Faces of the Frontier


Book Description

Faces of the Frontier showcases more than 120 photographic portraits of leaders, statesmen, soldiers, laborers, activists, criminals, and others, all posed before the cameras that made their way to nearly every mining shanty-town and frontier outpost on the prairie. Drawing primarily on the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, this book depicts many of the people who helped transform the West between the end of the Mexican War and passage of the Indian Citizenship Act.




Faces of the Frontier


Book Description

Portraits in word and pencil, describing typical characters who followed the American frontier westward. Fifty-four sketches include the cowboy, train robber, rancher's woman, desert rat, claim jumper, and sod buster.




The Two Faces of American Freedom


Book Description

The Two Faces of American Freedom boldly reinterprets the American political tradition from the colonial period to modern times, placing issues of race relations, immigration, and presidentialism in the context of shifting notions of empire and citizenship. Today, while the U.S. enjoys tremendous military and economic power, citizens are increasingly insulated from everyday decision-making. This was not always the case. America, Aziz Rana argues, began as a settler society grounded in an ideal of freedom as the exercise of continuous self-rule—one that joined direct political participation with economic independence. However, this vision of freedom was politically bound to the subordination of marginalized groups, especially slaves, Native Americans, and women. These practices of liberty and exclusion were not separate currents, but rather two sides of the same coin. However, at crucial moments, social movements sought to imagine freedom without either subordination or empire. By the mid-twentieth century, these efforts failed, resulting in the rise of hierarchical state and corporate institutions. This new framework presented national and economic security as society’s guiding commitments and nurtured a continual extension of America’s global reach. Rana envisions a democratic society that revives settler ideals, but combines them with meaningful inclusion for those currently at the margins of American life.




Faces on the Frontier


Book Description

"A history of the evolution of surveying public lands in Florida and traces the problems associated with any new frontier through the personalities of the major historical figures of the period."--Amazon.




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.




Faces on the Frontier


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On the Border


Book Description

Tom Miller’s On the Border frames the land between the United States and Mexico as a Third Country, one 2,000 miles long and twenty miles wide. This Third Country has its own laws and its own outlaws. Its music, language, and food are unique. On the Border, a first-person travel narrative, portrays this bi-national culture, “unforgettable to every reader lucky enough to discover this gem of southwestern Americana.” (San Diego Union-Tribune) It’s a “deftly written book,” said the New Times Book Review. “Mr. Miller has drawn a lively sketch of this unruly, unpredictable place.” Traveling from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean, Miller offers “cultural history and fine journalism.” (Dallas Times Herald) Among his stops is Rosa’s Cantina in El Paso, the Arizona site where a rancher sadistically tortured three Mexican campesinos, and the 100,000-watt XERF radio station where Wolfman Jack broadcasts nightly. He interviews children in both countries, all of whom insist that the candy on the other side is superior. On the Border, translated into Spanish, French, and Japanese, was the first book to identify and describe this land as a Third Country. Miller “knows this country,” says Newsday, “feels its joys and sorrows, hears its music and loves its soul.”




Facts, Figures and Faces


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Lens on the Texas Frontier


Book Description

Photographs of Texas’ frontier past are valuable as both art and artifact. Recording not only the lives and surroundings of days gone by, but also the artistry of those who captured the people and their times on camera, the rare images in Lens on the Texas Frontier offer a documentary record that is usually available to only a few dedicated collectors. In this book, prominent collector Lawrence T. Jones III showcases some of the most interesting and historically important glimpses of Texas history included among the five thousand photographs in the collection that bears his name at the DeGolyer Library of Southern Methodist University. One of the nation’s most comprehensive and valuable Texas-related photography collections, the Lawrence T. Jones III Collection documents all aspects of Texas photography from the years 1846–1945, including rare examples of the various techniques practiced from its earliest days in the state: daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, and paper print photographs in various formats. The selections in the book feature cartes de visite, cabinet cards, oversized photographs, stereographs, and more. The subjects of the photos include Confederate and Union soldiers and officers in the Civil War; Mexicans, including ranking military officials from the Mexican Revolution; and a wide spectrum of Texan citizens, including African American, Native American, Hispanic, and Caucasian women, men, and children.




The Fishermen's Frontier


Book Description

In The Fishermen's Frontier, David Arnold examines the economic, social, cultural, and political context in which salmon have been harvested in southeast Alaska over the past 250 years. He starts with the aboriginal fishery, in which Native fishers lived in close connection with salmon ecosystems and developed rituals and lifeways that reflected their intimacy. The transformation of the salmon fishery in southeastern Alaska from an aboriginal resource to an industrial commodity has been fraught with historical ironies. Tribal peoples -- usually considered egalitarian and communal in nature -- managed their fisheries with a strict notion of property rights, while Euro-Americans -- so vested in the notion of property and ownership -- established a common-property fishery when they arrived in the late nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, federal conservation officials tried to rationalize the fishery by "improving" upon nature and promoting economic efficiency, but their uncritical embrace of scientific planning and their disregard for local knowledge degraded salmon habitat and encouraged a backlash from small-boat fishermen, who clung to their "irrational" ways. Meanwhile, Indian and white commercial fishermen engaged in identical labors, but established vastly different work cultures and identities based on competing notions of work and nature. Arnold concludes with a sobering analysis of the threats to present-day fishing cultures by forces beyond their control. However, the salmon fishery in southeastern Alaska is still very much alive, entangling salmon, fishermen, industrialists, scientists, and consumers in a living web of biological and human activity that has continued for thousands of years.