emergency threatening the future of the planet.




The Burden of History


Book Description

This book is an ethnography of the cultural politics of Native/non-Native relations in a small interior BC city -- Williams Lake -- at the height of land claims conflicts and tensions. Furniss analyses contemporary colonial relations in settler societies, arguing that 'ordinary' rural Euro- Canadians exercise power in maintaining the subordination of aboriginal people through 'common sense' assumptions and assertions about history, society, and identity, and that these cultural activities are forces in an ongoing, contemporary system of colonial domination. She traces the main features of the regional Euro-Canadian culture and shows how this cultural complex is thematically integrated through the idea of the frontier. Key facets of this frontier complex are expressed in diverse settings: casual conversations among Euro-Canadians; popular histories; museum displays; political discourse; public debates about aboriginal land claims; and ritual celebrations of the city's heritage.




Calvinists Incorporated


Book Description

Bringing immigrants onstage as central players in the drama of rural capitalist transformation, Anne Kelly Knowles traces a community of Welsh immigrants to Jackson and Gallia counties in southern Ohio. After reconstructing the gradual process of community-building, Knowles focuses on the pivotal moment when the immigrants became involved with the industrialization of their new region as workers and investors in Welsh-owned charcoal iron companies. Setting the southern Ohio Welsh in the context of Welsh immigration as a whole from 1795 to 1850, Knowles explores how these strict Calvinists responded to the moral dilemmas posed by leaving their native land and experiencing economic success in the United States. Knowles draws on a wide variety of sources, including obituaries and community histories, to reconstruct the personal histories of over 1,700 immigrants. The resulting account will find appreciative readers not only among historical geographers, but also among American economic historians and historians of religion.




Nothing Daunted


Book Description

From the author of The Agitators, the acclaimed and captivating true story of two restless society girls who left their affluent lives to “rough it” as teachers in the wilds of Colorado in 1916. In the summer of 1916, Dorothy Woodruff and Rosamond Underwood, bored by society luncheons, charity work, and the effete men who courted them, left their families in Auburn, New York, to teach school in the wilds of northwestern Colorado. They lived with a family of homesteaders in the Elkhead Mountains and rode to school on horseback, often in blinding blizzards. Their students walked or skied, in tattered clothes and shoes tied together with string. The young cattle rancher who had lured them west, Ferry Carpenter, had promised them the adventure of a lifetime. He hadn’t let on that they would be considered dazzling prospective brides for the locals. Nearly a hundred years later, Dorothy Wickenden, the granddaughter of Dorothy Woodruff, found the teachers’ buoyant letters home, which captured the voices of the pioneer women, the children, and other unforgettable people the women got to know. In reconstructing their journey, Wickenden has created an exhilarating saga about two intrepid women and the “settling up” of the West.