For the Plains Indians, the period from 1750 to 1890, often referred to as the traditional period, was an evolutionary time. Horses and firearms, trade goods, shifting migration patterns, disease pandemics, and other events associated with extensive European contact led to a peak of Plains Indian influence and success in the early nineteenth century. Ironically, that same European contact ultimately led to the devolution of traditional Plains Indian society, and by 1870 most Plains Indian peoples were living on reservations. In The Plains Indians Paul H. Carlson charts the evolution and...

In this little classic, first published in 1977, Ray A. Billington outlines the threecenturylong process of westering that forged the American characteristics of resourcefulness, individualism and democracy, and upward social mobility.
"The American Frontiersman" looks at the mountain men of the fur trade who succumbed to the wilderness world in which they found themselves and in which they were forced to begin the climb upward to civilization once more. In "The Frontier and American Culture" the author suggests that although many backwoodsmen seceded from civilization, others made a...

Expansion was the fever of the early nineteenth century, and women burned with it as surely as men, although in a different way. Subscribing to the "cult of true womanhood," which valued domesticity, piety, and similar "feminine" virtues, women championed expansion for the cause of civilization, even while largely avoiding the masculine world of politics.
Adrienne Caughfield mines the diaries and letters of some ninety Texas women to uncover the ideas and enthusiasms they brought to the Western frontier. Although there were a few notable exceptions, most of them drew on their domestic...

In the spring of 1883 Apache raiders massacred Judge McComas and his wife and kidnapped their six-year-old son, Charley on a desolate road in southwestern New Mexico Territory, all victims of revenge sought by the Apaches for Gen. George Crook's campaign. Marc Simmons brings to light one of the last massacres of the Indian wars.

All Texans, or their ancestors, started as something else. The families that came here molded the state and were molded by it. Anne H. Sutherland explores just how the experiences of two of the early Anglo land-grant families--the Robertsons and the Sutherlands--shaped Texas events and how they handed down those experiences from one generation to another, transforming two Scots-Irish families into what in hindsight we have branded Anglo-Texans. The story of these two pioneering families, told through their letters, poems, diaries, and oral histories, embodies western expansion and political...

Historian David La Vere has culled from the Indian-Pioneer Histories housed in the Indian Archives of the Oklahoma Historical Society in Oklahoma City a wealth of vivid detail about life among the former Texas Indian peoples. The oral histories that make up this collection were gathered during the Great Depression by the Works Progress Administration. From the 112 bound volumes that resulted, Dr. La Vere has gathered all the material pertinent to the Indians who came from Texas into an exceptional picture of the details of daily life-war and raiding, hunting and planting, foodways dress,...

The 1929 master's thesis of folklorist, Jovita Gonzalez has served as source material on the Texas-Mexican borderlands for more than seventy-five years but has never before been published. When Gonzalez decided to pursue a master's degree in history from the University of Texas, she was already the vice-president and president-elect of the Texas Folklore Society. Despite this, she wrote a defiant master's thesis that offered a competing vision of Texas history and culture to that promoted by the "founding fathers" of Texas folklore. Her complex analysis de-emphasizes the role of the Texas...

As the nineteenth century ended in Hunt County, Texas, a way of life was dying. The tightly knit, fiercely independent society of the yeomen farmers--"plain folk," as historians have often dubbed them--was being swallowed up by the rising tide of a rapidly changing, cotton-based economy. A social network based on family, religion, and community was falling prey to crippling debt and resulting loss of land ownership. For many of the rural people of Hunt County and similar places, it seemed like the end of the world.
In Yeomen, Sharecroppers, and Socialists historian Kyle G. Wilkison...

Walter P. Lane emigrated from Ireland as a young boy, fought in three wars, sailed the Texas coast with a privateer, and traveled to California and Arizona in search of gold. What drove this man, who in many ways typifies the adventurers who contributed to the westward expansion in the United States during the early nineteenth century?
Through his mining of personal papers, memoirs, contemporary sources, and archived collections, Jimmy L. Bryan Jr. has produced a comprehensive portrait of the man who charged across the field at San Jacinto, aided in the removal of Indians and Tejano...

In distinctive, engaging prose, S. R. Martin Jr. crafts the story of his forebears and their westward journey, begun even before the great black migration that occurred around the two world wars.
By narrating the struggles and triumphs of his family both paternal and maternal during their move west, he illuminates an under-studied facet of African American history. As Martin explains it, he and his brother arrived on the scene at the confluence of these family streams in time to catch a ride to the shining sea.
Students, scholars, and interested general readers of modern African...