Dust and Determination After the Civil War, emancipated slaves who didn't want to pick cotton or operate an elevator headed west to find work and a new life. Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving drove two thousand longhorns across southern Texas blazing a trail to Bosque Redondo in New Mexico. In 1866, the new Goodnight-Loving Trail was crowded with cattle headed for a government market. By the 1870s, twenty-five percent of the over thirty-five thousand cowboys in the West were black. They were part of trail crews that drove more than twenty-seven million cattle on the Goodnight-Loving Trail, Western Trail, Chisholm Trail and Shawnee Trail. They were paid equally, and their skill and ability brought them earned respect and prestige. Author Nancy Williams recounts their lasting legacy.

The lure of cowgirls and cowboys has hooked the American imagination with the lure of freedom and adventure since the turn of the twentieth century. The cowboy and cowgirl played in the imagination and made rodeo into a symbolic representation of the Western United States. As a sport that is emblematic of all things “Western,” rodeo is a phenomenon that has since transcended into popular culture. Rodeo’s attraction has even spanned oceans and lives in the imaginations of many around the world. From the modest start of this fantastic sport in open fields to celebrate the end of a long cattle drive or to settle a friendly “who’s the best” bet between neighboring ranches, rodeo truly has grown into an edge-of-the-seat, money-drawing, and crowd-cheering favorite pastime. However, rodeo has diverse history that largely remains unaccounted for, unexamined, and silenced. In Gender, Whiteness and Power in Rodeo Tracey Owens Patton and Sally M. Schedlock visually explore how race, gender, and other issues of identity complicate the mythic historical narrative of the West. The authors examine the experiences of ethnic minorities, specifically Latinos, American Indians, and African Americans, and women who have continued to be marginalized in rodeo. Throughout the book, Patton and Schedlock questioned the binary divisions in rodeo that exists between women and men, and between ethnic minorities and Whites—divisions that have become naturalized in rodeo and in the mind of the general public. Using iconic visual images, along with the voices of the marginalized, Patton and Schedlock enter into the sometimes acrimonious debate of cowgirls and ethnic minorities in rodeo.

In this sweeping social history Dorceta E. Taylor examines the emergence and rise of the multifaceted U.S. conservation movement from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. She shows how race, class, and gender influenced every aspect of the movement, including the establishment of parks; campaigns to protect wild game, birds, and fish; forest conservation; outdoor recreation; and the movement's links to nineteenth-century ideologies. Initially led by white urban elites—whose early efforts discriminated against the lower class and were often tied up with slavery and the appropriation of Native lands—the movement benefited from contributions to policy making, knowledge about the environment, and activism by the poor and working class, people of color, women, and Native Americans. Far-ranging and nuanced, The Rise of the American Conservation Movement comprehensively documents the movement's competing motivations, conflicts, problematic practices, and achievements in new ways.

From the Wild West shows of the nineteenth century to the popular movie Westerns of the twentieth century, one view of an idealized and mythical West has been promulgated. Elyssa Ford suggests that we look beyond these cowboy clichés to complicate and enrich our picture of the American West. Rodeo as Refuge, Rodeo as Rebellion takes us from the beachfront rodeo arenas in Hawai‘i to the reservation rodeos held by Native Americans to reveal how people largely missing from that stereotypical picture make rodeo—and America—their own. Because rodeo has such a hold on our historical and cultural imagination, it becomes an ideal arena for establishing historical and cultural relevance. By claiming a place in that arena, groups rarely included in our understanding of the West—African Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Native Hawaiians, and the LGBT+ community—emphasize their involvement in the American past and proclaim their right to an American identity today. In doing so, these groups change what Americans know about their history and themselves. In her journey through these race- and group-specific rodeos, Ford finds that some see rodeo as a form of escape, a refuge from a hostile outside world. For others, rodeo has become a site of rebellion, a place to proclaim their difference and to connect to a different story of America. Still others, like Mexican Americans and the LGBT+ community, look inward, using rodeo to coalesce and celebrate their own identities. In Ford’s study of these historically marginalized groups, she also examines where women fit in race- and group-specific rodeos—and concludes that even within these groups, the traditional masculinity of the rodeo continues to be promoted. Female competitors may find refuge within alternate rodeos based on their race or sexuality, but they still face limitations due to their gender identity. Whether as refuge or rebellion, rodeos of difference emerge in this book as quintessentially American, remaking how we think about American history, culture, and identity.

Tells the stories of sixteen women who drove cattle up the trail from Texas during the last half of the nineteenth century.

Based on the latest research, this work provides a new look at the lives of African Americans in the Western United States, from the colonial era to the present. From colonial times to the present, this volume captures the experiences of the westward migration of African Americans. Based on the latest research, it offers a fresh look at the many ways African Americans influenced—and were influenced by—the development of the U.S. frontier. African Americans in the West covers the rise of the slave trade to its expansion into what was at the time the westernmost United States; from the post–Civil War migrations, including the Exodusters who fled the South for Kansas in 1879 to the mid–20th century civil rights movement, which saw many critical events take place in the West—from the organization of the Black Panthers in Oakland to the tragic Watts riots in Los Angeles.

Immigrants of African descent have come to Texas in waves—first as free blacks seeking economic and social opportunity under the Spanish and Mexican governments, then as enslaved people who came with settlers from the deep South. Then after the Civil War, a new wave of immigration began. In The African Texans, author Alwyn Barr considers each era, giving readers a clear sense of the challenges that faced African Texans and the social and cultural contributions that they have made in the Lone Star State. With wonderful photographs and first-hand accounts, this book expands readers’ understanding of African American history in Texas. Special features include · 59 illustrations · 12 biographical sketches · excerpts from newspaper articles · excerpts from court rulings The African Texans is part of a five-volume set from the Institute of Texan Cultures. The entire set, entitled Texans All, explores the social and cultural contributions made by five distinctive cultural groups that already existed in Texas prior to its statehood or that came to Texas in the early twentieth century: The Indian Texans, The Mexican Texans, The European Texans, The African Texans, and The Asian Texans.

“A groundbreaking work about race and the American landscape, and a deep meditation on nature…wise and beautiful.”—Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk A Foreword Reviews Best Book of the Year and Nautilus Silver Award Winner In me, there is the red of miry clay, the brown of spring floods, the gold of ripening tobacco. All of these hues are me; I am, in the deepest sense, colored. Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, South Carolina—a place “easy to pass by on the way somewhere else”—has been home to generations of Lanhams. In The Home Place, readers meet these extraordinary people, including Drew himself, who over the course of the 1970s falls in love with the natural world around him. As his passion takes flight, however, he begins to ask what it means to be “the rare bird, the oddity.” By turns angry, funny, elegiac, and heartbreaking, The Home Place is a meditation on nature and belonging by an ornithologist and professor of ecology, at once a deeply moving memoir and riveting exploration of the contradictions of black identity in the rural South—and in America today. “When you’re done with The Home Place, it won’t be done with you. Its wonders will linger like everything luminous.”—Star Tribune “A lyrical story about the power of the wild…synthesizes his own family history, geography, nature, and race into a compelling argument for conservation and resilience.”—National Geographic

This is a collection of stories set on the prairies and plains of middle America that stretch from Rio Grande northward into Canada.