Women of the New Mexico Frontier, 1846-1912

Women of the New Mexico Frontier, 1846-1912
Author: Cheryl J. Foote
Publisher: UNM Press
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780826337559

Biographies of and a collection of writings by women who, for various reasons, found themselves living in New Mexico Territory, from the mid-nineteenth century to the beginning of World War I.

Frontier Women and Their Art

Frontier Women and Their Art
Author: Mary Ellen Snodgrass
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2018-06-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 153810976X

While often less celebrated than their male counterparts, women have been vital contributors to the arts for centuries. Works by women of the frontier represent treasured accomplishments of American culture and still impress us today, centuries after their creation. The breadth of creative expression by women of this time period is as impressive as the women themselves. In Frontier Women and Their Art: A Chronological Encyclopedia, Mary Ellen Snodgrass explores the rich history of women’s creative expression from the beginning of the Federalist era to the end of the 19th century. Focusing particularly on Western artistic style, the importance of cultural exchange, and the preservation of history, this book captures a wide variety of artistic accomplishment, such as: Folk music, frontier theatrics, and dancing Quilting, stitchery, and beadwork Sculpture and adobe construction Writing, translations, and storytelling Individual talents highlighted in this volume include basketry by Nellie Charlie, acting by Blanche Bates, costuming by Annie Oakley, diary entries from Emily French, translations by Sacajawea, flag designs by Nancy Kelsey, photography by Jennie Ross Cobb, and singing by Lotta Crabtree. Each entry includes a comprehensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources, as well as further readings on the female artists and their respective crafts. This text also defines and provides examples of technical terms such as applique, libretto, grapevine, farce, coil pots, and quilling. With its informative entries and extensive examinations of artistic talent, Frontier Women and Their Art is a valuable resource for students, scholars, and anyone interested in learning about some of the most influential and talented women in the arts.

Forty-Seventh Star

Forty-Seventh Star
Author: David V. Holtby
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 567
Release: 2012-09-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 0806187867

New Mexico was ceded to the United States in 1848, at the end of the war with Mexico, but not until 1912 did President William Howard Taft sign the proclamation that promoted New Mexico from territory to state. Why did New Mexico’s push for statehood last sixty-four years? Conventional wisdom has it that racism was solely to blame. But this fresh look at the history finds a more complex set of obstacles, tied primarily to self-serving politicians. Forty-Seventh Star, published in New Mexico’s centennial year, is the first book on its quest for statehood in more than forty years. David V. Holtby closely examines the final stretch of New Mexico’s tortuous road to statehood, beginning in the 1890s. His deeply researched narrative juxtaposes events in Washington, D.C., and in the territory to present the repeated collisions between New Mexicans seeking to control their destiny and politicians opposing them, including Republican U.S. senators Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana and Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island. Holtby places the quest for statehood in national perspective while examining the territory’s political, economic, and social development. He shows how a few powerful men brewed a concoction of racism, cronyism, corruption, and partisan politics that poisoned New Mexicans’ efforts to join the Union. Drawing on extensive Spanish-language and archival sources, the author also explores the consequences that the drive to become a state had for New Mexico’s Euro-American, Nuevomexicano, American Indian, African American, and Asian communities. Holtby offers a compelling story that shows why and how home rule mattered—then and now—for New Mexicans and for all Americans.

Santa Fe

Santa Fe
Author: Elizabeth West
Publisher: Sunstone Press
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2012
Genre: Santa Fe (N.M.)
ISBN: 0865348766

This question-and-answer book contains 400 reminders of what is known and what is sometimes forgotten or misunderstood about a city that was founded more than 400 years ago. Not a traditional history book, this group of questions is presented in an apparently random order, and the answers occasionally meander off topic, as if part of a casual conversation.

