Power And Progress On The Prairie

A critical exploration of how modernity and progress were imposed on the people and land of rural South Dakota The Rosebud Country, comprising four counties in rural South Dakota, was first established as the Rosebud Indian Reservation in 1889 to settle the Sicangu Lakota. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, white homesteaders arrived in the area and became the majority population. Today, the population of Rosebud Country is nearly evenly divided between Indians and whites. In Power and Progress on the Prairie, Thomas Biolsi traces how a variety of governmental actors, including public officials, bureaucrats, and experts in civil society, invented and applied ideas about modernity and progress to the people and the land. Through a series of case studies—programs to settle “surplus” Indian lands, to “civilize” the Indians, to “modernize” white farmers, to find strategic sites for nuclear missile silos, and to extend voting rights to Lakota people—Biolsi examines how these various “problems” came into focus for government experts and how remedies were devised and implemented. Drawing on theories of governmentality derived from Michel Foucault, Biolsi challenges the idea that the problems identified by state agents and the solutions they implemented were inevitable or rational. Rather, through fine-grained analysis of the impact of these programs on both the Lakota and white residents, he reveals that their underlying logic was too often arbitrary and devastating.

Student radicals and hippies—in Oklahoma? Though most scholarship about 1960s-era student activism and the counterculture focuses on the East and West Coasts, Oklahoma’s college campuses did see significant activism and “dropping out.” In Prairie Power, Sarah Eppler Janda fills a gap in the historical record by connecting the activism of Oklahoma students and the experience of hippies to a state and a national history from which they have been absent. Janda shows that participants in both student activism and retreat from conformist society sought connections to Oklahoma’s past while forging new paths for themselves. She shows that Oklahoma students linked their activism with the grassroots socialist radicalism and World War I–era anti-draft protest of their grandparents’ generation, citing Woody Guthrie, Oscar Ameringer, and the Wobblies as role models. Many movement organizers in Oklahoma, especially those in the University of Oklahoma’s chapter of Students for a Democratic Society and the anti-war movement, fit into a larger midwestern and southwestern activist mentality of “prairie power”: a blend of free-speech advocacy, countercultural expression, and anarchist tendencies that set them apart from most East Coast student activists. Janda also reveals the vehemence with which state officials sought to repress campus “agitators,” and discusses Oklahomans who chose to retreat from the mainstream rather than fight to change it. Like their student activist counterparts, Oklahoma hippies sought inspiration from older precedents, including the back-to-the-land movement and the search for authenticity, but also Christian evangelicalism and traditional gender roles. Drawing on underground newspapers and declassified FBI documents, as well as interviews the author conducted with former activists and government officials, Prairie Power will appeal to those interested in Oklahoma’s history and the counterculture and political dissent in the 1960s.

The first comprehensive history of the Lakota Indians and their profound role in shaping America's history Named One of the New York Times Critics' Top Books of 2019 - Named One of the 10 Best History Books of 2019 by Smithsonian Magazine - Winner of the MPIBA Reading the West Book Award for narrative nonfiction "Turned many of the stories I thought I knew about our nation inside out."--Cornelia Channing, Paris Review, Favorite Books of 2019 "My favorite non-fiction book of this year."--Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg Opinion "A briliant, bold, gripping history."--Simon Sebag Montefiore, London Evening Standard, Best Books of 2019 "All nations deserve to have their stories told with this degree of attentiveness"--Parul Sehgal, New York Times This first complete account of the Lakota Indians traces their rich and often surprising history from the early sixteenth to the early twenty-first century. Pekka Hämäläinen explores the Lakotas' roots as marginal hunter-gatherers and reveals how they reinvented themselves twice: first as a river people who dominated the Missouri Valley, America's great commercial artery, and then--in what was America's first sweeping westward expansion--as a horse people who ruled supreme on the vast high plains. The Lakotas are imprinted in American historical memory. Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull are iconic figures in the American imagination, but in this groundbreaking book they emerge as something different: the architects of Lakota America, an expansive and enduring Indigenous regime that commanded human fates in the North American interior for generations. Hämäläinen's deeply researched and engagingly written history places the Lakotas at the center of American history, and the results are revelatory.