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In rural America, perhaps more than other areas, high school students have the ability to contribute to the revitalization and sustainability of their home communities by engaging in oral history projects designed to highlight the values that are revered and worth saving in their region. The Arkansas Delta Oral History Project, a multiyear collaboration between the University of Arkansas and several public high schools in small, rural Arkansas towns, gives students that opportunity. Through the project, trained University of Arkansas studentmentors work with high school students on in-depth writing projects that grow out of oral history interviews. The Delta, a region where the religious roo...
Until recently, histories of the American West gave little evidence of the presence?let alone importance?of African Americans in the unfolding of the western frontier. There might have been a mention of Estevan, slavery, or the Dred Scott decision, but the rich and varied experience of African Americans on the Great Plains went largely unnoted. This book, the first of its kind, supplies that critical missing chapter in American history. ø Originally published over the span of twenty-five years in Great Plains Quarterly, the essays collected here describe the part African Americans played in the frontier army and as homesteaders, community builders, and activists. The authors address race re...
Four miles southeast of the village of Matfield Green in Chase County, Kansas—the heart of the Flint Hills—lies the abandoned settlement of Thurman. At the turn of the century Thurman was a prosperous farming and ranching settlement with fifty-one households, a post office, two general stores, a blacksmith shop, five schools, and a church. Today, only the ruins of Thurman remain. Joseph Hickey uses Thurman to explore the settlement form of social organization, which—along with the village, hamlet, and small town—was a dominant feature of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American life. He traces Thurman's birth in 1874, its shallow rises and falls, and its demise in 1944. Akin ...
How American respectability has been built by maligning those who don't make the grade How did Americans come to think of themselves as respectable members of the middle class? Was it just by earning a decent living? Or did it require something more? And if it did, what can we learn that may still apply? The quest for middle-class respectability in nineteenth-century America is usually described as a process of inculcating positive values such as honesty, hard work, independence, and cultural refinement. But clergy, educators, and community leaders also defined respectability negatively, by maligning individuals and groups—“misfits”—who deviated from accepted norms. Robert Wuthnow ar...
Compelling and informative, the 14 diverse biographies of this book give a heightened understanding of the evolution of what it meant to be black and American through more than three centuries of U.S. history.
Designed as a text for the second half of the U.S. history survey course, The Human Tradition in America from 1865 to the Present is a collection of the best biographical essays from several volumes in SR Books' popular Human Tradition in America series. Like all books in the series, this text presents history from the 'bottom up' by chronicling the lives of ordinary Americans. These brief biographical sketches stress to students that history is created by people, making the subject appealing and vibrant in a way that just names and dates in a standard textbook cannot. Capturing the rich diversity of the United States, The Human Tradition in America from 1865 to the Present includes the stories of a variety of Americans of different races, ethnic groups, sexual orientations, religious affiliations, and genders from many different regions of the country. For this reader, series editor Charles Calhoun has carefully selected biographies of individuals whose lives highlight important themes from this dynamic period of history. The essays included here are sure to engage students, provoke lively classroom discussion, and promote critical thinking.
Between the Nebraska border and Osage County, Oklahoma, are the Flint Hills of Kansas, and growing on those hills the last of the tallgrass prairie that once ranged from Canada to Texas, and on those fields of bluestem, cattle graze—and tending the cattle, someone like Jim Hoy, whose people have ranched there from, well, not quite time immemorial, but pretty darn close. Hoy has always called the Flint Hills home and over the decades he has made a study of them—their tough terrain and quiet beauty, their distinctive folk life and cattle culture—and marshaled his observations to bring the Flint Hills home to readers in a singular way. These essays are Hoy’s Flint Hills, combining famil...
Contains articles on the literature, language, folklore, history, art, and music of the Great Plains.