Bøger i New Narratives in American His serien

In an engaging narrative format, Sleuthing the Alamo employs a particular archival "find" in each chapter to show how the meaning of the Texas Revolution, and especially the Alamo battle, cannot be understood without examining the construction of the histories and myths about the birth of the Texas Republic.

Despite the advances of the civil rights movement, many white southerners cling to the faded glory of a romanticized Confederate past. In The Making of a Confederate, William L. Barney focuses on the life of one man, Walter Lenoir of North Carolina, to examine the origins of southern white identity alongside its myriad ambiguities and complexities. For Lenoir and many fellow Confederates, the war never really ended. As he tells this compelling story, Barney offers new insights into the ways that (selective) memory informs history; through Lenoir's life, readers learn how individual choices can transform abstract historical processes into concrete actions.

The book narrates the Stono River uprising of 1739, a slave rebellion that took the lives of over two dozen whites and as many as two hundred blacks in colonial South Carolina, was the largest North American mainland slave insurrection during the English colonial era.

When Ishi, "the last wild Indian," came out of hiding in August 1911, he was quickly whisked away by train to San Francisco to meet Alfred Kroeber, one of the fathers of American anthropology. When Kroeber and Ishi came face to face, it was a momentous event, not only for each man but also for the cultures they represented. Each stood on the brink--one was in danger of losing something vital while the other was in danger of disappearing altogether. Ishi was a survivor, and he viewed the bright lights of the big city with a mixture of awe and bemusement. What surprised everyone is how handily he adapted himself to the modern city while maintaining his sense of self and his culture. Kroeber was professionally trained to document Ishi's culture and his civilization. What he didn't count on was how deeply working with the man would lead him to question his own profession and his civilization--how it would rekindle a wildness of his own. Although Ishi's story has been told before in film and fiction, Wild Men is the first book to focus on the depth of Ishi and Kroeber's friendship. Exploring what their intertwined stories tell us about Indian survival in modern America and about America's fascination with the wild, this text is an ideal supplement for courses on Native American history, the U.S. West, and the history of California.