From Sacagawea's travels with Lewis and Clark to rock groupie Pamela Des Barres's California trips, women have moved across the American West with profound consequences for the people and places they encounter. Virginia Scharff revisits a grand theme of United States history--our restless, relentless westward movement--but sets out in new directions, following women's trails from the early nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. In colorful, spirited stories, she weaves a lyrical reconsideration of the processes that created, gave meaning to, and ultimately shattered the West....
From Sacagawea's travels with Lewis and Clark to rock groupie Pamela Des Barres's California trips, women have moved across the American West with pro...
Dorothy Johnson, author of The Hanging Tree and Indian Country, describes the great western experience of a number of nineteenth-century women of widely different situations and fates. Some were captured by Indians. Cynthia Ann Parker, assimilated to the Comanche tribe after being captured as a child, was later recaptured by U.S. soldiers who killed her Comanche husband and separated her forever from her sons. Pioneer Fanny Kelly spent five months as a captive of the Sioux; she went on to write a clearheaded book about her experiences. Some, like missionary Mary Richardson...
Dorothy Johnson, author of The Hanging Tree and Indian Country, describes the great western experience of a number of nineteenth-century...
The Civil War turned the genteel world of Virginia society upside-down for Sallie Brock Putnam. She lived in the Confederate capital of Richmond throughout the war and saw it transformed from a quiet town of culture to a swollen refugee camp, black-market center, prison venue, and hospital complex. As the smoke from nearby battlefields drifted into town, swaggering young soldiers and ambulance trains filled the streets. Putnam describes the excitement of secession giving way to sacrifice and grim determination, the women of Richmond aiding the war effort, the funerals and hasty weddings, the...
The Civil War turned the genteel world of Virginia society upside-down for Sallie Brock Putnam. She lived in the Confederate capital of Richmond throu...
The twentieth-century rise of the automobile collided head on with Victorian prescriptions for the proper role and place of women in society. Gender conventions cast women as too weak, dependent, and flighty to manage the fiery motored beast. Overcoming that stereotype was as difficult for women as gaining access to the vote, the professions, and education, yet their personal feats of driving in both war and peace demolished the gender barriers against their taking the road. After women proved once and for all that they could drive under the worst conditions in World War I, they adapted...
The twentieth-century rise of the automobile collided head on with Victorian prescriptions for the proper role and place of women in society. Gende...
Empire and Liberty brings together two epic subjects in American history: the story of the struggle to end slavery that reached a violent climax in the Civil War, and the story of the westward expansion of the United States. Virginia Scharff and the contributors to this volume show how the West shaped the conflict over slavery and how slavery shaped the West, in the process defining American ideals about freedom and influencing battles over race, property, and citizenship. This innovative work embraces East and West, as well as North and South, as the United States observes the...
Empire and Liberty brings together two epic subjects in American history: the story of the struggle to end slavery that reached a violent clima...