Women of Empire

Women of Empire
Author: Verity McInnis
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2017-11-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0806159375

In his Rules for Wife Behavior, Colonel Joseph Whistler summed up his expectations for his new bride: “You will remember you are not in command of anything except the cook.” Although their roles were circumscribed, the wives of army officers stationed in British India and the U.S. West commanded considerable influence, as Verity McInnis reveals in this comparative study of two female populations in two global locations. Women of Empire adds a previously unexplored dimension to our understanding of the connections between gender and imperialism in the nineteenth century. McInnis examines the intersections of class, race, and gender to reveal social spaces where female identity and power were both contested and constructed. Officers’ wives often possessed the authority to direct and maintain the social, cultural, and political ambitions of empire. By transferring and adapting white middle-class cultural values and customs to military installations, they created a new social reality—one that restructured traditional boundaries. In both the British and American territorial holdings, McInnis shows, military wives held pivotal roles, creating and controlling the processes that upheld national aims. In so doing, these women feminized formal and informal military practices in ways that strengthened their own status and identities. Despite the differences between rigid British social practices and their less formal American counterparts, military women in India and the U.S. West followed similar trajectories as they designed and maintained their imperial identity. Redefining the officer’s wife as a power holder and an active contributor to national prestige, Women of Empire opens a new, nuanced perspective on the colonial experience—and on the complex nexus of gender, race, and imperial practice.

Colorado Women

Colorado Women
Author: Gail M. Beaton
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Total Pages: 692
Release: 2012-11-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1457173824

Colorado Women is the first full-length chronicle of the lives, roles, and contributions of women in Colorado from prehistory through the modern day. A national leader in women's rights, Colorado was one of the first states to approve suffrage and the first to elect a woman to its legislature. Nevertheless, only a small fraction of the literature on Colorado history is devoted to women and, of those, most focus on well-known individuals. The experiences of Colorado women differed greatly across economic, ethnic, and racial backgrounds. Marital status, religious affiliation, and sexual orientation colored their worlds and others' perceptions and expectations of them. Each chapter addresses the everyday lives of women in a certain period, placing them in historical context, and is followed by vignettes on women's organizations and notable individuals of the time. Native American, Hispanic, African American, Asian and Anglo women's stories hail from across the state--from the Eastern Plains to the Front Range to the Western Slope--and in their telling a more complete history of Colorado emerges. Colorado Women makes a significant contribution to the discussion of women's presence in Colorado that will be of interest to historians, students, and the general reader interested in Colorado, women's and western history.

Western Lives

Western Lives
Author: Richard W. Etulain
Publisher: UNM Press
Total Pages: 468
Release: 2004
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780826334725

The life stories of many individuals are woven together to tell the history of the American West from the earliest days of westward expansion to the twentieth century.

Three Roads to Magdalena

Three Roads to Magdalena
Author: David Wallace Adams
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Total Pages: 456
Release: 2016-06-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0700622543

“Someday,” Candelaria Garcia said to the author, “you will get all the stories.” It was a tall order, in Magdalena, New Mexico, a once booming frontier town where Navajo, Anglo, and Hispanic people have lived in shifting, sometimes separate, sometimes overlapping worlds for well over a hundred years. But these were the stories, and this was the world, that David Wallace Adams set out to map, in a work that would capture the intimate, complex history of growing up in a Southwest borderland. At the intersection of memory, myth, and history, his book asks what it was like to be a child in a land of ethnic and cultural boundaries. The answer, as close to “all the stories” as one might hope to get, captures the diverse, ever-changing experience of a Southwest community defined by cultural borders—--and the nature and role of children in defending and crossing those borders. In this book, we listen to the voices of elders who knew Magdalena nearly a century ago, and the voices of a younger generation who negotiated the community’s shifting boundaries. Their stories take us to sheep and cattle ranches, Navajo ceremonies, Hispanic fiestas, mining camps, First Communion classes, ranch house dances, Indian boarding school drill fields, high school social activities, and children’s rodeos. Here we learn how class, religion, language, and race influenced the creation of distinct identities and ethnic boundaries, but also provided opportunities for cross-cultural interactions and intimacies. And we see the critical importance of education, in both reinforcing differences and opening a shared space for those differences to be experienced and bridged. In this, Adams’s work offers a close-up view of the transformation of one multicultural community, but also of the transformation of childhood itself over the course of the twentieth century. A unique blend of oral, social, and childhood history, Three Roads to Magdalena is a rare living document of conflict and accommodation across ethnic boundaries in our ever-evolving multicultural society. Published in Cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University