New Books In The American West

Gilbert Mireles is the author of Continuing La Causa: Organizing Labor in California’s Strawberry Fields (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2013). He is associate professor of sociology at Whitman College. Mireles applies theories from political sociology and organizational management to the question of how unions organize workers. He examined the effective and ineffective strategies of United Farm Workers (UFW) to organize berry farmers in California. The book’s close methods bring life to these organizations. Mireles’ focus on telling the story of El Comite, in particular, stands out in the book.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New Mexico is a cultural borderland, marked by the interaction of Indian, Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo-American peoples over the past four hundred years. The question of how to commemorate this history and promote the traditions that arose from it is the subject of ongoing discussing, disagreement, and activism. In Recognizing Heritage: the Politics of Multiculturalism in New Mexico (University of Nebraska Press, 2013), Thomas H. Guthrie examines the work of scholars, community activists, politicians, and federal officials at several sites in Northern New Mexico – work meant to preserve the region’s Indian and Hispanic heritage and the state’s “multicultural” character, exemplified by the 2008 creation of the Northern Rio Grande National Heritage Area across the region. Recognizing Heritage offers a robust critique of the multicultural model at work in New Mexico. While Guthrie notes that both Anglo-Americans and Indian or Hispanic activists are well-meaning in their efforts to ma

Brendan C. Lindsay‘s impressive if deeply troubling new book centers on two concepts long considered anathema: democracy and genocide. One is an ideal of self-government, the other history’s most unspeakable crime. Yet as Lindsay deftly describes, Euro-American settlers in California harnessed democratic governance to expel, enslave and ultimately murder 90% of a population on their ancestral homelands in the mid-to-late 19th century. Murder State: California’s Native Genocide, 1846-1873 (University of Nebraska Press, 2012) is difficult but vital reading for residents of any state. Culling evidence from newspapers, public records, and personal narratives, Lindsay’s lays out an ironclad case that “genocide” is precisely the word to describe to the process faced by Native people in California, despite its rarified usage in academic and public discourse.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From illicit marijuana farms wedged deep in the canyons of the Angeles National Forest to the fire-bombed laboratories of the University of Washington, Char Miller takes readers on a wild romp through the contests, debates, and full-out battles that have surrounded American public lands for over a century in Public Lands, Public Debates: A Century of Controversy (Oregon State University Press, 2012) In a series of nineteen very short vignette essays published by the Oregon State University Press, Miller turns his laser focus on episodes in American land-management policy, some familiar and others formerly lost in institutional obscurity. Each essay brings a fresh perspective to land policy debates, often raising many questions along the way. Taken together as a collection, these vignettes and meditations offer a fascinating series of windows into the long and very contested history of American land-use policy. Contemporary observers of public lands controversies may harbor nostalgic longings for a past when

Anyone who’s turned on the television in the past several decades is familiar with the ubiquitous before-and-after picture. On the left, your present state: undesirable, out of shape, balding perhaps. Add ingredient X – maybe a fad diet or a hair transplant – and the picture on the right shows your new and improved future. While this visual juxtaposition might seem harmless enough – save for the whole manipulative advertising thing – it has a rather more nefarious history in the United States, bound intimately, like so much, with the question of race. The before-and-after pictures were a favorite of Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the pioneering Carlisle Indian School, where in the late 19th and early 20th century, Native American children from the recently pacified West were brought thousands of miles to a military base outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Haggard by the exhausting and traumatic train ride, Pratt’s photographer would snap the “before” picture, usi

Essay collections are often a repository of an author’s lesser works, an attempt by publishers to milk every last penny from a well-regarded scholar. This is not the case with Jace Weaver’s new book Notes from a Miner’s Canary: Essays on the State of Native America (University of New Mexico Press, 2010). He is, indeed, a well-regarded scholar. As director of the Institute of Native American Studies at the University of Georgia and the author of a number of foundational texts in the field, Weaver can certainly command the academic gravitas necessary for published article collections. But Notes from a Miner’s Canary is no mere repository. Weaver brilliantly harmonizes a number of diverse and compelling articles into a powerful primer for students and scholars of Native American Studies, moving deftly through environmentalism, NAGPRA, indigenous architecture, theology, literature, and far more. Grounded in a firm belief in the need for engaged scholarly work accountable to Native communit

Today we talked with Eric Gardner, who is chair and professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University. The interview focuses on Jennie Carter: A Black Journalist of the Early West (University Press of Mississippi, 2008), a new book which Dr. Gardner both authored an introduction to and edited. This is the first collection from an African American journalist writing for the San Francisco based newspaper, the Elevator. Gardner’s introduction does an excellent job of placing Carter into both the context of the history and literature of the American West. Dr. Gardner is also the editor of Major Voices: The Drama of Slavery and has authored works which appear in the African American Review, the African American National Biography, and Legacy. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to New Books in History. In this, our inaugural podcast, we’re honored to have Malcolm Rohrbough on the show. As many of you may know, Mac is a distinguished historian of the American West at the University of Iowa. He’s the author of many books and articles, among them The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789-1837 (Oxford University Press, 1968), Aspen: The History of a Silver Mining Town, 1879-1893 (Oxford University Press, 1986) and Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (University of California Press, 1997). In this show, however, we talk to Mac about his book The Trans-Appalachian Frontier: People, Societies, and Institutions, 1775-1850. It was originally published by Oxford University Press in 1968, but an expanded and revised edition of the book has just been released by Indiana University Press. Andrew Cayton of Miami University calls The Trans-Appalachian Frontier “the definitive history of the subje