More than Petticoats: Remarkable Montana Women, 2nd Edition celebrates the women who shaped the Treasure State. Short, illuminating biographies and archival photographs and paintings tell the stories of women from across the state who served as teachers, writers, entrepreneurs, and artists.

Moving portraits of eighteen independent women who helped make Colorado what it is today Remarkable Colorado Women profiles the lives of eighteen of the state’s most important historical figures—women from across Colorado, from many different backgrounds and from various walks of life. Read about Julia Archibald Holmes who became the first white woman to ascend to the summit of Pike’s Peak in 1858; Frances Wisebart Jacobs, the compassionate housewife who devoted her life to supporting Colorado charities in the late nineteenth century; and Mary Elitch Long, founder of the famed pleasure grounds known as Elitch Gardens. The third edition features new biographies of frontier teacher Mabel Barbee Lee, who left a lasting impact on the students of Cripple Creek; Mo-Chi, the first female warrior of the Cheyenne; and Mildred Montague Genevieve "Tweet" Kimball who became the Cattle Queen of Colorado's Front Range in the twentieth century. With enduring strength and compassion, these remarkable women broke through social, cultural, or political barriers to make contributions to society that still have an impact today.

Wild West Women features the true stories of the pioneering wives, mothers, daughters, teachers, writers, entrepreneurs, and artists who shaped the frontier and helped change the face of American history. These fifty stories cover the Western experience from Kansas City to Sacramento and the Yukon to the Texas Gulf.

More than Petticoats: Remarkable Illinois Women chronicles the stories of twelve Illinois women who lived in the era of True Womanhood and dedicated themselves to charity toward family and strangers. Unwittingly, these women forged a legacy that expanded well beyond Illinois' borders. From First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln's devotion to country to ballroom dancer Irene Castle's fight for animal rights, the women of Illinois acted with progressive vision. Meet the wife of the Mormon Prophet, Emma Hale Smith, who challenged ideology; Nobel Peace Prize winner Jane Addams, the model of usefulness;Myra Bradwell, considered America's first woman lawyer; and African American entrepreneur Annie Minerva Malone, who built a beauty empire. Born before the dawn of the twentieth century, the women herein paved the way for future generations. Author Lyndee Jobe Henderson presents absorbing biographies filled with rarely published details.

Illustrated with archival photographs, and encompassing twenty states—from Florida to Washington, Alaska to Maine—and many different tribes, this book brings together the lesser known stories of the Native American women who shaped their cultures and changed the course of American history.

More than Petticoats: Remarkable Washington Women, 2nd Edition celebrates the women who shaped the Evergreen State. Short, illuminating biographies and archival photographs and paintings tell the stories of women from across the state who served as teachers, writers, entrepreneurs, and artists.

This is the story of the Rankins, a family that embodied the risk and ambition that transformed America. John Rankin arrived in the West chasing the adventure of gold mining but soon turned to ranching and building in the new town of Missoula. There he met Olive Pickering, who had left New Hampshire in 1878 to become a teacher and seek a husband on the American frontier. John and Olive's children continued to demonstrate their parent's ambition and nerve. Their son became one of the biggest landowners in the country, one of the first personal injury lawyers, and a crusader against railroads and mining. Jeannette became the first woman in a national legislature, voted against two world wars and led marches protesting the Vietnam War. As a dean, Harriet helped develop the modern co-educational university. Edna traveled the world advocating for birth control. The Rankins faced both national adulation and condemnation for the choices they made. Their family story concerns independence and education, activism, the boundaries created by gender, religious choices, and the changing meaning of the West.

A delightfully wicked look at the badly behaved characters who shaped the history of Montana through their deeds and misdeeds.

What does it mean to live in the West today? Do people tend to identify with states, with regions, or with the larger West? This book examines the development of regional identity in the American West, demonstrating that it is a regionally diverse entity made up of many different wests--Great Plains, Southwest, Rocky Mountains, and more--in which American regionalism finds its fullest expression. These fourteen original essays tell how a sense of place emerged among residents of various regions and how a sense of those places was developed by people outside of them. Wrobel and Steiner first offer a compelling overview of the West's regional nature; then thirteen other rising or renowned scholars-from history, American Studies, geography, and literature-tell how regional consciousness formed among inhabitants of particular regions. All of the essays address the larger issue of the centrality of place in determining social and cultural forms and individual and collective identities. Some focus on race and culture as the primary influences on regional consciousness while others emphasize environmental and economic factors or the influence of literature. Some even examine western regionalism in areas that lie beyond the West as it has traditionally been conceived. Each of the contributors believes that where a people live helps determine what they are, and they write not only about the many wests within the larger West, but also about the constant state of flux in which regionalism exists. Many books speak of the West as a place, but few others deal with the West's different places. Many Wests presents a vision of the West that reflects both the common heritage and unique character of each major subregion, building on the revisionist impulse of the last decade to help redirect New Western History toward an appreciation of regional diversity and integrate scholarship in the regional subfields. It is a book for everyone who lives in, studies, or loves the West, for it confirms that it is home to very different peoples, economies, histories-and regions.

Winner of the Western Writers of America “SPUR Award” and the Western Association of Women Historians “Gita Chaudhuri Prize”! Born a slave in eastern Tennessee, Sarah Blair Bickford (1852–1931) made her way while still a teenager to Montana Territory, where she settled in the mining boomtown of Virginia City. Race and the Wild West is the first full-length biography of this remarkable woman, whose life story affords new insight into race and belonging in the American West around the turn of the twentieth century. For many years, Sarah Bickford’s known biography fit into a single paragraph. By examining her life in all its complexity, Arata fills in what were long believed to be unrecoverable “silent spaces” in her story. Before establishing herself as a successful business owner, we learn, she was twice married, both times to white men. Her first husband, an Irish immigrant, physically abused her until she divorced him in 1881. Their three children all died before the age of ten. In 1883, she married Stephen Bickford and gave birth to four more children. Upon his death, she inherited his shares of the Virginia City Water Company, acquiring sole ownership in 1917. For the final decade of her life, Bickford actively preserved and promoted a historic Virginia City building best known as the site of the brutal lynching in 1864 of five men. Her conspicuous role in developing an early form of heritage tourism challenges long-standing narratives that place white men at the center of the “Wild West” myth and its promotion. Bickford’s story offers a window into the dynamics of race in the rural West. Although her experiences defy easy categorization, what is clear is that her navigation of social norms and racial barriers did not hinge on exceptionalism or tokenism. Instead, she built a life that deserves to be understood on its own terms. Through exhaustive research and nuanced analysis, Laura J. Arata advances our understanding of a woman whose life embodied the contradictory intersections of hope and disappointment that characterized life in the early-twentieth-century American West for brave pioneers of many races.