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In 1894, when A. S. Mercer published this angry eyewitness account of the cattlemen’s invasion of Wyoming, the book was so thoroughly and ruthlessly suppressed that few copies of that edition remain today. Although historians have since questioned some of Mercer’s conclusions about the Johnson County range war, they have never controverted the facts of the cattlemen-homesteader struggle as he grimly reported them. With the intention of "executing" alleged rustlers and terrorizing the homesteaders, a band of fifty-two cattlemen and hired gunmen invaded Johnson Country, Wyoming, in April 1892. After besieging and killing "the bravest man in Johnson County," the raiders in turn found themselves besieged by the homesteaders and finally in the protective custody of the Untied States cavalry. Further legal and illegal maneuvering permitted the invaders to go unpunished, but the cattlemen never again attempted to retain their hold over the range with organized mob violence. In this new edition of The Banditti of the Plains the original text has been followed with the utmost fidelity, even including the illustrations. An informed and interesting foreword by William H. Kittrell has been added to the book.
Exploring the little-known history behind the legal doctrine of prior appropriation--"first in time is first in right"--used to apportion water resources in the western United States, this book focuses on the important case of Wyoming v. Colorado (1922). U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Willis Van Devanter, a former Chief Justice of Wyoming, ruled in that state's favor, finding that prior appropriation applied across state lines--a controversial opinion influenced by cronyism. The dicta in the case, that the U.S. Government has no interest in state water allocation law, drove the balkanization of interstate water systems and resulted in the Colorado River Interstate Compact between Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California. The exhaustive research that has gone into this book has uncovered the secret that Associate Justice Van Devanter had waited eleven years to publish his opinion in this important, but politically self-serving, case, at last finding a moment when his senior colleagues were sufficiently absent or incapacitated to either concur or dissent. Without the knowledge of his "brethren," save his "loyal friend" Taft, and without recusal, Van Devanter unilaterally delivered his sole opinion to the Clerk for publication on the last day of the Supreme Court's October 1921 Term.
National Book Award Finalist: The “impressive” conclusion to the “magisterial trilogy on the mythology of violence in American history” (Film Quarterly). “The myth of the Western frontier—which assumes that whites’ conquest of Native Americans and the taming of the wilderness were preordained means to a progressive, civilized society—is embedded in our national psyche. U.S. troops called Vietnam ‘Indian country.’ President John Kennedy invoked ‘New Frontier’ symbolism to seek support for counterinsurgency abroad. In an absorbing, valuable, scholarly study, [the author] traces the pervasiveness of frontier mythology in American consciousness from 1890. . . . Dime novels and detective stories adapted the myth to portray gallant heroes repressing strikers, immigrants and dissidents. Completing a trilogy begun with Regeneration Through Violence and The Fatal Environment, Slotkin unmasks frontier mythmaking in novels and Hollywood movies. The myth’s emphasis on use of force over social solutions has had a destructive impact, he shows.” —Publishers Weekly “Stirring . . . Breaks new ground in its careful explication of the continuing dynamic between politics and myth, myth and popular culture.” —The New York Times “A subtle and wide-ranging examination how America’s fascination with the frontier has affected its culture and politics. . . . Intellectual history at its most stimulating—teeming with insights into American violence, politics, class, and race.” —Kirkus Reviews
How is historical knowledge produced? And how do silence and forgetting figure in the knowledge we call history? Taking us through time and across the globe, David William Cohen's exploration of these questions exposes the circumstantial nature of history. His investigation uncovers the conventions and paradigms that govern historical knowledge and historical texts and reveals the economic, social, and political forces at play in the production of history. Drawing from a wide range of examples, including African legal proceedings, German and American museum exhibits, Native American commemorations, public and academic debates, and scholarly research, David William Cohen explores the "walls and passageways" between academic and non-academic productions of history.
Literary histories, of course, do not have a reason for being unless there exists the literature itself. This volume, perhaps more than others of its kind, is an expression of appreciation for the talented and dedicated literary artists who ignored the odds, avoided temptations to write for popularity or prestige, and chose to write honestly about the American West, believing that experiences long knowns to be of historical importance are also experiences that need and deserve a literature of importance.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. A study of the last 100 years of American history.
The fascinating story of the most notorious detective agency in US history. Between 1865 and 1937, Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency was at the center of countless conflicts between capital and labor, bandits and railroads, and strikers and state power. Some believed that the detectives were protecting society from dangerous criminal conspiracies; others thought that armed Pinkertons were capital’s tool to crush worker dissent. Yet the image of the Pinkerton detective also inspired romantic and sensationalist novels, reflected shifting ideals of Victorian manhood, and embodied a particular kind of rough frontier justice. Inventing the Pinkertons examines the evolution of the agency as a pivotal institution in the cultural history of American monopoly capitalism. Historian S. Paul O’Hara intertwines political, social, and cultural history to reveal how Scottish-born founder Allan Pinkerton insinuated his way to power and influence as a purveyor of valuable (and often wildly wrong) intelligence in the Union cause. During Reconstruction, Pinkerton turned his agents into icons of law and order in the Wild West. Finally, he transformed his firm into a for-rent private army in the war of industry against labor. Having begun life as peddlers of information and guardians of mail bags, the Pinkertons became armed mercenaries, protecting scabs and corporate property from angry strikers. O’Hara argues that American capitalists used the Pinkertons to enforce new structures of economic and political order. Yet the infamy of the Pinkerton agent also gave critics and working communities a villain against which to frame their resistance to the new industrial order. Ultimately, Inventing the Pinkertons is a gripping look at how the histories of American capitalism, industrial folklore, and the nation-state converged.