3 comments about Oklahoma I Had Never Seen Before: Alternative Views of Oklahoma History.

1. This was a supplemental text to a section of Oklahoma history (not the one taught by Dr. Joyce though) I took last semester at college. The essays cover a wide variety of topics and are very thought provoking. One essay in particular debates the value of "celebrating" the Land Run of 1889. When I was in second grade, my elementary school commemorated the Land Run by holding a mock run and we were made to believe it was a fun, adventurous event. Now that I'm older and have learned more about the Run, I have great uncertainties about whether such a celebration should take place.

   Goble's "Southern Influence on Oklahoma" was also intriguing. Political scientists and historians aren't sure how to classify Oklahoma because this state is a combination of Midwestern, Western and Southern. In his essay, Goble lists the many political and religious elements from the South that have shaped Oklahoma over the years. All things considered, this would be a great buy for anyone interested in Oklahoma history.




2. As the reviewer below was, I too was a student in Dr. Joyce's Oklahoma History class and this book was a required text for the course. After reading the essays of the book which deal with a more radical history of Oklahoma that is definitely not as well known in this state such as the Abortion Rights Movement, Gay Rights, the stealing of land from the Native Americans by White Men during the land rush of the 1880's-1890's, etc,.

   Dr Joyce has brought together some very eye opening essays from various writers who have either first hand experience or from those who are subject matter experts.

   This is the type of book that should be required reading to all high school students in Oklahoma. Yes, the book is definitely controversial and would upset those with conservative, "right-wing" viewpoints, however with that said, it describes events in the state's history that everyone should be concerned about.

   I admire Dr. Joyce and the conviction that made him write this book, and I highly recommended it to all who want to know a viewpoint of Oklahoma, its people and history that is generally not well known.




3. This "cafeteria Catholic" reviewer was born in ChicagoLand during the reign of Mayor Richard Daley I (American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley - His Battle for Chicago and the Nation), and graduated public High School in Wisconsin, in 1972, having never heard of Shakespeare, or Hamlet, knowing how to milk the cows of America's Dairyland, but never having heard mention of Joseph McCarthy, former US Senator from WISCONSIN and those in his wake (No Sense of Decency: The Army-McCarthy Hearings: A Demagogue Falls and Television Takes Charge of American Politics.) I proceeded onward to a Lutheran College in Northfield The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, Minnesota, where they made us eat this Gawd-Awful lye-soaked fish and never spoke of the James Gang, but raged on and on about the evils of the Vatican, and the Glory of Luther's Ninety-Five Theses in mandatory twice weekly religion classes. They taught me about that Shakespeare guy and his man Hamlet.
   I spent a lot of time out in Wounded Knee, and one day turned South back on I-35 and wound up in Oklahoma.
   I throw in all that personal geographical history because it illustrates Professor Joyce's (and, in a countrywide view, Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present (P.S.)) point that "History" is often fabricated, or at least selectively reported, by the prevailing "Power Structure." (Read Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (Civilization of the American Indian)).
   At the University of Oklahoma, I was dutifully instructed on how to contain, and eventually stop, a cattle stampede. I was *not* taught about Angie Debo's watershed book on the travesties against the survivors of the Trail of Tears And Still the Waters Run nor the fact that the Founding FATHERS at OU refused to allow her to teach there.
   But they must be getting better - or at least getting a sense of humour. In his intro, Joyce writes "... in that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in Oklahoma history, I prefer to tell the story of Oklahoma's pre- (and history) from the point of view of ... the Run of `89 [for you non-Okies, this is when Oklahoma and Indian Territories were "opened up" to land-grabbing non-Indians, despite the fact that the grass was still growing and the Rivers still Flowing, and therefore the previously promised perpetual treaties had not expired. The "Boomers" were the "law-abiding" land thieves who waited for the "official" Boom of the start gun, the "Sooners" snuck in - well - sooner!] as seen by the Indians already here, ... the University of Oklahoma's much vaunted football success as seen by the bright students who feel compelled to leave the state for high-quality education and jobs, or as seen by the athlete who never gets a degree; and so on ..."
   Boy Howdy! This book was published in 1994 by THE University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, OKlahoma, the institution former University President George Lynn Cross urged to become "a university our football team can be proud of."
   
