You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Moving Out: A Nebraska Woman's Life is the autobiography of Polly Spence (1914?98) and an intimate portrait of small-town life in the mid?twentieth century. The descendant of Irish settlers, Polly spent her first fifteen years in Franklin, a village with conservative, puritan religious values in south-central Nebraska. Although Polly's relationship with her mother was tense, she loved and admired her newspaperman father, from whom she inherited her love of learning and the English language. In 1927 her family moved to Crawford, a tough but relatively tolerant cow town in northwestern Nebraska. Polly vividly contrasts the cultural differences between Franklin's prudishness and Crawford's more...
?Crack shot.? ?Enigma woman.? ?Good with ponies and pistols.? ?A much-married woman.? ø What if such an unconventional woman?and the press unanimously agreed that Nellie May Madison was indeed unconventional?were to get away with murder? Shortly after her husband?s bullet-riddled body was found in the couple?s Burbank apartment, police issued an all-points bulletin for the ?beautiful, dark-haired widow.? The ensuing drama unfolded with all the strange twists and turns of a noir crime novel.øøøøøø ø In this intriguing cultural history, Kathleen A. Cairns tells the true tale of the first woman sentenced to death in California, Nellie May Madison. Her story offers a glimpse into law and disorder in 1930s Los Angeles while bringing to life a remarkable character whose plight reflects on the status of woman, the workings of the media and the judiciary system, and the stratification of society in her time. An intriguing cultural history, Cairns?s re-creation of the case from murder to trial to aftermath casts an eye forward to our own love-hate affair with celebrity crimes and our abiding ambivalence about domestic violence abuse as a defense for murder.
"Based on historical records, including the letters and diaries of Oatman's friends and relatives, The Blue Tattoo is the first book to examine her life from her childhood in Illinois including the massacre, her captivity, and her return to white society - to her later years as a wealthy banker's wife in Texas."--BOOK JACKET.
In 1919 Charlotte Anita Whitney, a wealthy white woman, received one of the first Communist Labor Party membership cards for the charter group of the northern California Communist Labor Party. Less than a decade later in Berkeley, California, a Jewish woman named Dorothy Ray Healey became a card-carrying member of the Young Communist League. Nearly forty years later, in 1966, Kendra Claire Harris Alexander, a mixed-race woman, enlisted with the Los Angeles branch of the Communist Party, determined to promote class equality. In Gendering Radicalism, Beth Slutsky examines how American leftist radicalism was experienced through the lives of these three women who led the California branches of t...
Tells the story of a group of farm girls who met while attending Iowa's Teacher's College and who shared a "yen to see some things." A blend of oral and written history, adventure, memoir, and just plain heartfelt living, this book presents a story of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
"With eighty men I could ride through the entire Sioux nation." The story of what has become popularly known as the Fetterman Fight, near Fort Phil Kearney in present-day Wyoming in 1866, is based entirely on this infamous declaration attributed to Capt. William J. Fetterman. Historical accounts cite this statement in support of the premise that bravado, vainglory, and contempt for the fort's commander, Col. Henry B. Carrington, compelled Fetterman to disobey direct orders from Carrington and lead his men into a perfectly executed ambush by an alliance of Plains Indians. In the aftermath of the incident, Carrington's superiors--including generals Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman--posi...
An examination of the Rodeo Queen phenomenon in the American West, from its first appearance at the 1910 Pendleton, Oregon, Round-Up, to 1956, when the Rodeo Queen transformed from a Western into a national symbol.
With the passage of the Morrill Act in 1862, many states in the Midwest and the West chartered land-grant colleges following the Civil War. Because of both progressive ideologies and economic necessity, these institutions admitted women from their inception and were among the first public institutions to practice coeducation. Although female students did not feel completely accepted by their male peers and professors in the land-grant environment, many of them nonetheless successfully negotiated greater gender inclusion for themselves and their peers. In Bright Epoch, Andrea G. Radke-Moss tells the story of female students early mixed-gender encounters at four institutions: Iowa Agricultural...
In 1881 Thomas and Elizabeth Tannatt said a final good-bye to Massachusetts and the eastern seaboard and set out in search not of land but of opportunities for social and political advancement. Facing severe limitations to their goals in the depressed and disheveled postwar East, the Tannatts went west to Walla Walla, Washington Territory, to pursue their dreams of influence and status. ø Domesticating the West examines the motivations of late-nineteenth-century middle-class migrants who moved west to build communities and establish themselves as leaders. The West offered new opportunities for solidly middle-class eastern families who endured hardship, uncertainty, and displacement during t...
Mildred Dee Brown (1905–89) was the cofounder of Nebraska’s Omaha Star, the longest running black newspaper founded by an African American woman in the United States. Known for her trademark white carnation corsage, Brown was the matriarch of Omaha’s Near North Side—a historically black part of town—and an iconic city leader. Her remarkable life, a product of the Reconstruction era and Jim Crow, reflects a larger American history that includes the Great Migration, the Red Scare of the post–World War era, civil rights and black power movements, desegregation, and urban renewal. Within the context of African American and women’s history studies, Amy Helene Forss’s Black Print w...