A supplemental textbook for middle and high school students, Hoosiers and the American Story provides intimate views of individuals and places in Indiana set within themes from American history. During the frontier days when Americans battled with and exiled native peoples from the East, Indiana was on the leading edge of America’s westward expansion. As waves of immigrants swept across the Appalachians and eastern waterways, Indiana became established as both a crossroads and as a vital part of Middle America. Indiana’s stories illuminate the history of American agriculture, wars, industrialization, ethnic conflicts, technological improvements, political battles, transportation networks, economic shifts, social welfare initiatives, and more. In so doing, they elucidate large national issues so that students can relate personally to the ideas and events that comprise American history. At the same time, the stories shed light on what it means to be a Hoosier, today and in the past.

The booklet opens with the Delaware Indians prior to 1818. White Americans quickly replaced the natives. Germanic people arrived during the mid-nineteenth century. African American indentured servants and free blacks migrated to Indianapolis. After the Civil War, southern blacks poured into the city. Fleeing war and political unrest, thousands of eastern and southern Europeans came to Indianapolis. Anti-immigration laws slowed immigration until World War II. Afterward, the city welcomed students and professionals from Asia and the Middle East and refugees from war-torn countries such as Vietnam and poor countries such as Mexico. Today, immigrants make Indianapolis more diverse and culturally rich than ever before.

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Vol. 1, t.-p. dated 1897, includes the Society's proceedings and all papers and publications from its organization in 1830 to 1886. Each succeeding volume made up from papers originally issued separately. Vol. 6, no. 4 contains minutes of the society, 1886-1918.

"Gentleman in the Shadows is a biography of Benjamin C. Evans Jr., a Central Intelligence Agency executive who operated at the top levels of the U.S. intelligence community during the darkest days of the Cold War. After serving as a covert case officer in revolutionary Havana, Cuba, and then managing The Asia Foundation, a sprawling CIA front organization, Evans was promoted to the CIA headquarters' seventh floor, where the executive directorate team managed world-changing intelligence missions. A socially adept administrator, Evans was the CIA Executive Secretary for seven Directors of Central Intelligence under four presidential administrations. Spooks said Evans was the traffic cop of the CIA. As a military intelligence and CIA officer, Evans was part of the tumultuous period that included America's crusade to democratize Occupied Japan, the Korean War, nuclear standoffs with the Soviet Union, the anti-Castro counterrevolutionary movement that climaxed in the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the Family Jewels furor after the CIA's dirty secrets were revealed. Although he had global CIA responsibilities, Evans was among the coterie of top federal executives who operated out of the limelight-extraordinarily significant officials whose names were virtually unknown to the American public. Through his marriage, Evans was a member of America's elite that figured so prominently in the U.S. intelligence services. Born and raised in a prosperous family in Crawfordsville, Indiana, Evans was imbued with conservative Hoosier values that celebrated servant-leadership. Following his graduation from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Evans's social savvy and encultured mores stood him in good stead in Occupied Japan, where he served as aide-de-camp to General Eugene Harrison, a decorated World War II intelligence officer and Occupation administrator. It was in Occupied Japan that Evans and the general's stepdaughter, Jan King, fell in love, and later married. Jan King Evans came from old Washington aristocracy-self-described "cave-dwellers"-who allied with the powerful thronging the nation's capital. The family connections shaped Evans's career. When President Harry Truman recognized he needed a foreign intelligence service, General Harrison was on the commission that established what came to be the CIA. Not too many years later, Harrison and his cohorts insured that his son-in-law Evans, by then a respected military intelligence officer, was offered a position in the agency. So this book is also about CIA families, who not uncommonly led double lives of sequestered thoughts, unasked questions and intimate deception. An empathetic family man, Evans paid a psychological price for his emotionally isolate life in the clandestine service. The primary source material for this book is based on family archives, on-the-record interviews, and available declassified CIA documents. Given Evans' covert career and long executive service near the apex of U.S. intelligence, it is not surprising that the CIA has declassified only a small portion of the enormous volume of documents connected to his CIA career. As such, this book is incomplete; a contribution to the larger story of a remarkable gentleman spy, who remains partially in the shadows."--

Historical fiction based on the true story and work on the underground railroad by Levi and Catherine Coffin and other abolitionists, including free blacks. Story of a thirteen-year-old boy's challenge of understanding the horrors of slavery, how to see and relate to African Americans as real people, and make his own decisions about breaking the law and facing the dangers of working on the underground railroad. Blurb: After his parents died, Luke's aunt and uncle gave him a home. He was pretty sure his uncle didn't liked him much, though. Luke thought about running away, maybe finding work on one of the boats or barges that tied up at the port of Cincinnati, his hometown and the biggest city in the West. When Levi Coffin, a storeowner in an Indiana village, asked Luke to work for him over the summer, Luke jumped at the chance to live and work with this Quaker family, who treated him with such kindness and respect. But while the Coffins lived in a quiet town, far from civilization, their home was known as the "Grand Central Station" of the Underground Railroad. Luke had to decide whether to obey his uncle, who told him to have nothing to do with breaking the law, or join in the dangerous ¿ and most important ¿ work of his time.A sequel, A Winding Road to Freedom, follows the story of a character from this book, Cassie, who returns south to where she was a slave to rescue her baby son.

For all that has been written about the Civil War's impact on the urban northeast and southern home fronts, we have until now lacked a detailed picture of how it affected specific communities in the Union's Midwestern heartland. Nicole Etcheson offers a deeply researched microhistory of one such community--Putnam County, Indiana, from the Compromise of 1850 to the end of Reconstruction-and shows how its citizens responded to and were affected by the war. Delving into the everyday life of a small town in one of the nineteenth century's bellwether states, A Generation at War considers the Civil War within a much broader chronological context than other accounts. It ranges across three decades to show how the issues of the day-particularly race and sectionalism-temporarily displaced economic and temperance concerns, how the racial attitudes of northern whites changed, and how a generation of young men and women coped with the transformative experience of war. Etcheson interrelates an impressively wide range of topics. Through temperance and alcohol she illustrates nativism and class consciousness, while through an account of a murder she probes ethnicity, politics, and gender. She reveals how some women wanted to "maintain dependence" and how the war gave independence to others, as pensions allowed them to survive without a male provider. And she chronicles the major shift in race relations as the most revolutionary change: blacks had been excluded from Indiana in the 1850s but were invited into Putnam County by 1880. Etcheson personalizes all of these issues through human stories, bringing to life people previously ignored by history, whether veterans demanding recognition of their sacrifice, women speaking out against liquor, or Copperheads parading against Republicans. The introduction of race with the North Carolina Exodusters marks a particularly effective lens for seeing how the idealism unleashed by Lincoln's war influenced the North. Etcheson also helps us understand how white Southerners tried to reunify the country on the basis of shared white racism. Drawing on personal papers, local newspapers, pension petitions, Exoduster pamphlets, and more, Etcheson demonstrates how microhistory helps give new meaning to larger events. A Generation at War opens a new window on the impact of the Civil War on the agrarian North.