   One more thing about the introduction: Joyce asks "Couldn't our view of Oklahoma history use a little reshuffling of heros and villians? Why, for example, isn't Woody Guthrie in the Oklahoma Hall of Fame?"
   What? This reviewer was flabbergasted. So, while singing "This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land" to myself (and hoping that I wouldn't have to rouse all the folk on son Arlo's infamous Group W bench into action,) I did some updated internet research and am pleased to announce that Woody was rightfully but belatedly inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame. In 2006. (Angie Debo got in in 1950.)
   This book should be required reading in all Oklahoma curricula. And every state should have one like it. Bravo, Professor Joyce! (See also Alternative Oklahoma: Contrarian Views of the Sooner State.) The footnotes are great, except that it required massive use of my Amazon Prime membership and the construction of yet another "Some Assembly Required" bookcase. "The Southern Influence of Oklahoma" article validated every inchoate concept I had about the Sooner State - my internal guide has always been any state wherein the predominance of the populace drawls and avails itself of some form of "you all" as the Second Person Plural is "Southern," linguisticly, socially, and politicly - despite Frederick Jackson Turner and Okie protestations that they are a "mid-western" state just because they have an Oklahoma City suburb named Midwest City! And the article on the integration/lunch counter sit-ins is important for younger generations to understand. It's the Santayana thing: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
   /TundraVision, back in Minnesota's Land of Sky Blue Waters

No comments about Births, Deaths, and Marriages from El Paso Newspapers Through 1885 for Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Indian Territory.

1 comments about Final Destinations: A Travel Guide for Remarkable Cemeteries in Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana.

1. This is a good reference book. It lists some different cemeteries in the Texas,New Mexico,Oklahoma and Arkansas region. Some I already knew about but lot I did not. It has some historical information along with several pictures of the actual cemeteries. Would have liked more information listed about some of the cemeteries in Oklahoma. I'm sure a book on each state and its famous or interesting cemeteries could be written. I would recommend it for people doing genealogy in this region.

1 comments about Great Surveys of the American West (American Exploration and Travel Series).

1. A narrative that will appeal to those interested in western US history, natural science, geography, and exploration. Features excellent word portraits of the four survey groups, their leaders and key members, and descriptions of the conditions, methods, equipment and problems encountered. Includes a selection of contemporary photographs. The only negative: The several maps included are too small and require use of magnifying glass to read the fine print.

No comments about El Cerrito, New Mexico: Eight Generations in a Spanish Village.

1 comments about The 101 Ranch.

1. One of the more interesting books on the 101 Ranch. Originally written at a time when many of the people involved with the 101 were still alive to give valuable first hand information. For the most part a very easy read and a revealing look at the building of the vast 110,000 acre empire. There are some areas where the story bogs down with financial figures and crop output etc. However it is an amazing story that even today seems unreal. The fact that such names as Tom Mix, Buck Jones, Buffalo Bill and many more were associated with the 101 Wild West Show makes for very interesting reading in addition to the many facets surrounding life at the "White House" and the three Miller brothers themselves.

5 comments about All but the Waltz: A Memoir of Five Generations in the Life of a Montana Family.

1. While I enjoyed this book - it made me aware of just how fragmented my own family history is. How I wish my ancestors had written (or kept) diaries and especially wish they had written on the backs of all those old photos to know what states, counties, cities, villages they were in at the time of the photograph and what was the event or celebration, etc. Thanks for a good read, Ms. Blew



2. The book All but the Waltz is something you should read if you are interested in learning some things about Montana life from the 1880's on. You should only read this book if you have patience because it skips around a lot. The book is a lot of stories put together and don't really ever tie together. If that bothers you then you shouldn't read this book but if it doesn't then I think that you would like this book.



3. This fine book is a collection of essays that weave together remarkable accounts of four generations of the author's ancestors, from their settlement in central Montana in the 19th century to the latter years of the 20th. Pioneers of strong fortitude, originating in Pennsylvania, her father's family, the Hogelands, are among the first settlers along the headwaters of the Judith River.
   
   Good years, wise management, and a faith in the rewards of hard work serve them well - until the early death of the author's grandfather, followed by a decade of severe drought and then the Great Depression. While half of the homesteaders around them go broke and move on, her family continues to scrape a living from the land, the women on her mother's side of the family supplementing their incomes with teaching in remote one-room country schools.
   
   Reconstructing her family's story, the author brings vividly to life her father and mother, grandmothers, aunts, and her great-grandparents. She deciphers and transcribes the writings of her great-grandfather Abraham, interviews living relatives, and studies family photographs, many of which are included in her book. While the primary theme of the book is the survival of her family, she also has much to say about the role of women, focusing on the circumstances that invariably compromised their hopes and aspirations.
   
