Standing Bear S Quest For Freedom

Lawrence A. Dwyer has written the story of Chief Standing Bear of the Ponca Nation, who was willing to face arrest for leaving the government's reservation without permission because of his love for his son and his people, and a desire to be free, resulting in the First Civil Rights victory for Native Americans.

This is a story of a great and noble man. A man of courage and determination who was willing to face arrest for leaving the government's reservation without its permission--all because of his love for his son and his people. Standing Bear was a man who fought for his freedom, not with armed resistance, but with bold action, strong testimony and heartfelt eloquence. He knew he and his people had been wronged. All he wanted was the right to live and die with his family on his own land - on the beloved land of his Ponca ancestors. This story is a civil rights victory for Native Americans, unprecedented in American history. For the first time, a federal court declared a Native American to be a "person" - a human being, having rights and privileges to file an action for a redress of grievances in a federal court, like every other person in America. Standing Bear won his fight for freedom. His victory began a movement of change, a slow change, but a change, nevertheless. The pervading sense of indifference toward Native Americans was broken. America would never be the same because of what Standing Bear did.

In 1877, Chief Standing Bear's Ponca Indian tribe was forcibly removed from their Nebraska homeland and marched to what was then known as Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), in what became the tribe's own Trail of Tears. "I Am a Man" chronicles what happened when Standing Bear set off on a six-hundred-mile walk to return the body of his only son to their traditional burial ground. Along the way, it examines the complex relationship between the United States government and the small, peaceful tribe and the legal consequences of land swaps and broken treaties, while never losing sight of the heartbreaking journey the Ponca endured. It is a story of survival---of a people left for dead who arose from the ashes of injustice, disease, neglect, starvation, humiliation, and termination. On another level, it is a story of life and death, despair and fortitude, freedom and patriotism. A story of Christian kindness and bureaucratic evil. And it is a story of hope---of a people still among us today, painstakingly preserving a cultural identity that had sustained them for centuries before their encounter with Lewis and Clark in the fall of 1804. Before it ends, Standing Bear's long journey home also explores fundamental issues of citizenship, constitutional protection, cultural identity, and the nature of democracy---issues that continue to resonate loudly in twenty-first-century America. It is a story that questions whether native sovereignty, tribal-based societies, and cultural survival are compatible with American democracy. Standing Bear successfully used habeas corpus, the only liberty included in the original text of the Constitution, to gain access to a federal court and ultimately his freedom. This account aptly illuminates how the nation's delicate system of checks and balances worked almost exactly as the Founding Fathers envisioned, a system arguably out of whack and under siege today. Joe Starita's well-researched and insightful account reads like historical fiction as his careful characterizations and vivid descriptions bring this piece of American history brilliantly to life.

A tiny American town's plans for radical self-government overlooked one hairy detail: no one told the bears. Once upon a time, a group of libertarians got together and hatched the Free Town Project, a plan to take over an American town and completely eliminate its government. In 2004, they set their sights on Grafton, NH, a barely populated settlement with one paved road. When they descended on Grafton, public funding for pretty much everything shrank: the fire department, the library, the schoolhouse. State and federal laws became meek suggestions, scarcely heard in the town's thick wilderness. The anything-goes atmosphere soon caught the attention of Grafton's neighbors: the bears. Freedom-loving citizens ignored hunting laws and regulations on food disposal. They built a tent city in an effort to get off the grid. The bears smelled food and opportunity. A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear is the sometimes funny, sometimes terrifying tale of what happens when a government disappears into the woods. Complete with gunplay, adventure, and backstabbing politicians, this is the ultimate story of a quintessential American experiment -- to live free or die, perhaps from a bear.

Finalist for the 2004 C.B. Macpherson Prize presented by the Canadian Political Science Association Winner of the Best First Book Award presented by the Foundations of Political Theory section of the American Political Science Association Tocqueville's Democracy in America continues to be widely read, but for all this familiarity, the vivid imagery with which he conveys his ideas has been overlooked, left to act with unexamined force upon readers' imaginations. In this first sustained feminist reading of Democracy in America Laura Janara assesses the dramatic feminine, masculine, and infantile metaphorical figures that represent the historical political drama that is Tocqueville's primary topic. These tropes are analyzed as both historical artifacts and symbols for psychoanalytic interpretation, deepening and complicating the standing interpretations of Tocqueville's work. Democracy Growing Up comments critically upon the peculiar gendered and familial foundations of modern Western democracy and upon the notion of democratic maturity that Tocqueville offers us.

United States, Canada, Mexico. All new digitized maps. Detailed city _vicinity maps. Detailed downtown city street maps. Same page state map indexing. Special business reference section including: USA statistics; time zone; zip code and area code maps; U.S. and international area code listings. Mileage and driving time charts.

Mark Twain is high on the list of America’s great travel writers. His amazing life took him to more than 35 countries and two-thirds of the states and provinces of North America. Jack Dold has highlighted these travels with a series of journals describing unique tours conducted for the University of California, Berkeley, where the majority of Mark Twain’s writings are housed at the Bancroft Library. Those tours were all accompanied by Bob Hirst, the general editor of the Mark Twain Papers Project, whose stated goal is the publication of every word the author penned. Jack’s journal descriptions are enhanced by Mark Twain’s own observations.