Böcker utgivna av University of Oklahoma Press

Travel north from the upper Midwest's metropolises, and before long you're "Up North"-a region that's hard to define but unmistakable to any resident or tourist. Crops give way to forests, mines (or their remains) mark the landscape, and lakes multiply, becoming ever clearer until you reach the vastness of the Great Lakes. How to characterize this region, as distinct from the agrarian Midwest, is the question North Country seeks to answer, as a congenial group of scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals explores the distinctive landscape, culture, and history that define the northern margins of the American Midwest.From the glacial past to the present day, these essays range across the histories of the Dakota and Ojibwe people, colonial imperial rivalries and immigration, and conflicts between the economic imperatives of resource extraction and the stewardship of nature. The book also considers literary treatments of the area-and arguably makes its own contributions to that literature, as some of the authors search for the North Country through personal essays, while others highlight individuals who are identified with the area, like Sigurd Olson, John Barlow Martin, and Russell Kirk.From the fur trade to tourism, fisheries to supper clubs, Finnish settlers to Native treaty rights, the nature of the North Country emerges here in all its variety and particularity: as clearly distinct from the greater Midwest as it is part of the American heartland.

While the Western was dying a slow death across the cultural landscape, it was blazing back to life as a video game in the early twenty-first century. Rockstar Games' Red Dead franchise, beginning with Red Dead Revolver in 2004, has grown into one of the most critically acclaimed video game franchises of the twenty-first century. Red Dead Redemption: History, Myth, and Violence in the Video Game West offers a critical, interdisciplinary look at this cultural phenomenon at the intersection of game studies and American history.Drawing on game studies, western history, American studies, and cultural studies, the authors train a wide-ranging, deeply informed analytic perspective on the Red Dead franchise-from its earliest incarnation to the latest, Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018). Their intersecting chapters put the series in the context of American history, culture, and contemporary media, with inquiries into issues of authenticity, realism, the meaning of play and commercial promotion, and the relationship between the game and the wider cultural iterations of the classic Western. The contributors also delve into the role the series' development has played in recent debates around working conditions in the gaming industry and gaming culture.In its redeployment and reinvention of the Western's myth and memes, the Red Dead franchise speaks to broader aspects of American culture-the hold of the frontier myth and the "Wild West" over the popular imagination, the role of gun culture in society, depictions of gender and ethnicity in mass media, and the increasing allure of digital escapism-all of which come in for scrutiny here, making this volume a vital, sweeping, and deeply revealing cultural intervention.

In Going Back to T-Town, Ernie's daughter, Carmen Fields, tells a story of success, disappointment, and perseverance, extending from the early jazz era to the 1960s. This is an enlightening account of how this talented musician and businessman navigated the hurdles of racial segregation during the Jim Crow era.

Of the three physicians at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, Doctor George Edwin Lord (1846-76) was the lone commissioned medical officer, an assistant surgeon with the United States Army's 7th Cavalry-one more soldier caught up in the U.S. government's efforts to fulfill what many people believed was the young country's "Manifest Destiny." A Life Cut Short at the Little Big Horn tells Lord's story for the first time. Notable for its unique angle on Custer's last stand and for its depiction of frontier-era medicine, the book is above all a compelling portrait of the making of an army medical professional in mid-nineteenth-century America.Drawing on newly discovered documents, Todd E. Harburn describes Lord's education and training at Bowdoin College in Maine and the Chicago Medical College, detailing what the study of medicine entailed at the time for "a young man of promise . . . held in universal esteem." Lord's time as a contract physician with the army took him in 1874 to the U.S. Northern Boundary Survey. From there Harburn recounts how, after a failed romance and the rigors of the U.S. Army Medical Board examination, the young doctor proceeded to his first-and only-appointment as a post surgeon, at Fort Buford in Dakota Territory. What followed, of course, was Lord's service, and his death, in the Little Big Horn campaign, which this book shows us for the first time from the unique perspective of the surgeon.A portrait of a singular figure in the milieu of the American military's nineteenth-century medical elite, A Life Cut Short at the Little Big Horn offers a close look at a familiar chapter in U.S. history, and a reminder of the humanity lost in a battle that resonates to this day.

