History Commons^™

Review: A Brick And A Bible: Black Women’S Radical Activism In The Midwest During The Great Depression, By Melissa Ford, Brent M. S. Campney

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

Bending Moral Philosophy And Philosophy Of History Toward Each Other, Bennett B. Gilbert

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

In lieu of an abstract, here is an excerpt from the introduction:

In his journal of intimate thoughts (called The Inward Morning) written while journeying through the wildernesses of Montana, the American existentialist philosopher Henry Bugbee (1915–1999)—who had fled there from the Harvard Philosophy Department and who remains little known even in the U.S.—wrote: “Reflection, it seems, must earn the gift of the essential meaning of things past.” I think this is true, that the past is both exemplar of moral reflection and part of the substance of it. I have written a book to argue for the how and …

The Problems Of Personalism Today, Bennett Gilbert

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

In lieu of an abstract, here is a short excerpt:

I shall speak today, generally and just within my 15 minutes, about the problems of personalism today—that is, its current position in philosophy and its internal stresses that must be addressed to improve that situation. My comments are the first fruits of my next book, now under way, which will develop a renewed humanism on a personalistic basis by reformulating a foundation for personalism. The book will also apply this personalism to the challenges of the Anthropocene and particularly of transhumanism. For reasons I will explain, no one has yet …

Review: Indigenous Borderlands: Native Agency, Resilience, And Power In The Americas, Edited By Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez, Thomas A. Britten

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

Review Of King Fisher: The Short Life And Elusive Legend Of A Texas Desperado, By Chuck Parsons And Thomas C. Bicknell, William C. Yancey

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

Review: Borders Of Violence And Justice: Mexicans, Mexican Americans, And Law Enforcement In The Southwest, 1835–1935, By Brian D. Behnken., George T. Diaz

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

Ethnicity And Imitatio In Isidore Of Seville, Erica Buchberger

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

Analyses of imitatio imperii commonly focus on the ceremonial and symbolic aspects of the Roman Empire—victory celebrations, creation of a capital, ceremonial dress and language, imagery on coins, and legal pronouncements—not ethnicity. Perhaps one reason is that in modern English, ‘imitation’ carries derogatory connotations of uninspired copying that remove the agency and creativity of the imitator. Imitated items and practices are seen as poor copies of originals, the latter of which are much more worthy of attention.2 Under this definition, one would expect an imitator of Rome to claim to be Roman, resembling Athaulf’s claim that Goths were unable to …

Conducting Oral History: Background And Methods, Katrine Barber

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

This chapter-length essay describes the practice of oral history through real world examples: the steps to conducting oral history interviews, things to consider when developing a project or an interview plan, and ethical considerations. How oral history has enlarged the historical record and changed scholarly interpretation of the past are highlighted.

Haunted In Desolation: The Murder Of Captain John Gunnison, Reconsidered, Todd Shallat

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

Deserts confuse, fogging memory and electrifying the imagination. In 1853, on Utah’s Sevier River, a ritualized killing spawned a folklore of deserts that lives on to this day. Captain John W. Gunnison, an engineer, had detoured into an ambush. Dismembered, decapitated, his heart torn from his chest, he had died, it was said, by order of the Mormon prophet and Utah’s Latter-day Saints. Fabulized over the decades, the tale was contorted with an evil king in a desert kingdom, with ghoulish assassins and restless corpses undead. Folklore saw what historians have been slow to perceive about hauntings in desolation. Memories …

Review Of Pioneer Of Mexican-American Civil Rights: Alonso S. Perales, Rolando Avila

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

Book Review Of, The Nature Of The Game: Links Golf At Bandon Dunes And Far Beyond By Mike Keiser With Stephen Goodwin (Review), William Lang

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

In 1999, Mike Keiser and his associates welcomed golfers to a new and remarkable links golf course on the southern Oregon coast near the town of Bandon. At the mouth of the Coquille River and small bay some thirty miles south of Coos Bay, Bandon had begun as a mining camp in the 1850s and developed an economy in the late nineteenth century based on fishing, logging, dairying, and cranberry cultivation. The area’s spectacular coastline brought tourists, but nothing quite prepared the town for the advent of world-class golf courses — six in total at Bandon Dunes — and an …

