The Kitty Anderson Diary and Civil War Texas, 1861
Edited by Nancy Draves
Price: $24.95
ISBN: 9781682830031
Pub Date: October 2017
In 2008, Texas historian Nancy Draves happened upon an amazing find up for public auction: the 1861 diary of Kitty Anderson, the daughter of prominent San Antonio resident and vocal Union Army supporter...
In 1815, in the Spanish settlement of San Antonio de Béxar, a dying widow named María Concepción de Estrada recorded her last will and testament. Estrada used her will to record her debts and credits,...
Mary Bennett Love had a physicality exceeded only by her personality. Six feet tall and over 300 pounds, Love was anything but shackled by the mores of her day. In the 1840s, she moved west from Arkansas...
The California Work of the Women's National Indian Association
by Valerie Sherer Mathes
Price: $39.95
ISBN: 9780896727458
Pub Date: April 2012
Founded in Philadelphia in 1879, the Women’s National Indian Association devoted seventy years to working among Native women. Bucking society’s narrow sense of women’s appropriate sphere, WNIA members across the U.S. built Indian homes, missionary cottages, schools, and chapels; supported government teachers and field matrons; and funded physicians—all with a strong dose of Christianity. Though goals of forced assimilation were as unrealistic as they were unsuccessful, WNIA’s contributions to the welfare of Native women were hardly insignificant, especially in California. In the north, they worked at the Round Valley and Hoopa Reservations and realized their most unusual undertaking—the funding of the Greenville Indian Industrial School. In the south they worked with the Native mission populations, where cultural similarities and greater proximity fostered unprecedented cooperation among WNIA workers. Amelia Stone Quinton, longtime WNIA president and editor of The Indian’s Friend, provides a consistent narrative thread, as does Helen Hunt Jackson in...
The first comprehensive view of women on the North American Plains, these essays explore the richness, variety, and complexity of their experiences. From prehistory to the present, the Great Plains have played a significant role in the lives of women who moved to or across them, cleaving to cultural ideas and patterns while adapting to the rigors of the region. Twelve essays—arranged chronologically within sub-regions—draw upon innovative theoretical and methodological approaches, including gender/transgender studies, decolonization of Native peoples, and the influence of nation states. Richly grounded in the particular, these essays also contextualize the stories of specific women and locales within larger social, political, and economic trends. Individually and collectively, they reveal the intricate relations that tie together people and place. Here are long-needed perspectives on the diverse lives of women who have been—and who continue to be—too often ignored in wider histories of the Plains.
Through court cases and legal documents, Hers, His, and Theirs explores the evolution of Castilian law during the Spanish Reconquest and how those laws came to the New World and Texas. Looking carefully at why the Spanish legal system developed so differently from any other European system and why it survived in Texas even after settlement by Anglos in the 1830s, Jean A. Stuntz discusses what this system of community property offered that English common law did not, and why this aspect of married women’s property rights has not been well studied.
In twenty-five years of syndicated columns in small-town Texas newspapers between 1930 and 1960, Nellie Witt Spikes described her life on the High Plains, harking back to earlier times and reminiscing about pioneer settlement, farm and small-town culture, women’s work, and the natural history of the flatlands and canyons. Engaging and eloquent, her “As a Farm Woman Thinks” columns today conjure up a vivid portrait of a bygone era. Spikes’s best pieces, selected and arranged by Geoff Cunfer, are illuminated by black-and-white historical photographs featuring people, landscapes, small towns, farms, and ranches that populated the caprock-and-canyon country ofher West Texas. For historians, As a Farm Woman Thinks enlarges our understanding of a wide land and its culture. For the rest of us, Spikes’s “poetry of place” still captures the spirit of the Plains and, decades later, inspires imagination and memory.
“In this book are bits and pieces of dreams, lives, experiences, and vistas, like squares cut from old cloth and assembled into a crazy quilt of writing styles and forms. The patchwork design mirrors both the complexity of the chroniclers and the stark lines and angles of the American frontier.” —Susan Cummins Miller, from the introduction In this anthology of thirty-four writers who published during the settlement years of the American frontier, Miller assembles nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and occasional writings from women of Anglo, Chinese, Hispanic, and Native American ethnicity. Variously addressing such themes as isolation, drudgery, friendship, mourning, and even mysticism, these writers offer up a different frontier, one that focuses on women’s experiences as much as men’s. In brief biographical and historical introductions to each writer, Miller shares insights and context as engaging as the selections themselves.
