This study of Pope County, Arkansas in the 1850s represents an analysis of the pioneer decade of an upper South region largely settled by yeoman farmers; the presence of slaves constituting approximately ten percent of the population also enables one to view that peculiar institution in a non-plantation environment. As we celebrate the century mark of the 1890 census, which inspired Frederick Jackson Turner's study of the influence of the frontier on the American experience, historians turn anew to examine the influence of that frontier. Today insights provided by computer assisted quantification, "thick description" of social anthropologists and the concept of the New Social History shed additional light on that quest for meaning. This study is a first-rate example of the New Social History in practice. Contents: The Beginnings; Communications and Transportation; Agriculture; Table Fare; Artisans, Business and Professional Activities; Disorder and Crimes; Morbidi Mortality; Marriage; We are Family; Education; Religion; Slavery; and Moving In-Moving Out.

"Hardscrabble: Frontier Life in Pushmataha County" is the story of Pushmataha County, Oklahoma. Life there has always been rough-and-tumble, from the earliest days forward. This book presents the colorful characters who called it home, and the beautiful rivers and mountains that define it. The book is divided into Part I, which tells the story from the days of the dinosaurs through today, and Part II, is an A-Z list of people, places and events. The histories of each town and settlement are included. Its Indian Territory days are not neglected: the blazing of the Fort Smith-to-Fort Towson Military Road, life on the frontier in the Confederate States of America, the coming of the St. Louis and San Francisco Railroad, the logging industry and logging trams, the Locke-Jones War, and much more are revealed in these pages. Many maps, photographs, and other illustrations liven the story and make it come to life.

In 1840, prosperous farming families left North and South Carolina to trek in covered wagons to the unsettled Arkansas River Valley. Absorbing to read and rich with colorful detail, this is a story of the peopling of the western frontier and the ways in which hardship, religion, and a shared past bound settlers together into a lasting community.

Winner, San Antonio Conservation Society Citation, 2005Runner-up, Carr P. Collins Award, Best Book of Nonfiction, Texas Institute of Letters, 2005 Until the U.S. Army claimed 300-plus square miles of hardscrabble land to build Fort Hood in 1942, small communities like Antelope, Pidcoke, Stampede, and Okay scratched out a living by growing cotton and ranching goats on the less fertile edges of the Texas Hill Country. While a few farmers took jobs with construction crews at Fort Hood to remain in the area, almost the entire population--and with it, an entire segment of rural culture--disappeared into the rest of the state. In Harder than Hardscrabble, oral historian Thad Sitton collects the colorful and frequently touching stories of the pre-Fort Hood residents to give a firsthand view of Texas farming life before World War II. Accessible to the general reader and historian alike, the stories recount in vivid detail the hardships and satisfactions of daily life in the Texas countryside. They describe agricultural practices and livestock handling as well as life beyond work: traveling peddlers, visits to towns, country schools, medical practices, and fox hunting. The anecdotes capture a fast-disappearing rural society--a world very different from today's urban Texas.

Far in the future, the merchant ships of the Space Trading Commission fleet travel the space lanes each on journeys of trade and exploration. As the Phoenix falls through a crack in the sky after completing one of its many n-space jumps, First Officer Jana Maines makes an astounding discovery. Jana detects a derelicta ghost ship from the forgotten past. Believing this to be an opportunity to advance her career and financially help her parents, Jana attempts to convince her captain that they should investigate, but he insists that they remain on course. Just as they are about to depart, however, a signal is received from the shipand Janas adventures begin! A routine resupply run to a lonely desert world becomes complicated when more than one man expresses greater interest in her than her ships cargo. While on a mission from an ocean world, she desperately tries to find a way to save millions of fish eggs critical to the survival of an entire planet. Her encounters include an astonishingly ancient woman, a wealthy mystic, and a string of crusty, opinionated captains. In a series of science fiction stories that span the far reaches of the universe, a courageous captain-in-training faces challenges that test her abilities to the limit as she strives to complete her missions.

This Violent Empire traces the origins of American violence, racism, and paranoia to the founding moments of the new nation and the initial instability of Americans' national sense of self. Fusing cultural and political analyses to create a new form of political history, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg explores the ways the founding generation, lacking a common history, governmental infrastructures, and shared culture, solidified their national sense of self by imagining a series of "Others" (African Americans, Native Americans, women, the propertyless) whose differences from European American male founders overshadowed the differences that divided those founders. These "Others," dangerous and polluting, had to be excluded from the European American body politic. Feared, but also desired, they refused to be marginalized, incurring increasingly enraged enactments of their political and social exclusion that shaped our long history of racism, xenophobia, and sexism. Close readings of political rhetoric during the Constitutional debates reveal the genesis of this long history.

Named Outstanding Academic Title by CHOICE Winnter of the Wesley-Logan Prize of the American Historical Association Winner of the Byron Caldwell Smith Book Prize Winner of the 2014 Albert J. Raboteau Book Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions Jacob S. Dorman offers new insights into the rise of Black Israelite religions in America, faiths ranging from Judaism to Islam to Rastafarianism all of which believe that the ancient Hebrew Israelites were Black and that contemporary African Americans are their descendants. Dorman traces the influence of Israelite practices and philosophies in the Holiness Christianity movement of the 1890s and the emergence of the Pentecostal movement in 1906. An examination of Black interactions with white Jews under slavery shows that the original impetus for Christian Israelite movements was not a desire to practice Judaism but rather a studied attempt to recreate the early Christian church, following the strictures of the Hebrew Scriptures. A second wave of Black Israelite synagogues arose during the Great Migration of African Americans and West Indians to cities in the North. One of the most fascinating of the Black Israelite pioneers was Arnold Josiah Ford, a Barbadian musician who moved to Harlem, joined Marcus Garvey's Black Nationalist movement, started his own synagogue, and led African Americans to resettle in Ethiopia in 1930. The effort failed, but the Black Israelite theology had captured the imagination of settlers who returned to Jamaica and transmitted it to Leonard Howell, one of the founders of Rastafarianism and himself a member of Harlem's religious subculture. After Ford's resettlement effort, the Black Israelite movement was carried forward in the U.S. by several Harlem rabbis, including Wentworth Arthur Matthew, another West Indian, who creatively combined elements of Judaism, Pentecostalism, Freemasonry, the British Anglo-Israelite movement, Afro-Caribbean faiths, and occult kabbalah. Drawing on interviews, newspapers, and a wealth of hitherto untapped archival sources, Dorman provides a vivid portrait of Black Israelites, showing them to be a transnational movement that fought racism and its erasure of people of color from European-derived religions. Chosen People argues for a new way of understanding cultural formation, not in terms of genealogical metaphors of -survivals, - or syncretism, but rather as a -polycultural- cutting and pasting from a transnational array of ideas, books, rituals, and social networks.