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.

This book includes some 200 complete entries from the award-winning Dictionary of Women Artists, as well as a selection of introductory essays from the main volume.

Contains letters, journals, and reminiscences showing the impact of the frontier on women's lives and the role of women in the West.

In 1935, the United States Congress began employing large numbers of American artists through the Works Progress Administration--fiction writers, photographers, poster artists, dramatists, painters, sculptors, muralists, wood carvers, composers and choreographers, as well as journalists, historians and researchers. Secretary of Commerce and supervisor of the WPA Harry Hopkins hailed it a "renascence of the arts, if we can call it a rebirth when it has no precedent in our history." Women were eminently involved, creating a wide variety of art and craft, interweaving their own stories with those of other women whose lives might not otherwise have received attention. This book surveys the thousands of women artists who worked for the U.S. government, the historical and social worlds they described and the collaborative depiction of womanhood they created at a pivotal moment in American history.

Biographers describe the struggles and contributions of female scholars researching Indians of the American West in the early 1900s.

WOMAN AS A PIONEER Every battle has its unnamed heroes. The common soldier enters the stormed fortress and, falling in the breach which his valor has made, sleeps in a nameless grave. The subaltern whose surname is scarcely heard beyond the roll-call on parade, bears the colors of his company where the fight is hottest. And the corporal who heads his file in the final charge, is forgotten in the "earthquake shout" of the victory which he has helped to win. The victory may be due as much, or more, to the patriot courage of him who is content to do his duty in the rank and file, as to the dashing colonel who heads the regiment, or even to the general who plans the campaign: and yet unobserved, unknown, and unrewarded the former passes into oblivion while the leader's name is on every tongue, and perhaps goes down in history as that of one who deserved well of his country.

Collects the letters of the wife of Civil War major general Benjamin H. Grierson, describing daily life and hardships at frontier posts like Fort Riley, Fort Concho, Fort Davis, and Fort Grant

Profound changes were taking place in American society during the period of the 1960s and 1970s when legislation for the National Foundation for the Arts and the Humanities was enacted and the agencies went into operation. It was a period of soul-searching by the American public when the cherished prejudices and civil inequities of the past decades were wiped out and old wounds began to heal; at the same time, however, the Vietnam War was creating new fissures and antagonisms. Into this newly healing, newly questioning society, congressional action thrust the National Council on the Arts in 1964, and the National Endowment for the Arts in 1965. Their mission was to encourage and support the arts, and the men and women charged with this responsibility went about their work with the zeal and enthusiasm of religious converts. The idea of even a minute amount of federal financial assistance to the country's chronically beleaguered and often impoverished artists and arts organi zations seemed strange to a segment of the population that had existed in forgot ten independence from government intervention. Many of the nation's artists and arts leaders were wary, partly because of the uncertainties and constraints of previous patterns of governmental support.

The western frontier was officially pronounced closed in 1890, the year Harvey Fergusson was born in Albuquerque. He spent his life reopening it in a series of novels stretching from the classic Wolf Song to the belatedly acclaimed Grant of Kingdom and The Conquest of Don Pedro. In this first full biography and critical study, Robert F. Gish sees Fergusson as a modern frontiersman in love with the outdoors, women, and writing. The scion of New Mexico family prominent in business and politics, Fergusson moved restlessly from one new frontier to another, always seeking to recreate in his life and work the adventure and freedom enjoyed by his ancestors. After a strenuous open-air life by the Rio Grande he went east to raise a ruckus us a journalist and then to Hollywood as a screenwriter, all the while testing his sexual mettle. Finally freelance writing was the only frontier available to one of his imaginative energy. Fergusson?s early novel Wolf Song is still considered one of the best ever written about the mountain man. Gish shows the writer embracing the gloriously masculine and atavistic role of a ?lone rider? even as he scorned ?the worship of the primitive.? Fergusson struck up a friendship with H. L. Mencken and Theodore Dreiser (who influenced his literary style) and played a part in the development of Taos and Santa Fe as meccas for artists and writers. Based on extensive research, including Fergusson?s diaries and correspondence, Frontier?s End goes a long way toward reconciling the regional with the mainstream in American literature in the person of a serious novelist whose importance is finally being recognized.

This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2013. Monstrous Spaces: The Other Frontier, is a collection of essays presented during the First Global Conference of Monstrous Geography held at Manchester College, Oxford. When examining monstrous geographies, we encounter an Other frontier, a space that runs counter to the socially constructed space of culture that at the same time includes, overlaps, and co-occupies the cultural landscape.