Kit Carson and the Indians

Kit Carson and the Indians
Author: Thomas W. Dunlay
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 566
Release: 2005-05-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780803266421

Portrayed by past historians as the greatest guide and Indian fighter in the West, Kit Carson has become in recent years a historical pariah--a brutal murderer who betrayed the Navajos, and an unwitting dupe of American expansion, and a racist. Many historians now question both his reputation and his place in the pantheon of American heroes. Here we are urged to reconsider Carson yet again. Carson was a man of the nineteenth century, whose racial views and actions were much like those of his contemporaries.

Water and American Government

Water and American Government
Author: Donald J. Pisani
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 428
Release: 2002-12-31
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0520230302

Donald Pisani's history of perhaps the boldest economic and social program ever undertaken in the United States, shows in fascinating detail how ambitious government programs fall prey to the power of local interest groups and the federal system of governance itself.

Massacre at Camp Grant

Massacre at Camp Grant
Author: Chip Colwell
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2015-09-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0816532656

Winner of a National Council on Public History Book Award On April 30, 1871, an unlikely group of Anglo-Americans, Mexican Americans, and Tohono O’odham Indians massacred more than a hundred Apache men, women, and children who had surrendered to the U.S. Army at Camp Grant, near Tucson, Arizona. Thirty or more Apache children were stolen and either kept in Tucson homes or sold into slavery in Mexico. Planned and perpetrated by some of the most prominent men in Arizona’s territorial era, this organized slaughter has become a kind of “phantom history” lurking beneath the Southwest’s official history, strangely present and absent at the same time. Seeking to uncover the mislaid past, this powerful book begins by listening to those voices in the historical record that have long been silenced and disregarded. Massacre at Camp Grant fashions a multivocal narrative, interweaving the documentary record, Apache narratives, historical texts, and ethnographic research to provide new insights into the atrocity. Thus drawing from a range of sources, it demonstrates the ways in which painful histories continue to live on in the collective memories of the communities in which they occurred. Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh begins with the premise that every account of the past is suffused with cultural, historical, and political characteristics. By paying attention to all of these aspects of a contested event, he provides a nuanced interpretation of the cultural forces behind the massacre, illuminates how history becomes an instrument of politics, and contemplates why we must study events we might prefer to forget.