   There is her father's mother, Grammy, who does the work of a man while providing home and shelter for a live-in hired man without benefit of clergy. There's her mother's mother, who teaches school into her seventies to support her family and pay for her husband's care in a nursing home. There's the author's aunt Imogen, who remains unmarried and also teaches school. There's the author's mother, who marries a handsome cowboy and then struggles to make a place for herself in her husband's domineering family.
   
   Meanwhile, the men in her stories make equally interesting studies, especially her strong-willed father, Jack, who's a natural horseman and top hand; her mother's father, who cannot withstand the pressures of a lonely, hard life on the prairie; and a husband in later years, a wildcat oilman who is in complete denial that he is dying of pulmonary fibrosis.
   
   I highly recommend this well-written, absorbing and sometimes harrowing book that renders such a vivid picture of Montana homesteaders and the extremes of rural life. Thanks to the University of Oklahoma Press for keeping it in print. Readers of this book will also like Judy Blunt's memoir of growing up on a Montana ranch, "Breaking Clean."



4. Mary Clearman Blew pulls no punches in telling the story of the Hogeland and the Welch families and the tellingly tough times they faced in frontier Montana from the turn of the twentieth century onward. Drought, the Depression, inexperience, madness, bitterly cold winters and dust storms all conspire against these families, and yet they somehow managed to persevere, if not to prosper, at least to survive. Blew's finely wrought essays weave a tapestry that brings these people to life, from 1900 right up to the present day. Her own difficult marriages and fierce, almost ruthless, determination to succeed are not spared in the telling. This is one helluva good read, one which I will recommend highly. I have nothing but admiration for Mary Clearman Blew, both as a writer and as a woman.



5. To paraphrase what another reviewer has said: These people become your family. You love them as your own. Possibly you end up knowing them better, and more coherently than your own family from stories and memories you have pieced together. One senses an extraordinary effort on the part of the author to bring poetic exactness to, to reinvigorate the pain, the wind, the vast loneliness and silence, the indifference to ultimate human concerns of the Montana landscape.

1 comments about Lost Trails of the Cimarron.

1. 
   This book is a layman's history of nineteenth-century Cimarron country which encompasses southwestern Kansas, southeastern Colorado, and the neutral strip of Oklahoma and Texas Panhandle.
   
   Characters included outlaws, ruffians, buffalo hunters, cowboys, settlers, with eventual cattle ranches and resultant cattle drives. Mr. Chrisman chronicles all of the above and more. The book also includes maps and illustrations in the telling of these life stories. Mr. Chrisman was a journalist/newspaperman from Liberal, Kansas, being the author of other books such as Fifty Years on the Owlhoot Trail, Tales of the Western Heartland, and 1001 Questions About the American West, among others.
   
   As usual, The University of Oklahoma has done an impressive job with the wrap around cover painting and the general quality of this book. Being the satisfied ownere of hundreds of U of Ok books, this one included, both hardcover and trade it is not possible to overpraise the University and its press.
   
   Semper Fi.

5 comments about Ghost Towns of Texas.

1. This is the kind of book you want to take in your car always! You never know in Texas when your going to be near a ghost town! The book has a map and is indexed, with good information on the towns , how to get there and what you will find. A must by for anyone interested in TX history



2. Although, by their very nature, the Texas ghost towns featured in Baker's book have deteriorated even more - or disappeared altogether - since the publication of this book in 1986, it remains a classic reference on this material and is a "must have" for the ghost town hunter's library.

   The historical research is very in-depth and resurrects these "towns that time forgot" in the reader's mind. The book is lavishly illustrated with black and white photos taken by the author, as well as archival material. Highly recommended!




3. This is a great book on ghost towns (and near ghost towns) of Texas, and a model on how to present a guide to local history for travelers in a given state or area. This book describes 88 sites throughout Texas; each site has its own detailed map as well as precise directions on how to find the location. Also each townsite has at least one accompanying photograph, most more than one. Baker's text is lively and interesting and relates information about each town that is useful and informative. If you are interested in local history, especially of places that have seen better days, this book will give you much pleasure.



4. Fun read for anyone, however, I wanted the book for research and record, as my family owned the Pickering Lumber CO. and thousands of acres of timberland, which they eventually sold to the federal government to create the Sabine National Forest. I was interested in only one chapter, however, my interest was piqued and I read the entire book, informative, fun and interesting.
   Jill Ball



5. I like books like this. Lots of info if you like this sort of thing.

No comments about Cherokee Connections.