For the Cherokee Nation, the Civil War was more than a contest between the Union and the Confederacy. It was yet another battle in the larger struggle against multiple white governments for land and tribal sovereignty. Cherokee Civil Warrior tells the story of Chief John Ross as he led the tribe in this struggle.The son of a Scottish father and mixed-blood Indian mother, John Ross served the Cherokee Nation in a public capacity for nearly fifty years, thirty-eight as its constitutionally elected principal chief. W. Dale Weeks describes Ross's efforts to protect the tribe's interests amid systematic attacks on indigenous culture throughout the nineteenth century, from the forced removal policies of the 1830s to the exigencies of the Civil War era. At the outset of the Civil War, Ross called for all Cherokees, slaveholding and non-slaveholding, to remain neutral in a war they did not support-a position that became untenable when the United States withdrew its forces from Indian Territory. The vacated forts were quickly occupied by Confederate troops, who pressured the Cherokees to align with the South. Viewed from the Cherokee perspective, as Weeks does in this book, these events can be seen in their proper context, as part of the history of U.S. "Indian policy," failed foreign relations, and the Anglo-American conquest of the American West. This approach also clarifies President Abraham Lincoln's acknowledgment of the federal government's abrogation of its treaty obligation, and his commitment to restoring political relations with the Cherokees-a commitment abruptly ended when his successor Andrew Johnson instead sought to punish the Cherokees for their perceived disloyalty.Centering a Native point of view, this book recasts and expands what we know about John Ross, the Cherokee Nation, its commitment to maintaining its sovereignty, and the Civil War era in Indian Territory. Weeks also provides historical context for later developments, from the events of Little Bighorn and Wounded Knee to the struggle over tribal citizenship between the Cherokees and the descendants of their former slaves.

The Lakȟóta are among the best-known Native American peoples. In popular culture and even many scholarly works, they were once lumped together with others and called the Sioux. This book tells the full story of Lakȟóta culture and society, from their origins to the twenty-first century, drawing on Lakȟóta voices and perspectives.

American expansion, says Richard Drinnon, is characterized by repression and racism. In his reinterpretation of "winning" the West, Drinnon links racism with colonialism and traces this interrelationship from the Pequot War in New England, through American expansion westward to the Pacific, and beyond to the Phillippines and Vietnam. He cites parrallels between the slaughter of bison on the Great Plains and the defoliation of Vietnam and notes similarities in the language of aggression used in the American West, the Philippines, and Southeast Asia.

While skillfully portraying a significant historical figure--one of the first female writers known to have composed in the English language--Prize for the Fire renders the inner life of Anne Askew with a depth and immediacy that transcends time.

The five largest southeastern Indian groups were forced to emigrate west to the Indian territory (now Oklahoma) in the 1830s. This book contains the Indians' own stories - taken from WPA interviews - of the troubled years between the Civil War and Oklahoma statehood.

Sandra Muse Isaacs uses the concepts of Gadugi and Duyvkta to explore the Eastern Cherokee oral tradition, and to explain how storytelling in this tradition - as both an ancient and a contemporary literary form - is instrumental in the perpetuation of Cherokee identity and culture.

Among the diverse peoples who converged on America's mid-nineteenth western frontier were African American pioneers. Whether enslaved or free, they too were involved in this transformative movement. Sweet Freedom's Plains is a powerful retelling of the migration story from their perspective.

Although he is best known for Bless Me, Ultima and other novels, Rudolfo Anaya's writing also takes the form of nonfiction, and in these 52 essays he draws on both his heritage as a Mexican American and his gift for storytelling.

The Chicano Movement of the 1960s and '70s, like so much of the period's politics, is best known for its radicalism. Less understood was the movement's moderate elements. This book presents the first full account of these more mainstream liberal activists-those who rejected the politics of protest and worked within the system.

In 'Cotton County', the first of the dual memoirs in The Land and the Days, acclaimed author Tracy Daugherty describes the forces that shape us: the 'rituals of our regions' and the family and friends who animate our lives and memories.

Tells a powerful tale about the love and forgiveness that keep a modern Native American family together in Santa Rosa, California. First published in 1998, Watermelon Nights remains one of the few works of fiction to illuminate the experiences of urban Native Americans.

During the Great Depression, the Los Angeles area was rife with radical movements. Although many observers thought their ideas unworkable, even dangerous, Southern Californians voted for them by the tens of thousands. This book asks why.

In these short stories, Jack Forbes captures the remarkable breadth and variety of American Indian life. Drawing on his skills as scholar and native activist, and, above all, as artist, Forbes enlarges our sense of how American Indians experience themselves and the world around them.

"[The authors] have created a history rich in synthesis and made all the more pleasing by a style that is crisp, occasionally ironic, always persuasive, and frequently eloquent...quite simply, the best history of the state available."--L.G. Moses, Oklahoma State University