U.S. History As Part Of A Core Curriculum, Megan Birk

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

"The Veneer Of Civilization Washed Off": Anti-Black Posse-Lynchings In The Twentieth-Century Rural Midwest, Brent M. S. Campney

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study seeks to identify anti-Black posse-lynchings in the Midwest between 1910 and 1930, and to examine the ways in which they were framed by the media for their readers. It posits that these lynchings emerged as the foremost type of anti-Black lynching by the second decade of the twentieth century, casting doubt thereby on the prevailing scholarly assumption that the number of lynchings declined precipitously in these years. Because most of these incidents received little attention at the time and few received significant attention outside of the locality in which they occurred, this essay uses as its primary documentation …

Review Of John B. Denton: The Bigger-Than-Life Story Of The Fighting Parson And Texas Ranger, By Mike Cochran, William C. Yancey

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

From A Tabula Rasa To The Governor’S Award For Historic Preservation, Roseann Bacha-Garza, Juan L. Gonzalez, Christopher L. Miller, Russell K. Skowronek

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

Prior to 2009, South Texas was essentially an archaeological tabula rasa, largely unknown in the academic, public, or grey literature due to its location far from research universities, the state historic preservation office, and cultural resource management firms. Here, we relate how a consortium of anthropologists and archaeologists, biologists, historians, geologists, and geoarchaeologists have embraced a locally focused, place-based STEAM research approach to tell the story of a largely unknown region of the United States and make it accessible to K–17 educators,¹ the public, and scholars with bilingual maps, books, exhibits, films, traveling trunks, and scholarly publications. The efforts …

9/11, Culture War, And The Pitfalls Of History, David Horowitz

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

9/11 marks one of the traumatic events of modern U. S. history. Yet its occurrence and aftermath must be placed in the context of social movements and global developments. This presentation focuses on getting past political and social divisiveness. Professor Horowitz has taught at Portland State since 1968, where he won a prize for outstanding achievement in 2007. He is co-author of a U.S. history textbook and has a number of publications to his credit. He is the author of a personal, professional, and political memoir with the title “Getting There: An American Cultural Odyssey.”

Documenting Difficult Cases: A Mixed Method Analysis, Thomas Daniel Knight

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

This Special Issue of Genealogy examines the use of evidence, documentation, and methodology in family history and genealogical studies, and welcomes case studies that examine how to document individuals and relationships. A critical component of scholarly research focusing on the study of particular individuals or groups entails correctly identifying those individuals Historians, genealogists, historical demographers, and scholars in other disciplines sometimes undertake this sort of analysis. Often, research is uncomplicated if the research subject remained in a particular geographical area, or left a clear evidentiary trail, but what happens when historical documents do not clearly identify the research subject? Utilizing …

Review Of Civil Rights In Black And Brown: Histories Of Resistance And Struggle In Texas Ed. By Max Krochmal And J. Todd Moye, Brent M. S. Campney

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

Remarks At The Park Blocks Ceremony Dedicating A Plaque To Commemorate The Psu Student Antiwar Strike Of May 1970, David Horowitz

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

Remarks at the Park Blocks Ceremony Dedicating a Plaque to Commemorate the PSU Student Antiwar Strike of May 1970

Extinction And Its Interventions In The Americas, Germán Vergara, Emily Wakild

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

This forum argues that environmental historians ought to pay more attention to animal extinction—the disappearance of a lineage of life—than they have to date. Examining the pre-and post-extinction contexts of charismatic terrestrial vertebrates in the Americas certainly underscores the power humans have had over other animals and their habitats. Yet, the contingencies and unexpected results of conservation efforts merit no less attention. Indeed, by uncovering important nuances in the extension of human power, they provide insights into the conditions critical to avoid extinction. As environmental history has long shown, abstracting the human from the nonhuman world distorts the history of …

Review Of Texas Rangers, Ranchers, And Realtors: James Hughes Callahan And The Day Family In The Guadalupe River Basin, By Thomas O. Mcdonald, William C. Yancey

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

What’S A Guanaco?: Tracing The Llama Diaspora Through And Beyond South America, Emily Wakild

