scholarly journals Black Cowboys In the American West: A Historiographical Review

1997 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-89
Author(s):  
David Goldstein-Shirley

Few subjects in the ethnic experience of the United States are as fraught with mythology and misinformation as black cowboys. Although absent from most classic history texts of the American West, black cowboys probably constituted about a quarter of the working cowboys in the nineteenth century, although q uantitative data to establish a number are lacking. This essay reviews the historiography of black cowboys published during the last half-century, noting how much of it is marred either by glossing over the presence of black cowboys or by credulously repeating estimates of their numbers established by earlier work. The essay speculates whether such problematic scholarship stems from unacknowledged prejudice among mainstream historians or from carelessness and calls for more and improved scholarly attention to the role of African American cowboys in the American West.

2019 ◽  
pp. 129-168
Author(s):  
Anne Nassauer

Chapter 9 explores whether the books’ findings hold in other contexts by examining other instances of surprising outcomes. First, the chapter discusses the outbreak of violence in uprisings after police shootings of African American citizens in the United States, such as Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 and Baltimore, Maryland, in 2015. The first section takes a detailed look at the role of background and context factors (such as symbolic and systemic racism) and situational patterns in uprisings turning violent. Then the chapter discusses successful and failed armed store robberies. Here the surprising outcome is not violence but armed criminals failing to get the money from an unarmed store clerk. Findings suggest similar patterns of situational breakdowns in these occurrences as in protests and uprisings. Overall, the chapter discusses the crucial importance of the micro-level of social phenomena: if routines of both collective and individual social events are disrupted, surprising outcomes occur.


Author(s):  
Duncan Bell

This chapter focuses on John Robert Seeley (1834–95), the most prominent imperial thinker in late nineteenth-century Britain. It dissects Seeley's understanding of theology and religion, probes his views on the sacred character of nationality, and shows how he attempted to reconcile particularism and universalism in a so-called “cosmopolitan nationalist” vision. It argues that Seeley's most famous book, The Expansion of England (1883) should be understood as an expression of his basic political-theological commitments. The chapter also makes the case that he conceived of Greater Britain as a global federal nation-state, modeled on the United States. It concludes by discussing the role of India and Ireland in his polychronic, stratified conception of world order.


Risk Analysis ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 37 (11) ◽  
pp. 2150-2163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vicki S. Freimuth ◽  
Amelia Jamison ◽  
Gregory Hancock ◽  
Donald Musa ◽  
Karen Hilyard ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Robert Jackson

Chapter 5 examines lynching, a longstanding practice in the United States that became more regionally associated with the South in the late nineteenth century, as a force in film history from the earliest days of the medium through a cycle of anti-lynching films during the years around midcentury. Paradoxically, the Western genre is important here, absorbing many of the common rituals and generating a powerful ideological defense of lynching. During different periods across this half-century, different attitudes about lynching led to a variety of film representations, culminating with a number of films in the late 1930s and beyond questioning both lynching and its cinematic traces.


1977 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 1009-1027 ◽  
Author(s):  
David A. Martin

Foreign money remained in widespread use in the United States until the middle of the nineteenth century. Several foreign coins were provided legal tender status in order to supplement the scanty American specie supply. A particular disadvantage was the perpetuation of non-decimal units of account, especially in New York. When the U.S. enacted a subsidiary silver standard in 1853, the expedient bases for the lawful status of foreign coin was removed. In 1857, the United States coinage was finally reformed to secure an exclusive national currency.


2002 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 581-605 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Jones

The role of business enterprise in integrating economies is one of the central historical themes of the last two centuries. Although globalization—both in its current iteration and in its nineteenth-century form—has been widely studied, the role of the firm, as opposed to macroeconomic forces, has yet to receive sufficient attention. Many research questions remain, including the role of the United States as a host country, the place of multinationals based in emerging markets, and the importance of understudied sectors such as retailing. Business historians should shift the focus of queries from “why” to “how” and go beyond the discipline's traditional organization along national lines to study the behavior of firms worldwide.


2021 ◽  
Vol 98 (3) ◽  
pp. 2-27
Author(s):  
Brent M. S. Campney

This study investigates anti-Chinese violence in the American West—focusing primarily on events in the Arizona Territory between 1880 and 1912—and the role of diplomatic relations between the United States and China in tempering the worst excesses of that violence. Recent scholarship asserts that the Chinese rarely suffered lynching and were commonly targeted for other types of violence, including coercion, harassment, and intimidation. Building on that work, this study advances a definition of racist violence that includes a broad spectrum of attacks, including the threat of violence. While affirming that such “subtler” violence achieved many of the same objectives as the “harsher” violence, it seeks to explain why whites used such radically different and less openly violent methods against this minority and explains why this difference mattered. Using these insights to interrogate the complex relationship between the United States and China, this essay shows that Chinese diplomatic influence stifled anti-Chinese mob violence by white Americans. It argues that this relationship denied white racists the same agency against the Chinese immigrants as they possessed against other racial and national minorities and thus forced them to “choose” the “subtler” acts of violence against this group rather than those usually employed against these others.


Author(s):  
Jay Sexton

Jay Sexton’s opening essay focuses on the role of the Civil War in the realization of U.S. national and global power in the nineteenth century. Though the Civil War gave evidence of the immense military and economic power of the United States, he shows, the projection of that power on the world stage also required foreign collaboration.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeff Strickland

Jeff Strickland tells the powerful story of Nicholas Kelly, the enslaved craftsman who led the Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion, the largest slave revolt in the history of the antebellum American South. With two accomplices, some sledgehammers, and pickaxes, Nicholas risked his life and helped thirty-six fellow enslaved people escape the workhouse where they had been sent by their enslavers to be tortured. While Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, and Denmark Vesey remain the most recognizable rebels, the pivotal role of Nicholas Kelly is often forgotten. All for Liberty centers his rebellion as a decisive moment leading up to the secession of South Carolina from the United States in 1861. This compelling micro-history navigates between Nicholas's story and the Age of Atlantic Revolutions, while also considering the parallels between race and incarceration in the nineteenth century and in modern America. Never before has the story of Nicholas Kelly been so eloquently told.


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