Reviewed by: Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War by Kendra Taira Field Justin Isaac Rogers Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War. By Kendra Taira Field. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2018. Pp. 256. Illustrations, notes, index.) Over the past three decades, historians have created a thriving body of scholarship that centers questions of race and identity among Black and Indigenous peoples across the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century. Historian Kendra Taira Field's complex and elegant microhistory elevates this scholarly dialogue by tracing the movements of three multiracial freedpeople from whom she descended, Thomas Jefferson Brown, Monroe Coleman, and Alexander "Elic" Davis. She provides new perspectives on westward expansion and the migrations of African-descended peoples, the rise of ideas about racial destiny and Black nationalism, and the emergence of biracialism between 1865 and 1915. Throughout four chapters, Field reconstructs her ancestors' lives and weaves an intricate tapestry rooted in her family's generational knowledge and personal letters, alongside archival and genealogical records. The first chapter focuses on Brown, born the son of a Black father and an Irish mother during the 1850s, and his migration from Arkansas to Indian Territory in the 1870s. After emancipation, according to Field, African-descended men like Brown distanced themselves from slavery by participating in American westward expansion. Although Brown entered Indian Territory as an "intruder" or "non-native," his marriages to Black Indian women allowed him to acquire more than a thousand acres of land, which became a Black and Creek settlement known as Brownsville. At the turn of the twentieth century, however, White land speculation and an emerging biracial system led to land loss among Brown and other Africandescended and Creek property owners. The Black-white racial dichotomy ultimately obscured the multinational history of Brownsville, which later descendants came to remember as part of Oklahoma's "all-Black" town movement. Succeeding chapters concentrate on the next generation, including Coleman and Davis, at the turn of the twentieth century. Intensifying violence, increasing political exclusion, and hardening Black-White racial lines in Mississippi eroded Coleman's relative prosperity as the mixed-race [End Page 217] son of a freedwoman and her former enslaver. According to Field, Coleman and his mixed-race contemporaries—forced into the category of "Black"—formulated ideas about a common racial destiny from their efforts to secure the "real freedom" associated with the acquisition of land and the reconstitution of kinship ties in "all-Black" western towns. In contrast to Coleman, poverty, in addition to political exclusion and violence, pushed men like Davis, a sharecropper who migrated westward from Mound Bayou, Mississippi, into "all-Black" western towns. Migrations as a response to such conditions provided a pretext for Davis to join Chief Alfred Sam's 1913–15 back-to-Africa movement after Oklahoma imposed Jim Crow laws. In her most powerful analysis, Field situates the transnational Chief Sam movement within a larger "continuum of flight from the late nineteenth-century United States" (137). Earlier Black departures from the South, then, constituted not discreet movements, but instead harbingers for a series of migrations that linked American expansionism to pan-Africanism. Taken together, migrations and notions of "racial destiny" responded to biracialism, yet erased a complex multiracial—African, mixed-race, and Black Indian—past and provided a foundation for the later Great Migration. Field's unique perspective, rigorous documentation, and astute analysis provide a shining example for historians using family stories in their own work and for students enrolled in historical methodology courses. The broader public, likewise, will find Field's narrative approach engaging and accessible. Historians of Texas and the Native South and Southwest will appreciate her focus on the multinational and multiracial dimensions of migration during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Justin Isaac Rogers University of Mississippi Copyright © 2020 The Texas State Historical Association