Few historical chronicles are as informative and eloquent as the journal written by Prince Maximilian of Wied as a record of his journey into the North American interior in 1833, following the route Lewis and Clark had taken almost thirty years earlier. Maximilian's memorable descriptions of topography, Native peoples, and natural history were further brought to life through the now-familiar watercolors and sketches of Karl Bodmer, the young Swiss artist who accompanied him. The first of the three volumes of the North American Journals recounts the prince's journey from Europe to St. Louis—then the edge of the frontier. Volume II vividly narrates his experiences on the upper Missouri and offers an unparalleled view of the region and the peoples native to it. In these pages, we accompany Maximilian as he travels far up the Missouri River to Fort McKenzie, a trading post some 2,500 river miles from St. Louis near what is now Fort Benton, Montana. The handsome, oversize volume not only reproduces this historic document but also features every one of Maximilian's illustrations—more than 200 in all, including nearly 50 in color—from the original journal now housed at Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska. Maximilian recorded detailed observations of flora, fauna, geology, and climate. From his unique, scientifically trained perspective, he also undertook a serious field study of the cultures and languages of the central and northern Great Plains Indians he encountered. His journal contains important, firsthand descriptions of tribal social customs, religious rituals, material culture, and art, as well as an account of Native interactions with Euro-Americans engaged in the then-burgeoning fur trade. This book is published with the assistance of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains practiced an archival art—narrating war exploits in large-scale paintings executed on animal hide robes, shirts, tipi covers, and tipi liners. Essentially autobiographical, the paintings were worn and lived in by the men whose war exploits they portrayed, and were made to be “read” by the public at large. Executed in a pictorial narrative style and documenting actual events, these paintings blend visual art and history. Indigenous War Painting of the Plains is the first comprehensive look at this important North American art form, covering the full corpus of war paintings from fourteen tribes across the plains. Two impediments have previously made such a book impractical: photography alone falls short of rendering war paintings for the printed page, and only about half of the surviving works have reliable documentation on their cultural origins. Arni Brownstone surmounts these difficulties by producing precise electronic redrawings and by using well-documented paintings to inform poorly documented examples, bolstered by a careful examination of collection histories. Featuring some 300 photographs and electronic redrawings, the book focuses on 83 paintings organized into four chapters covering the paintings of tribes associated with a specific geographical sphere of artistic influence. Four appendixes feature paintings combined with “translations” by Indigenous collaborators who had intimate knowledge of the depicted events. Offering vivid access to the key works of war painting preserved in 37 museums throughout North America and Europe, Indigenous War Painting of the Plains illuminates distinctions between painting styles of different tribes, reveals how they influenced one another and changed over time, and conveys a deep understanding of how war painting developed in relation to profound social changes in Plains Indian cultures.

"This book examines how travel writers viewed the American West from the age of Manifest Destiny through the Great Depression. In the nineteenth century, the West was often presented as one developing frontier among many; in the twentieth century, travel writers often searched for American frontier distinctiveness"--Provided by publisher"--Provided by publisher.

Less than thirty years after Lewis and Clark completed their epic journey, Prince Maximilian of Wied—a German naturalist—and his entourage set off on their own daring expedition across North America. Accompanying the prince on this 1832–34 voyage was Swiss artist Karl Bodmer, whose drawings and watercolors—designed to illustrate Maximilian’s journals—now rank among the great treasures of nineteenth-century American art. This lavishly illustrated book juxtaposes Bodmer’s landscape images with modern-day photographs of the same views, allowing readers to see what has changed, and what seems unchanged, since the time Maximilian and Bodmer made their storied trip up the Missouri River. To discover how the areas Bodmer depicted have changed over time, photographer Robert M. Lindholm and anthropologist W. Raymond Wood made several trips over a period of years, from 1985 to 2002, to locate and record the same sites—all the way from Boston Harbor, where Maximilian and Bodmer began their journey, to Fort McKenzie, in modern-day western Montana. Pairing sixty-seven Bodmer works side by side with Lindholm’s photographs of the same sites, this volume uses the comparison of old and new images to reveal alterations through time—and the encroachment of a built environment—across diverse landscapes. Karl Bodmer’s America Revisited is at once a tribute to the artistic achievements of a premier landscape artist and a photographer who followed in his footsteps, and a valuable record of America’s ever-changing environment.

North America took its political shape in the crisis of the 1860s, marked by Canadian Confederation, the U.S. Civil War, the restoration of the Mexican Republic, and numerous wars and treaty regimes conducted between these states and indigenous peoples. This crisis wove together the three nation-states of modern North America from a patchwork of contested polities. Remaking North American Sovereignty brings together distinguished experts on the histories of Canada, indigenous peoples, Mexico, and the United States to re-evaluate this era of political transformation in light of the global turn in nineteenth-century historiography. They uncover the continental dimensions of the 1860s crisis that have been obscured by historical traditions that confine these conflicts within its national framework.

Few historical chronicles are as informative and eloquent as the journals written by Prince Maximilian of Wied as a record of his journey into the North American interior in 1833–34, following the route Lewis and Clark had taken almost thirty years earlier. In this third, and final, volume, Maximilian vividly narrates his extended stay at Fort Clark (near today's Bismarck, North Dakota) and his return journey eastward across America and on to his home in Germany. This handsome, oversize volume not only reproduces the prince's historic document but also features every one of his illustrations—nearly 100 in all, including several in color—from the original journal, along with other watercolors, now housed at Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska. This book is published with the assistance of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.

Journal of the Northern Plains.