Indians in the Sierra Gorda and Chiquitos Missions
The Spanish crown wanted native peoples in its American territories to be evangelized and, to that end, facilitated the establishment of missions by various Catholic orders. Focusing on the Franciscan missions of the Sierra Gorda in Northern New Spain (Mexico) and the Jesuit missions of Chiquitos in what is now Bolivia, Frontiers of Evangelization ......
When Horace Greeley published his famous imperative, "Go West, young man, and grow up with the country," the frontier was already synonymous with a distinctive type of idealized American masculinity. But Greeley's exhortation also captured popular sentiment surrounding changing ideas of American boyhood; for many educators, politicians, and ......
Surveying the United States-Mexico Boundary along the Rio Grande, 1852 and 1853
The 1848 treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican-American War described a boundary between the two countries that was to be ascertained by a joint boundary commission effort. The section of the boundary along the Rio Grande from Presidio to the mouth of the Pecos River was arguably the most challenging, and it was surveyed by two ......
The Ecuadorian Andes in the Late Twentieth Century
Drawing on extensive research in her native Ecuador, Amalia Pallares examines the South American Indian movement in the Ecuadorian Andes and explains its shift from class politics to racial politics in the late twentieth century. Pallares uses an interdisciplinary approach to explore the reasons why indigenous Ecuadorians have bypassed their ......
From the first contact with Europeans to the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812, the Wendat peoples have been an intrinsic part of North American history. Although the story of these peoples-also known as Wyandot or Wyandotte-has been woven into the narratives of European-Native encounters, colonialism, and ......
One January day in 1923, a young boy came across the dead body of a twenty-year-old woman on a San Diego beach. When the police arrived on the scene, they found the woman's calling card, which read simply, "I am Fritzie Mann." Yet Fritzie's identity, as revealed in this compelling history, was anything but simple, and her death-eventually ruled a ......
Elmer Thomas (1876-1965) represented the people of Oklahoma in the state's first legislature and in Congress. This memoir, written shortly after he left the U.S. Senate in 1951 but never before published, chronicles his long career and offers a wealth of information on people and events that helped shape the development of the state and the course ......
During 1873 a jury trial took place in San Diego to decide whether Pio Pico, the last Mexican governor of California, had been the victim of a fraud by his brother-in-law, John Forster.Pico claimed title to the huge Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores land grant in southern California, located approximately 208 square miles north of San Diego on ......
In 1872, a young graduate of Yale University named Thomas Russell unearthed the bones of an 83,000,000-year-old dinosaur in western Kansas. The rare fossil, an avian dinosaur with teeth and flightless wings, proved that birds evolved from reptiles. More than a century later, Russell's great-granddaughter set out to retrace her ancestor's forgotten ......