As the commander of the U.S. garrison at Fort Sumter in the fateful early hours of April 12, 1861, Robert Anderson (1805-71) played a critical role in the unfolding of the Civil War. Although his leadership and his courage under fire catapulted him into national recognition, the attack on Fort Sumter was just one chapter in Anderson's story. That ......
Oklahoma's Ghost Towns, Vanishing Towns, and Towns Persisting against the Odds
The history of Oklahoma runs through the thousands of towns that sprang up in the wake of statehood and even before then--readable in the traces of bygone days, if you know what to look for. In Here Today, Jeffrey B. Schmidt conducts readers, armchair travelers and adventurers alike, through places that tell Oklahoma's story: towns all but ......
American and British Cavalry Responses to a New Technology, 1903-1939
At its dawn in the early twentieth century, the new technology of aviation posed a crucial question to American and British cavalry: what do we do with the airplane? Lacking the hindsight of historical perspective, cavalry planners based their decisions on incomplete information. Harnessing the Airplane compares how the American and British armies ......
Col. George Wright's campaign against the Yakima, Spokane, Coeur d'Alene, Palouse, and other Indian peoples of eastern Washington Territory was intended to punish them for a recent attack on another U.S. Army force. Wright had once appeared to respect the Indians of the Upper Columbia Plateau, but in 1858 he led a brief war noted for its violence, ......
Natural Philosophy, Poetry, and Gender in Seventeenth-Century England
In Handmaid to Divinity, Desiree Hellegers establishes seventeenth-century poetry as a critical resource for understanding the debates about natural philosophy, astronomy, and medicine during the Scientific Revolution. Hellegers provides important insights into seventeenth-century responses to the emergent discourses of western science and into ......
Susan Ford Wiltshire traces the evolution of the doctrine of individual rights from antiquity through the eighteenth century. The common thread through that long story is the theory of natural law. Growing out of Greek political thought, especially that of Aristotle, natural law became a major tenet of Stoic philosophy during the Hellenistic age ......
There was a time when countless young people in the Midwest, South, and Southwest went to dances and stage shows to hear a territory band play. Territory bands traveled from town to town, performing jazz and swing music, and Tulsa-based musician Ernie Fields (1904-97) led one of the best. In Going Back to T-Town, Ernie's daughter, Carmen Fields, ......
There was a time when countless young people in the Midwest, South, and Southwest went to dances and stage shows to hear a territory band play. Territory bands traveled from town to town, performing jazz and swing music, and Tulsa-based musician Ernie Fields (1904-97) led one of the best. In Going Back to T-Town, Ernie's daughter, Carmen Fields, ......
General George Crook was one of the most prominent soldiers in the frontier West. General William T. Sherman called him the greatest Indian fighter and manager the army ever had. And yet, on hearing of Crook's death, the Sioux chief Red Cloud lamented, "He, at least, never lied to us." As a young officer in the Pacific Northwest, Crook emphasized ......
