An Oklahoma I Had Never Seen Before


Book Description

Davis D. Joyce presents fourteen essays that interpret Oklahoma's unique populist past and address current political and social issues ranging from gender, race, and religion to popular music, the energy industry, and economics.




Alternative Oklahoma


Book Description

Contrarian Sooner views of Oklahoma history




Boom Town


Book Description

A brilliant, kaleidoscopic narrative of Oklahoma City—a great American story of civics, basketball, and destiny, from award-winning journalist Sam Anderson NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • NPR • Chicago Tribune • San Francisco Chronicle • The Economist • Deadspin Oklahoma City was born from chaos. It was founded in a bizarre but momentous “Land Run” in 1889, when thousands of people lined up along the borders of Oklahoma Territory and rushed in at noon to stake their claims. Since then, it has been a city torn between the wild energy that drives its outsized ambitions, and the forces of order that seek sustainable progress. Nowhere was this dynamic better realized than in the drama of the Oklahoma City Thunder basketball team’s 2012-13 season, when the Thunder’s brilliant general manager, Sam Presti, ignited a firestorm by trading future superstar James Harden just days before the first game. Presti’s all-in gamble on “the Process”—the patient, methodical management style that dictated the trade as the team’s best hope for long-term greatness—kicked off a pivotal year in the city’s history, one that would include pitched battles over urban planning, a series of cataclysmic tornadoes, and the frenzied hope that an NBA championship might finally deliver the glory of which the city had always dreamed. Boom Town announces the arrival of an exciting literary voice. Sam Anderson, former book critic for New York magazine and now a staff writer at the New York Times magazine, unfolds an idiosyncratic mix of American history, sports reporting, urban studies, gonzo memoir, and much more to tell the strange but compelling story of an American city whose unique mix of geography and history make it a fascinating microcosm of the democratic experiment. Filled with characters ranging from NBA superstars Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook; to Flaming Lips oddball frontman Wayne Coyne; to legendary Great Plains meteorologist Gary England; to Stanley Draper, Oklahoma City's would-be Robert Moses; to civil rights activist Clara Luper; to the citizens and public servants who survived the notorious 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building, Boom Town offers a remarkable look at the urban tapestry woven from control and chaos, sports and civics.




A Day I Ain't Never Seen Before


Book Description

The Black people of Marks, Mississippi, and other rural southern towns were the backbone of the civil rights movement, yet their stories have too rarely been celebrated and are, for the most part, forgotten. Part memoir, part oral history, and part historical study, A Day I Ain’t Never Seen Before tells the story of the struggle for equality and dignity through the words of these largely unknown men and women and the civil rights workers who joined them. Deeply rooted in documentary and archival sources, this book also offers extensive suggestions for further readings on both Marks and the civil rights movement. Set carefully within its broader historical context, the narrative begins with the founding of the town and the oppressive conditions under which Black people lived and traces their persistent efforts to win the rights and justice they deserved. In their own words, Marks residents describe their lives before, during, and after the activist years of the civil rights movement, bolstered by the voices of those like Joe Bateman who arrived in the mid-1960s to help. Voter registration projects, white violence, sit-ins, arrests, school desegregation cases, community-organizing meetings, protest marches, Freedom Schools, door-to-door organizing—all of these played out in Marks. The broader civil rights movement intersects many of these local efforts, from Freedom Summer to the War on Poverty, from the death of a Marks man on the March against Fear (Martin Luther King Jr. preached at his funeral) to the Poor People’s Movement, whose Mule Train began in Marks. At each point Bateman and local activists detail how they understood what they were doing and how each protest action played out. The final chapters examine Marks in the aftermath of the movement, with residents reflecting on the changes (or lack thereof ) they have seen. Here are triumphs and beatings, courage and infighting, surveillance and—sometimes— lasting progress, in the words of those who lived it.




Blood Matters


Book Description

First Published in 2002. This study explores how the five tribes of Oklahoma - Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles - strove to achieve political unity within their tribes during the first decades of the 20th century by forging a new sense of peoplehood around the idea of blood.




Letters From the Front: A Year in the Life of an Infantryman


Book Description

Details H.A. Lowery's career using his son's commentary, family history and photos, military honors and decorations, and the letters to his wife and sons. The letters contained within provide a one-sided portrait of H.A. Lowery as a young man during a thirteen-month period between February 23, 1943 and March 25, 1944, as his wife's letters to him didn't survive.




The Louisiana Purchase


Book Description

Published in celebration of the Purchase's bicentennial, this resource offers a multifaceted view of a watershed American event. In one easy-access resource, The Louisiana Purchase brings together the work of over 100 experts covering historical figures, relevant legal and historical concepts, states that formed in the new territory, frontier outposts, and the Native Americans uprooted by expansion westward. The book examines every aspect and consequence of Thomas Jefferson's momentous transaction: the largest real estate deal in American history. Readers will learn how the purchase made Manifest Destiny really seem like destiny; how it sparked the rise of America's urban industrial society and inflamed passions over the expansion of slavery; and how it triggered tragic conflicts between the government and Native Americans as well as immeasurable environmental damage. Ideal for students, historians, and public and private libraries, the Encyclopedia is the most comprehensive reference ever compiled on an event so central to the American experience that it seems to lie at the heart of everything triumphant and tragic in our history.




The University of Oklahoma


Book Description

This book, the first in a projected three-volume definitive history, traces the University’s progress from territorial days to 1917. David W. Levy examines the people and events surrounding the school’s formation and development, chronicling the determined ambition of pioneers to transform a seemingly barren landscape into a place where a worthy institution of higher education could thrive. The University of Oklahoma was established by the territorial legislature in 1890. With that act, Norman became the educational center of the future state. Levy captures the many factors—academic, political, financial, religious—that shaped the University. Drawing on a great depth of research in primary documents, he depicts the University’s struggles to meet its goals as it confronted political interference, financial uncertainty, and troubles ranging from disastrous fires to populist witch hunts. Yet he also portrays determined teachers and optimistic students who understood the value of a college education. Written in an engaging style and enhanced by an array of historical photographs, this volume is a testimony to the citizens who overcame formidable obstacles to build a school that satisfied their ambitions and embodied their hopes for the future.




Red Dirt


Book Description

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz tells the story of her hardships as a child growing up in Oklahoma.




Red Dust and Broadsides


Book Description

The engrossing story of two prominent American radicals




Recent Books