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In the spring of 1868, people from several Ojibwe villages located along the upper Mississippi River were relocated to a new reservation at White Earth, more than 100 miles to the west. In many public declarations that accompanied their forced migration, these people appeared to embrace the move, as well as their conversion to Christianity and the new agrarian lifestyle imposed on them. Beneath this surface piety and apparent acceptance of change, however, lay deep and bitter political divisions that were to define fundamental struggles that shaped Ojibwe society for several generations. In order to reveal the nature and extent of this struggle for legitimacy and authority, To Be The Main Le...
Commemorative practices are revised and rebuilt based on the spirit of the time in which they are re/created. Historians sometimes imagine that commemoration captures history, but actually commemoration creates new narratives about history that allow people to interact with the past in a way that they find meaningful. As our social values change (race, gender, religion, sexuality, class), our commemorations do, too. We Are What We Remember: The American Past Through Commemoration, analyzes current trends in the study of historical memory that are particularly relevant to our own present – our biases, our politics, our contextual moment – and strive to name forgotten, overlooked, and deni...
Based on an extensive collection of letters written from the home front and the battlefront, Family War Stories offers fresh insights into how the reciprocal nature of family correspondence can shape a family’s understanding of the war. Family War Stories examines the contribution of the Densmore family to the Northern Civil War effort. It extends the boundaries of research in two directions. First, by describing how members of this white family from Minnesota were mobilized to fight a family war on the home front and the battlefront, and second, by exploring how the war challenged the family’s abolitionist beliefs and racial attitudes. Family War Stories argues that the totality of the ...
The U.S.-Dakota War, the bloodiest Indian war of the 19th century, erupted in southwestern Minnesota during the summer of 1862. In the war's aftermath, a hastily convened commission of five army officers conducted trials of 391 Indians charged with murder and massacre. In 36 days, 303 Dakota men were sentenced to death. In the largest simultaneous execution in American history, 38 were hanged on a single gallows on December 26, 1862--an incident now widely considered an act of revenge rather than judicial punishment. Providing fresh insight into this controversial event, this book examines the Dakota War trials from the perspective of 19th century military law. The author discusses the causes and far-reaching consequences of the war, the claims of widespread atrocities, the modern debate over the role of culture in lawful warfare and how the war has been depicted by historians.
This book explores tensions between critical social justice and what the author terms white justice as fairness in public commemoration of Minnesota’s US-Dakota War of 1862. First, the book examines a regional white public pedagogy demanding “objectivity” and “balance” in teaching-and-learning activities with the purpose of promoting fairness toward white settlers and the extermination campaign they once carried out against Dakota people. The book then explores the dilemmas this public pedagogy created for a group of majority-white college students co-authoring a traveling museum exhibit on the war during its 2012 sesquicentennial. Through close analyses of interviews, field notes, and course artifacts, this volume unpacks the racial politics that drive white justice as fairness, revealing a myriad of ways this common sense of justice resists critical social justice education, foremost by teaching citizens to suspend moral judgment toward symbolic white ancestors and their role in a history of genocide.
In August 1862 the worst massacre in U.S. history unfolded on the Minnesota prairie, launching what has come to be known as the Dakota War, the most violent ethnic conflict ever to roil the nation. When it was over, between six and seven hundred white settlers had been murdered in their homes, and thirty to forty thousand had fled the frontier of Minnesota. But the devastation was not all on one side. More than five hundred Indians, many of them women and children, perished in the aftermath of the conflict; and thirty-eight Dakota warriors were executed on one gallows, the largest mass execution ever in North America. The horror of such wholesale violence has long obscured what really happen...
The Northern home-front during the Civil War was far from tranquil. Fierce political debates set communities on edge, spurred secret plots against the Union, and triggered widespread violence. At the heart of all this turmoil stood the anti-war Democrats, nicknamed "Copperheads." Now, Jennifer L. Weber offers the first full-length portrait of this powerful faction to appear in almost half a century. Weber reveals how the Copperheads came perilously close to defeating Lincoln and ending the war in the South's favor. Indeed, by the summer of 1864, they had grown so strong that Lincoln himself thought his defeat was "exceedingly likely." Passionate defenders of civil liberties and states' right...
Situating Dakota language and oral tradition within the framework of decolonization, Remember This! Dakota Decolonization and the Eli Taylor Narratives makes a radical departure from other works in Indigenous history because it relies solely on Indigenous oral tradition for its primary sources and privileges Dakota language in the text. ø Waziyatawin Angela Wilson, both a historian and a member of the Dakota Nation, demonstrates the value of oral history in this bilingual presentation and skillful analysis of the stories told by the Dakota elder Eli Taylor (1908?99). Taylor lived on the Sioux Valley Reserve in Manitoba, Canada, and was adopted into Wilson?s family in 1988. He agreed to tell...
The great, pre-Civil War attempt of Protestant missionaries to Christianize Native Americans is found by Robert F. Berkofer, Jr. to be a significant point of contact with enduring lessons for American thought. The irony displayed by this relationship, he says, did not really lie in the disparity between Anglo-Saxon ideals and the actual treatment of first peoples but in the failure of all, including the missions, to see that both sides had ultimately behaved according to their cultural values. Using the records of missions to sixteen tribes in various regions of the United States, Berkofer has carefully followed the hopeful efforts of sixty-five years. The ultimate outcome, when the Civil War brought most of the missions to an end, was only a nominal conversion of Native Americans, despite the unflagging optimism of missionaries struggling against cultural barriers.
I have always wanted to be a journalist. Even as a boy, I would get my mother to drive me into town to pick up sheets of newsprint at the local weekly newspaper shop. Back home with these sheets, I would sit at the kitchen table or at the desk in my bedroom, creating newspapers and magazines. I wrote such scintillating prose as, "My grandpa tells me he can't let his sheep get sick. My grandpa says a sick sheep is a dead sheep." In some cases, I would make extra copies of my publications and send them to my aunts and uncles and suggest that they might want to subscribe-at a reasonable rate, of course.