Farming The Home Place

In 1919, against a backdrop of a long history of anti-Asian nativism, a handful of Japanese families established Cortez Colony in a bleak pocket of the San Joachin Valley. Valerie Matsumoto chronicles conflicts within the community as well as obstacles from without as the colonists responded to the challenges of settlement, the setbacks of the Great Depression, the hardships of World War II internment, and the opportunities of postwar reconstruction. Tracing the evolution of gender and family roles of members of Cortez as well as their cultural, religious, and educational institutions, she documents the persistence and flexibility of ethnic community and demonstrates its range of meaning from geographic location and web of social relations to state of mind.

In this joyous reminiscence of a small-town boyhood in West Tennessee, Drake reflects upon his family's origins, flowering, and eventual decline, and ponders the meaning of their lives. It is a story with which many a Southerner who has grown up in twentieth-century America will readily identify. As a chronicle in microcosm of the gradual disintegration of the traditional extended family that has taken place all across the country in this turbulent century, it speaks to modern humankind everywhere.Drake concludes that the old tales about the home place were what held the family together long after the place itself was gone. The Drakes were rooted in the goodness of God and the joy of the Lord. The gift they had been given, a happiness based ultimately on love and joy in all God's creation, they in turn passed on to their family and all who came in contact with them.History and geography also helped give the Drakes their identities: they knew who they were because they knew where they were and when they were, with no alienation from either time or place. Their lives were thus whole and full. Their home, their family, their community were all very real entities, nourishing and sustaining the individual member while giving him a sense of belonging to something greater than himself. They gave order and meaning to his life.The times have changed, but who can say that the world of the Drakes is any less meaningful to us today? Perhaps the memories of that world constitute a rebuke to our frenetic lives. But perhaps the legacy of their lives, their times, and, above all, their great love, can still exert its healing power on modern generations.

To many Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the West was simultaneously the greatest symbol of American opportunity, the greatest story of its history, and the imagined blank slate on which the country's future would be written. From the Spanish-American War in 1898 to the Great Depression's end, from the Mississippi to the Pacific, policymakers at various levels and large-scale corporate investors, along with those living in the West and its borderlands, struggled over who would define modernity, who would participate in the modern American West, and who would be excluded. In Making a Modern U.S. West Sarah Deutsch surveys the history of the U.S. West from 1898 to 1940. Centering what is often relegated to the margins in histories of the region--the flows of people, capital, and ideas across borders--Deutsch attends to the region's role in constructing U.S. racial formations and argues that the West as a region was as important as the South in constructing the United States as a "white man's country." While this racial formation was linked to claims of modernity and progress by powerful players, Deutsch shows that visions of what constituted modernity were deeply contested by others. This expansive volume presents the most thorough examination to date of the American West from the late 1890s to the eve of World War II.

Final issue of each volume includes table of cases reported in the volume.

An oral-history-based biography of a seminal Asian-American activist. The book traces Embrey's life from her youth in the Little Tokyo section of Los Angeles, to her harrowing experiences in the Japanese internment camps, to her many decades of passionate advocacy on behalf of her fellow internees.