What does it mean to be a "mixed-blood," and how has our understanding of this term changed over the last two centuries? What processes have shaped American thinking on racial blending? Why has the figure of the mixed-blood, thought too offensive for polite conversation in the nineteenth century, become a major representative of twentieth-century native consciousness? In Injun Joe's Ghost, Harry J. Brown addresses these questions within the interrelated contexts of anthropology, U.S. Indian policy, and popular fiction by white and mixed-blood writers, mapping the evolution of "hybridity" from a biological to a cultural category. Brown traces the processes that once mandated the mixed-blood's exile as a grotesque or criminal outcast and that have recently brought about his ascendance as a cultural hero in contemporary Native American writing. Because the myth of the demise of the Indian and the ascendance of the Anglo-Saxon is traditionally tied to America's national idea, nationalist literature depicts Indian-white hybrids in images of degeneracy, atavism, madness, and even criminality. A competing tradition of popular writing, however, often created by mixed-blood writers themselves, contests these images of the outcast half-breed by envisioning "hybrid vigor," both biologically and linguistically, as a model for a culturally heterogeneous nation. Injun Joe's Ghost focuses on a significant figure in American history and culture that has, until now, remained on the periphery of academic discourse. Brown offers an in-depth discussion of many texts, including dime novels and Depression-era magazine fiction, that have been almost entirely neglected by scholars. This volume also covers texts such as the historical romances of the 1820s and the novels of the twentieth-century "Native American Renaissance" from a fresh perspective. Investigating a broad range of genres and subject over two hundred year of American writing, Injun Joe's Ghost will be useful to students and professionals in the fields of American literature, popular culture, and native studies.

On the night of 16 October 1892, a double homicide occurred on Otay Mesa in San Diego County near the Mexican border. The two victims were an elderly couple, John and Wilhelmina Geyser, who lived on a farm on the edge of the mesa. Within minutes of discovering the crime, neighbors subdued and tied up the alleged killer, Josä Gabriel, a sixty-year-old itinerant Native American handyman from El Rosario, California, who worked for the couple. Since Gabriel was apprehended at the scene, most presumed his guilt. The local press, prosecutors, witnesses, and jurors called him by the epithet ?Indian Joe.? ø The sensational murder trial of Gabriel highlights the legal injustices committed against Native Americans in the nineteenth century. During this time, California Native Americans could not vote or serve on juries, so from the outset Gabriel was unlikely to receive a fair trial. No motive for murder was established, and the evidence against Gabriel was inconclusive. Nonetheless, the case went forward. Drawing on court testimony and newspaper accounts, Clare V. McKanna Jr. traces the murder trial: the handling of the case by the prosecution, the defense, the jury, and the judge; an examination of the crime scene; and the imaging of ?Indian Joe.? Through his considerable research, McKanna sheds light on a dark time in the American legal system.

Each fun and intriguing volume in the award-winning series offers more than 250 illustrated pages of places where tourists usually don't venture: the oddball curiosities, ghostly sites, local legends, crazy characters, cursed roads, and peculiar roadside attractions.

This book explores Twain's major writings as they address the New World and the Old, race, slavery, imperialism, the possibility of American literary form and the limits of humour. Twain's humour is an expression of the pleasure and fun of life, but it is also a response to ultimate contradictions and losses. It is particularly American in that it rarely points to harmonies that might actually be enjoyed beyond itself. It is the humour of someone always on the move if not on the run. The absence of any destination in Twain, other than the ultimate one of death, is why his work is so formally unsettled. There is no point of clarification where author, narrator and readers can be expected to arrive together. Texts treated in this book include The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mississippi, The Gilded Age, A Connecticut Yankee, Pudd'nhead Wilson, Following the Equator, The Mysterious Stranger, and several short pieces.

Fishkin "offers an intriguing look at how Mark Twain's life and work have been cherished, memorialized, exploited, and misunderstood."

Praise for the previous edition:RASD/ALA "Outstanding Reference Source, 1996""'Essential' is the word for it!