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

Let us begin with Spook the llama. Spook lived in the animal enclosures at New York’s Central Park Zoo in 1912. Caretakers described Spook as a “morose, cantankerous” soul inhabiting the back of the deer range. Initially forlorn by this location, he looked out the back door at the road that circled past the pen. The busy street proved entertaining as it was full of noisy automobiles and anxious drivers honking. Spook watched the cars and, before long, learned to honk. Or so reported the head keeper at the zoo, Bill Snyder, who claimed “Spook thrust his head forward, drew …

Chapter 2 Origin Legends Of Visigothic Spain In Isidore Of Seville’S Writings, Erica Buchberger

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

The Indian Mission Of The Institute Of Blessed Virgin Mary (Ibvm) Nuns: Convents, Curriculum, And Indian Women, Nilanjana Paul

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study focuses on the Indian mission of IBVM nuns, and the role played by them in the spread of female education in India. While acknowledging that missionaries were part of the imperial process, this study analyzes the work of Catholic nuns in India, their convents, and curriculum to show how their work advanced women’s educational opportunities in India. In the process the study examines how Catholic nuns resisted the dominating attitude of the Catholic Church in India. The last section of the article examines how Christian influence under missionaries not only prepared good mothers and wives but also trained …

Review Of Reverberations Of Racial Violence: Critical Reflections On The History Of The Border Ed. By Sonia Hernández And John Morán González, George T. Diaz

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

Review: ¡Viva George!: Celebrating Washington’S Birthday At The Us-Mexico Border, By Elaine A. Peña, George T. Diaz

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

Elaine A. Peña’s ¡Viva George! offers an in-depth “anthropological history” of the ways a binational community’s celebration of George Washington’s birthday bridges national and cultural divides across the U.S.-Mexico border (p. 6). For over one hundred years, Laredo, Texas—a medium-sized community along the Rio Grande—has celebrated the birthday of the first president of the United States. Rather than fetishize the celebration as a border eccentricity, the book considers how Mexican Americans embraced and co-opted the festivity to cultivate a unique identity. Moreover, the book considers how local and regional business interests contended with U.S. and Mexican national policies in …

Review: The Broken Heart Of America: St. Louis And The Violent History Of The United States, By Walter Johnson, Brent M. S. Campney

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

In The Broken Heart of America, historian Walter Johnson examines the histories of white supremacy, capitalism, and racist violence through the lens of St. Louis, Missouri, from the nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. He argues that St. Louis epitomizes the major themes of American history, including Indian wars, anti-Black lynching spectacles, epic riots, police violence, discrimination, exclusion, and segregation. More than a story of one city, he writes, Broken Heart uses that metropolis to explore “the history of ‘racial capitalism’: the intertwined history of white supremacist ideology and the practices of empire, extraction, and exploitation. Dynamic, unstable, ever-changing, …

Narciso Martínez: El Huracán Del Valle De Sol A Sol, Manuel F. Medrano

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

“Our Antient Friends . . . Are Much Reduced”: Mary And James Wright, The Hopewell Friends Meeting, And Quaker Women In The Southern Backcountry, C. 1720–C. 1790, Thomas Daniel Knight

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

Although the existence of Quakers in Virginia is well known, the best recent surveys of Virginia history devote only passing attention to them, mostly in the context of expanding religious freedoms during the revolutionary era. Few discuss the Quakers themselves or the nature of Quaker settlements although notably, Warren Hofstra, Larry Gragg, and others have studied aspects of the Backcountry Quaker experience. Recent Quaker historiography has reinterpreted the origins of the Quaker faith and the role of key individuals in the movement, including the roles of Quaker women. Numerous studies address Quaker women collectively. Few, however, examine individual families or …

“Standing In The Crater Of A Volcano”: Anti-Chinese Violence And International Diplomacy In The American West, Brent M. S. Campney

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study investigates anti-Chinese violence in the American West—focusing primarily on events in the Arizona Territory between 1880 and 1912—and the role of diplomatic relations between the United States and China in tempering the worst excesses of that violence. Recent scholarship asserts that the Chinese rarely suffered lynching and were commonly targeted for other types of violence, including coercion, harassment, and intimidation. Building on that work, this study advances a definition of racist violence that includes a broad spectrum of attacks, including the threat of violence. While affirming that such “subtler” violence achieved many of the same objectives as the …