In American Silence, a complement to his previous study Trickster in the Land of Dreams, Zeese Papanikolas investigates a number of significant American cultural artifacts and the lives of their makers. For Papanikolas, both the private failures and public successes of Clarence King, Henry Adams, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Chandler, and Hank Williams resonate with silences. These silences absences and omissions put them in opposition to the American mythology of success and express the essential solitude Alexis de Tocqueville found at the heart of the American...

The American Civil War was at a turning point in 1863 when Lt. Col. Arthur J. L. Fremantle of the British Coldstream Guards toured the Confederacy. Mildly predisposed toward the Union side because of his dislike of slavery, he was soon awakened to the gallantry of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and his generals, ordinary Johnny Rebs, and the women left at home. From April to early July 1863-the critical period of campaigns at Vicksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg-Fremantle traveled from the Texas frontier to northern Virginia, recording in a diary his experience of the war. Three Months...

Louis Tikas was a union organizer killed in the battle between striking coal miners and state militia in Ludlow, Colorado, in 1914. In Buried Unsung he stands for a whole generation of immigrant workers who, in the years before World War I, found themselves caught between the realties of industrial America and their aspirations for a better life.

Zeese Papanikolas forges seemingly disparate events and movements in western history including some of its strangest and most exotic strains into a coherent whole by examining them against the laughter and wisdom of Shoshonean trickster tales. Seen against these tales, the West becomes both a canvas for the projection of utopian dreams and the site of their shattered remains.Papanikolas undertakes a dramatic retelling of Shoshoni creation stories and examines, along with other topics, the mythologies embedded in the Dream Mine of Mormon folklore, the heroic images of cowboys and Wobblies, the...

The profound economic and social changes in the post-Civil War United States created new challenges to a nation founded on Enlightenment and transcendental values, religious certainties, and rural traditions. Newly-freed African Americans, emboldened women, intellectuals and artists, and a polyglot tide of immigrants found themselves in a restless new world of railroads, factories, and skyscrapers where old assumptions were being challenged and new values had yet to be created. In An American Cakewalk: Ten Syncopators of the Modern World, Zeese Papanikolas tells the lively and...