For Christian European missionaries among the Cherokees at the turn of the eighteenth century, translating the Bible meant wrestling with the extreme structural differences between Cherokee and English. The New Voice of God reveals how these linguistic differences encoded basic predispositions and orientations toward the physical, spiritual, and ......
Over a century ago, a group of painters dreamed of establishing an artists' colony in the village of Taos, New Mexico, and succeeded beyond their wildest imaginings. Founded in 1915 and disbanded in 1927, the Taos Society of Artists promoted painting that embraced the landscape of the Southwest and the local Pueblo and Hispanic people. This ......
Coming of age during the Great Depression, the American boys who fought in World War II had, through necessity, developed a unique brand of technological resourcefulness. This proficiency, Robert P. Wettemann Jr. contends, provided GIs with another weapon in a distinctly American way of war. Rhino Tanks and Sticky Bombs is Wettemann's eminently ......
Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, 32 states passed laws allowing involuntary sterilization on those deemed biologically "unfit": convicted criminals, the disabled, the poor, and people of color. Texas, despite a history of violent racism, was not one of them. In The Purifying Knife, Michael Phillips and Betsy Friauf explore this ......
Indigenous Geography and American Empire in the Early Tennessee Country
Since time immemorial, Native peoples' understandings of space and territory have defined the landscape of the Tennessee Country-the region drained by the Tennessee, Cumberland, and Mississippi rivers and their tributaries. Marking Native Borders challenges the narrative of inevitable U.S. expansion by exploring how Cherokees and Chickasaws used ......
As the commander of the U.S. garrison at Fort Sumter in the fateful early hours of April 12, 1861, Robert Anderson (1805-71) played a critical role in the unfolding of the Civil War. Although his leadership and his courage under fire catapulted him into national recognition, the attack on Fort Sumter was just one chapter in Anderson's story. That ......
The Making of the Native American Church, 1880-1937
Regarding peyote use among Native Americans, an ethnologist noted in 1891: "The ceremonial eating of the plant has become the great religious rite of all tribes of the southern plains." But, as Lisa D. Barnett observes in Peyote Politics: The Making of the Native American Church, 1880-1937, Peyotism quickly came under scrutiny, with opponents, ......
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 freed the world of the political and military perils and imperatives of the Cold War. But it also introduced a whole new constellation of risks and challenges, as Jonathan M. House brings into sharp relief in A Military History of the New World Disorder, 1989-2022, the third and final volume in his ......
In the early 1920s, amid rising anti-Catholic sentiment and hysteria generated by World War I, the reconstituted Ku Klux Klan found new footing in many states outside the Deep South-including Montana. In Big Skies, White Hoods, Christine K. Erickson explores the little-known history of the Klan in Big Sky Country, revealing what this western ......
