A Marriage Out West

A Marriage Out West
Author: Theresa Russell
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 473
Release: 2020-10-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0816540713

A Marriage Out West is an intimate biographical account of two fascinating figures of twentieth-century archaeology. Frances Theresa Peet Russell, an educator, married Harvard anthropologist Frank Russell in June 1900. They left immediately on a busman’s honeymoon to the Southwest. Their goal was twofold: to travel to an arid environment to quiet Frank’s tuberculosis and to find archaeological sites to support his research. During their brief marriage, the Russells surveyed almost all of Arizona Territory, traveling by horse over rugged terrain and camping in the back of a Conestoga wagon in harsh environmental conditions. Nancy J. Parezo and Don D. Fowler detail the grit and determination of the Russells’ unique collaboration over the course of three field seasons. Delivering the first biographical account of Frank Russell’s life, this book brings detail to his life and work from childhood until his death in 1903. Parezo and Fowler analyze the important contributions Theresa and Frank made to the bourgeoning field of archaeology and Akimel O’odham (Pima) ethnography. They also offer never-before-published information on Theresa’s life after Frank’s death and her subsequent career as a professor of English literature and philosophy at Stanford University. In 1906 Theresa Russell published In Pursuit of a Graveyard: Being the Trail of an Archaeological Wedding Journey, a twelve-part serial in Out West magazine. Theresa’s articles constituted an experiential narrative based on field journals and remembrances of life in the northern Southwest. The work offers both a biography and a seasonal field narrative that emphasized personal experiences rather than traditional scientific field notes. Included in A Marriage Out West, Theresa’s writing provides an invaluable participant’s perspective of early 1900s American archaeology and ethnography and life out West.

Exploration and Empire

Exploration and Empire
Author: William H. Goetzmann
Publisher: ACLS History E-Book Project
Total Pages: 702
Release: 2008-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781597404266

From early mountain men searching for routes through the Rockies to West Point soldier-engineers conducting topographical expeditions, the exploration of the American West mirrored the development of a fledgling nation. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning Exploration and Empire, William H. Goetzmann analyzes the special role the explorer played in shaping the vast region once called "the Great American Desert." According to Goetzmann, the exploration of the West was not a haphazard series of discoveries, but a planned - even programmed - activity in which explorers, often armed with instructions from the federal government, gathered information that would support national goals for the new lands. As national needs and the frontier's image changed, the West itself was rediscovered by successive generations of explorers, a process that in turn helped shape its culture. Nineteenth-century western exploration, Goetzmann writes, can be divided into three stages. The first, beginning with the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804, was marked by the need to collect practical information, such as the locations of the best transportation routes through the wilderness. Then came the era of settlement and investment - the drive to fulfill the Manifest Destiny of a nation beginning to realize what immense riches lay beyond the Mississippi. The final stage involved a search for knowledge of a different kind, as botanists and paleontologists, ethnographers and engineers hunted intensively for scientific information in the "frontier laboratory." This last phase also saw a rethinking of the West's place in the national scheme; it was a time of nascent conservation movements and public policy discussions aboutthe region's future. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, Goetzmann offers a masterful overview of the opening of the West, as well as a fascinating study of the nature of exploration and its consequences for civilization.

Army Exploration in the American West, 1803-1863

Army Exploration in the American West, 1803-1863
Author: William H. Goetzmann
Publisher: Texas State Historical Assn
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1991
Genre: United States
ISBN: 9780876111109

First published in 1959, this book tells the story of the U.S. Army's role in exploring the trans-Mississippi West, particularly the role of the Topographical Engineers. An interdisciplinary book, it addresses the military's role in the founding of archaeology and ethnology in this country and includes art and photography as part of the story.

Pacific Answers to Western Hegemony

Pacific Answers to Western Hegemony
Author: Jürg Wassmann
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2020-09-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000323889

The destruction of local identity through the relentless encroachment of a 'McDonald-ized' cultural imperialism is a global phenomenon. Yet the reactions of Pacific peoples to this Western hegemony are diverse and encourage the creation of independent cultural identities through sports and games, political mediations, tourism, media and filmmaking, and the struggles for land rights and titles, particularly in Australia.This book, based on extensive fieldwork, addresses a subject of great immediacy to peoples of the Pacific Island nations. It fills an important gap in existing ethnographic literature on the region and confidently navigates what had previously been considered uncharted, even unchartable, waters -- that wide sea between the classic ethnography of Oceania and contemporary anthropology's theoretical concerns with global relations and transnational cultures. Its breadth, rigour, and timely contribution to post-colonial politics in Oceania are certain to ensure that this book will provide an enduring contribution to the field.

