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Although historians talk about each other's work routinely, they have been reluctant to record their thoughts about the leading practitioners of U.S. history. Robert Allen Rutland attempts to remedy this state of things with this collection named for Clio, the Greek muse vested with the inspirations of history. The volume offers a glimpse of the lives and work of historians who must be considered among the most remarkable from the last half of the twentieth century. The roll call of excellence for Clio's Favorites was established after Rutland informally polled some twenty-five historians, asking them to name the outstanding workers in the field of U.S. history since the end of World War II....
Juan P. Valdez was born May 25, 1938 in Canjilon, New Mexico, the second of Amarante and Philomena Valdez' seven children. Juan's father took him out of school after the third grade to help with the raising of crops and tending of livestock necessary to support the family. After having been continuously denied grazing permits by the U. S. Forest Service it was necessary for Juan to sneak his family's cattle on and off the forest pastures on a daily basis. While in his mid-twenties Juan met Reies Lopez Tijerina, a charismatic former preacher who was traveling from village to village in Northern New Mexico speaking out about how the United States had stolen hundreds of thousands of acres of gr...
In 1865, Wild Bill Hickok killed Dave Tutt in a Missouri public square in the West’s first notable "walkdown." One hundred and twenty-nine years later, Bernard Goetz shot four threatening young men in a New York subway car. Apart from gunfire, what do the two events have in common? Goetz, writes Richard Maxwell Brown, was acquitted of wrongdoing in the spirit of a uniquely American view of self-defense, a view forged in frontier gunfights like Hickok’s. When faced with a deadly threat, we have the right to stand our ground and fight. We have no duty to retreat.
Focusing on the political culture forged by Rocky Mountain workers from the 1870s through the 1920s, this book shows how the unique working-class politics of the region led to remarkable successes in securing progressive labor legislation. These successes--especially in improving workers' hours, wages, and safety--in turn played a central role in transforming the nation's attitudes toward workers' rights. Examining political culture in the everyday lives of workers (from shop floors to union halls to recreation), the author uncovers a labor movement based as much on pragmatism as on ideology, and he traces how its members productively focused their efforts on political action at the local and state levels. In the process, they developed a genuinely social-democratic political culture.
A discussion of the emergence of Hispano identity among the Spanish-speaking people of New Mexico during the 19th and 20th centuries.
In this richly insightful survey that represents the culmination of decades of research, a leading western specialist argues that the unique history of the American West did not end in the year 1900, as is commonly assumed, but was shaped as much--if not more--by events and innovations in the twentieth century. Earl Pomeroy gathers copious information on economic, political, social, intellectual, and business issues, thoughtfully evaluates it, and draws a new and more nuanced portrait of the West than has ever been depicted before. Pomeroy mines extensive published and unpublished sources to show how the post-1900 West charted a path that was influenced by, but separate from, the rest of the country and the world. He deals not only with the West's transition from an agricultural to an urban region but also with the important contributions of minority racial and ethnic groups and women in that transformation. Pomeroy describes a modern West--increasingly urban, transnational, and multicultural--that has overcome much of the isolation that challenged it at an earlier time. His final book is nothing short of the definitive source on that West.
First published in 1968, The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience has become a classic in the field of American studies. G. Edward White traces the origins of “the West of the imagination” to the adolescent experiences of Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister—three Easterners from upper-class backgrounds who went West in the 1880s in search of an alternative way of life. Each of the three men came to identify with a somewhat idealized “Wild West” that embodied the virtues of individualism, self-reliance, and rugged masculinity. When they returned East, they popularized this image of the West through art, literature, politics, and even their public personae. Moreover, these Western virtues soon became and have remained American virtues—a patriotic ideal that links Easterners with Westerners. With a multidisciplinary blend of history, biography, sociology, psychology, and literary criticism, The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience will appeal to a wide audience. The author has written a new preface, offering additional perspectives on the mythology of the West and its effect on the American character.
Política offers a stunning revisionist understanding of the early political incorporation of Mexican-origin peoples into the U.S. body politic in the nineteenth century. Historical sociologist Phillip B. Gonzales reexamines the fundamental issue in New Mexico's history, namely, the dramatic shift in national identities initiated by Nuevomexicanos when their province became ruled by the United States. Gonzales provides an insightful, rigorous, and controversial interpretation of how Nuevomexicano political competition was woven into the Democratic and Republican two-party system that emerged in the United States between the 1850s and 1912, when New Mexico became a state. Drawing on newly dis...
Impresiones de un Surumato en Nuevo México by Manuel Sariñana represents a remarkable literary recovery. For the first time, the novella is presented in its original Spanish and in English, painstakingly translated and annotated by Phillip B. Gonzales. Manuel Sariñana came to the New Mexico territory from Mexico to work as a Spanish-language journalist. While covering politics, he wrote and published Impresiones de un Surumato en Nuevo México as a picaresque work, a common genre in Mexico that uses satire to narrate a drama based on concrete social issues in the author’s immediate vicinity. In his preface, Sariñana makes his intent clear: to address the unseemly manner in which New Mexico’s Democratic Party attempts to gain leverage in elections. But, in a caricature of two immigrant peons, he surreptitiously takes to task how nuevomexicanos look down on people from Mexico. Gonzales provides a critical introduction, an interpretation of Sariñana’s piece, and a historical framework to contextualize the author’s experiences and the events alluded to in the novella. The result brings this important work of fiction to a new generation of readers.