Myth And The History Of The Hispanic Southwest

Located in Southwest Collection.

The Bents might be the most famous family in the history of the American West. From the 1820s to 1920 they participated in many of the major events that shaped the Rocky Mountains and Southern Plains. They trapped beaver, navigated the Santa Fe Trail, intermarried with powerful Indian tribes, governed territories, became Indian agents, fought against the U.S. government, acquired land grants, and created historical narratives. The Bent family’s financial and political success through the mid-nineteenth century derived from the marriages of Bent men to women of influential borderland families—New Mexican and Southern Cheyenne. When mineral discoveries, the Civil War, and railroad construction led to territorial expansions that threatened to overwhelm the West’s oldest inhabitants and their relatives, the Bents took up education, diplomacy, violence, entrepreneurialism, and the writing of history to maintain their status and influence. In Blood in the Borderlands David C. Beyreis provides an in-depth portrait of how the Bent family creatively adapted in the face of difficult circumstances. He incorporates new material about the women in the family and the “forgotten” Bents and shows how indigenous power shaped the family’s business and political strategies as the family adjusted to American expansion and settler colonist ideologies. The Bent family history is a remarkable story of intercultural cooperation, horrific violence, and pragmatic adaptability in the face of expanding American power.

The history of the Lone Star state is a narrative dominated by larger-than-life personalities and often-contentious legends, presenting interesting challenges for historians. Perhaps for this reason, Texas has produced a cadre of revered historians who have had a significant impact on the preservation (some would argue creation) of our state’s past. An anthology of biographical essays, Writing the Story of Texas pays tribute to the scholars who shaped our understanding of Texas’s past and, ultimately, the Texan identity. Edited by esteemed historians Patrick Cox and Kenneth Hendrickson, this collection includes insightful, cross-generational examinations of pivotal individuals who interpreted our history. On these pages, the contributors chart the progression from Eugene C. Barker’s groundbreaking research to his public confrontations with Texas political leaders and his fellow historians. They look at Walter Prescott Webb’s fundamental, innovative vision as a promoter of the past and Ruthe Winegarten’s efforts to shine the spotlight on minorities and women who made history across the state. Other essayists explore Llerena Friend delving into an ambitious study of Sam Houston, Charles Ramsdell courageously addressing delicate issues such as racism and launching his controversial examination of Reconstruction in Texas, Robert Cotner—an Ohio-born product of the Ivy League—bringing a fresh perspective to the field, and Robert Maxwell engaged in early work in environmental history.

In this groundbreaking and lavishly illustrated volume edited by Dennis Reinhartz and Gerald D. Saxon, five leading scholars in history, geography, and cartography discuss the role Spanish explorers and mapmakers played in bringing knowledge of the New World to Europe. The entradas, of Pánfilo de Narváez and Alvar Núnez Cabeza de Vaca (1527-37), Fray Marcos de Niza and Francisco Vásquez de Coronado (1539-42), and Hernando de Soto and Luis de Moscoso (1539-43), into the Greater Southwest of North America were crucial in the dissemination of information and images of the newly discovered lands. The contributors investigate linkages between the early explorers’ experiences, their influence on indigenous peoples, and perceptions of the region as reflected in printed maps of the period. This body of images, which incorporated Indian information, made a powerful impression on the still largely preliterate people of Europe, reshaping their world.

From 1539 to 1542 Hernando de Soto and several hundred armed men cut a path of destruction and disease across the Southeast from Florida to the Mississippi River. The eighteen contributors to this volume?anthropologists, ethnohistorians, and literary critics?investigate broad cultural and literary aspects of the resulting social and demographic collapse or radical transformation of many Native societies and the gradual opening of the Southeast to European colonization.

Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Project is a national project to locate, identify, preserve and make accessible the literary contributions of U.S. Hispanics from colonial times through 1960 in what today comprises the fifty states of the United States.

This volume brings together a number of critical essays on three selected topics: biography, nationhood, and globalism. Written exclusively for this book by specialists from Mexico, Germany, and the United States, the essays propose a reexamination of Mexican American cultural history from a twenty-first century standpoint, written in English and approached from different analytical models and critical methods, but free of theoretical jargon. The essays range from biographies and memoirs by leading Chicano historians and studies of globalism during the rule of Imperial Spain (1492-1898), to the modern rise and global influence of the United States, particularly in Mexico, Latin America and the Caribbean. Also included are critical studies of novels by Chicano, Latin American, and Caribbean writers who narrate and represent the dominant role played by the United States both within the nation itself and in the Caribbean, thus illustrating the historical parallels and relations that bind Latinos and Americans of Mexican descent. This book will be of importance to literary historians, literary critics, teachers, students, and readers interested in stimulating and unconventional studies of Mexican American cultural history from a global perspective.

Originally published as a hardback in 2003.