Reinterpreting Exploration

Reinterpreting Exploration
Author: Dane Keith Kennedy
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2014
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199755345

Exploration was a central and perhaps defining aspect of the West's encounters with other peoples and lands. Rather than reproduce celebratory narratives of individual heroism and national glory, this volume focuses on exploration's instrumental role in shaping a European sense of exceptionalism and its iconic importance in defining the terms of cultural engagement with other peoples. In chapters offering broad geographic range, the contributors address many of the key themes of recent research on exploration, including exploration's contribution to European imperial expansion, Western scientific knowledge, Enlightenment ideas and practices, and metropolitan print culture. They reassess indigenous peoples' responses upon first contacts with European explorers, their involvement as intermediaries in the operations of expeditions, and the complications that their prior knowledge posed for European claims of discovery. Underscoring that exploration must be seen as a process of mediation between representation and reality, this book provides a fresh and accessible introduction to the ongoing reinterpretation of exploration's role in the making of the modern world.

Why the West Fears Islam

Why the West Fears Islam
Author: J. Cesari
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2013-07-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1137121203

Jocelyne Cesari examines the idea that Islam might threaten the core values of the West through testimonies from Muslims in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the US. Her book is an unprecedented exploration of Muslim religious and political life based on several years of field work in Europe and in the United States.

Staring Into Chaos

Staring Into Chaos
Author: Bruce Brander
Publisher: Spence Publishing Company
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1998
Genre: Civilization
ISBN: 9780965320856

Readers who feel stranded in a painful epoch of cultural decline will learn why it is occurring, where it might lead, and why the West may yet be reborn as a culture of truth and life.

Obregón's History of 16th Century Explorations in Western America

Obregón's History of 16th Century Explorations in Western America
Author: Baltasar de Obregón
Publisher:
Total Pages: 398
Release: 1928
Genre: Mexico
ISBN:

Baltasar Obregón (born 1534) was a 16th-century Spanish explorer and historian. He is most notable for publishing the Historia de los descubrimientos de Nueva Espana, an account of his travels in the New World. Obregón was born the son of an encomendera in the Spanish colony of New Spain. At the age of 19 Obregón joined up with a Spanish expedition to California, from which he returned with travel experience. In 1554 at the age of 20 he joined the expedition of Francisco de Ibarra to explore the frontiers of Spanish territory and to secure mineral resources. The expedition was a success, founding several settlements and allowing the Spanish to colonize Zacatecas. Later in life Obregón published an account of his travels, the Historia de los descubrimientos de Nueva Espana, in which he described the landscape of northern Mexico. After cataloging his own life, he continued to publish the accounts of other Spanish expeditions, such as that of Antonio de Espejo.

Queer Ancient Ways

Queer Ancient Ways
Author: Zairong Xiang
Publisher: punctum books
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2018
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1947447939

Queer Ancient Ways advocates a profound unlearning of colonial/modern categories as a pathway to the discovery of new forms and theories of queerness in the most ancient of sources. In this radically unconventional work, Zairong Xiang investigates scholarly receptions of mythological figures in Babylonian and Nahua creation myths, exposing the ways they have consistently been gendered as feminine in a manner that is not supported, and in some cases actively discouraged, by the texts themselves. An exercise in decolonial learning-to-learn from non-Western and non-modern cosmologies, Xiang's work uncovers a rich queer imaginary that had been all-but-lost to modern thought, in the process critically revealing the operations of modern/colonial systems of gender/sexuality and knowledge-formation that have functioned, from the Conquista de America in the sixteenth century to the present, to keep these systems in obscurity. At the heart of Xiang's argument is an account of the way the unfounded feminization of figures such as the Babylonian (co)creatrix Tiamat, and the Nahua creator-figures Tlaltecuhtli and Coatlicue, is complicit with their monstrification. This complicity tells us less about the mythologies themselves than about the dualistic system of gender and sexuality within which they have been studied, underpinned by a consistent tendency in modern/colonial thought to insist on unbridgeable categorical differences. By contextualizing these deities in their respective mythological, linguistic, and cultural environments, through a unique combination of methodologies and critical traditions in English, Spanish, French, Chinese, and Nahuatl, Xiang departs from the over-reliance of much contemporary queer theory on European (post)modern thought. Much more than a queering of the non-Western and non-modern, Queer Ancient Ways thus constitutes a decolonial and transdisciplinary engagement with ancient cosmologies and ways of thought which are in the process themselves revealed as theoretical sources of and for the queer imagination.