Southwest Territories Research Articles

THE LANDS WERE NOT EMPTY

THE LANDS WERE NOT EMPTY

Estimation of using underground water in Khyzy area

According to the results of exploration works carried out in Khyzy area, fresh water here is of Cretaceous complex. On the south-west territory from Tazakend area, the water is in the sandstones, pelitomorphic tuffogene limestones and clay (Kemchi suite). To the south-east from Thykhly village, fresh water occurs in the alternation of the sandstones and pelitomorphic clay, to the south from Dizavar village (in the axial region of Tygchay downfold) – in the alternation of sandstones, limestones, gritrock and clay (Aghburun suite). Additional research surveys on Khyzy territory are necessary for the estimation of underground water to increase its usage in water supply of inhabited localities.

Meeting on February 28, 1892.

Prof. V. Ye. Chernov read and distributed printed copies of the "report of the commission, elected by the Obstetrician-Gynecological Society in Kiev to develop the issue of measures to support childless children and foundlings in the South-West Territory". This question was submitted for discussion by the head of the region, Count A.P. Ignatiev. Having examined this issue comprehensively, the commission spoke in favor of the need to establish "hospitals for babies" at least in provincial cities, and, if necessary, in more populated areas of the region, and developed rules for these benefits, when compiling which were guided by the current rules for the admission of children to the IMPERIAL Foster homes and return from them.

Mining the Borderlands: Industry, Capital, and the Emergence of Engineers in the Southwest Territories, 1855‐1910. Sarah E.M.Grossman. University of Nevada Press, 2018.

Mining the Borderlands: Industry, Capital, and the Emergence of Engineers in the Southwest Territories, 1855‐1910. Sarah E.M.Grossman. University of Nevada Press, 2018.

Mining Engineers and Authority on the US-Mexico Border - Sarah E. M. Grossman Mining the Borderlands: Industry, Capital, and the Emergence of Engineers in the Southwest Territories, 1855–1910. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2018. 184 pp. $44.95 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1-94-385983-2.

Mining Engineers and Authority on the US-Mexico Border - Sarah E. M. Grossman Mining the Borderlands: Industry, Capital, and the Emergence of Engineers in the Southwest Territories, 1855–1910. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2018. 184 pp. $44.95 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1-94-385983-2. - Volume 19 Issue 2

Mining the Borderlands: Industry, Capital, and the Emergence of Engineers in the Southwest Territories, 1855–1910

Mining the Borderlands: Industry, Capital, and the Emergence of Engineers in the Southwest Territories, 1855–1910

Mining the Borderlands: Industry, Capital, and the Emergence of Engineers in the Southwest Territories by Sarah E. M. Grossman

Mining the Borderlands: Industry, Capital, and the Emergence of Engineers in the Southwest Territories by Sarah E. M. Grossman

Review: Mining the Borderlands: Industry, Capital, and the Emergence of Engineers in the Southwest Territories, 1855–1910 by Sarah E.M. Grossman

Review: <i>Mining the Borderlands: Industry, Capital, and the Emergence of Engineers in the Southwest Territories, 1855–1910</i> by Sarah E.M. Grossman

Review: Mining the Borderlands: Industry, Capital, and the Emergence of Engineers in the Southwest Territories, 1855–1910, by Sarah E. M. Grossman

Review: Mining the Borderlands: Industry, Capital, and the Emergence of Engineers in the Southwest Territories, 1855–1910, by Sarah E. M. Grossman

Mining the Borderlands: Industry, Capital, and the Emergence of Engineers in the Southwest Territories, 1855–1910

Mining the Borderlands: Industry, Capital, and the Emergence of Engineers in the Southwest Territories, 1855–1910

Theater of a Separate War: The Civil War West of the Mississippi River, 1861– 1865 by Thomas W. Cutrer

Reviewed by: Theater of a Separate War: The Civil War West of the Mississippi River, 1861– 1865 by Thomas W. Cutrer Richard B. McCaslin Theater of a Separate War: The Civil War West of the Mississippi River, 1861– 1865. By Thomas W. Cutrer. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. 284. Maps, notes, bibliography, index.) When scholars who study the former Confederate states and territories west of the Mississippi River receive any book on the American South, they eagerly look to see if the author included the Trans-Mississippi region. Usually they are disappointed to learn that the answer is no. This is especially true concerning works on the Civil War era, so it is refreshing to have a new study of the Trans-Mississippi conflict, especially by an engaging and well-read scholar. Geographically, this work stretches beyond the Confederate Department of the Trans-Mississippi to include events in California, Colorado, the Dakotas, Kansas, Minnesota, and Nebraska (most of which are federal operations against Indians). This is primarily military history, but the first chapter does provide an overview of the secession movements west of the Mississippi. Cutrer also discusses the impact of political sentiments and events on military affairs, such as the division within Missouri over the Union and the clashes in Washington that hindered efforts to expel Confederate forces from that state. Cutrer makes it clear that leadership defined the Trans-Mississippi conflict, and he has strong opinions concerning many principal characters. Among the Confederates, Gideon J. Pillow was "arguably the worst commander in either army" in Missouri in 1861 (42); John S. Roane was "wholly unfit for military command" (134); James S. Rains was "manifestly incompetent" (142); and Theophilus H. Holmes lost most of his army through "strategic ineptitude" (163). Union commanders do not escape unscathed; Cutrer obviously thinks little of John M. Schofield. He can be forgiving: Thomas C. Hindman, who fought with his fellow Confederates and Federals alike in Arkansas, is commended for his efforts. And some Confederates get high praise: Richard Taylor's defense of Louisiana is impressive, even if he had inept opponents, while Tom Green had "one of the most brilliant careers of any cavalry officer of the Civil War" (202). Some of Cutrer's opinions may spark debate. Texans might be crushed [End Page 455] to learn that the best defense of the Lone Star State was "Northern indifference" (275). Cutrer refrains from referring to Milliken's Bend as a massacre, but he is chillingly clear that what William C. Quantrill did at Lawrence and Baxter Springs deserves that label. He is reserved in his comments on Poison Spring and Marks' Mill, and does not cite some recent literature on those engagements, but he does use the word "massacre" in describing them (388). He also notes that black soldiers retaliated for the last two affairs by killing wounded Confederates at Jenkins' Ferry. Cutrer does stray slightly in declaring the motives for the combatants in the Trans-Mississippi. He writes that Federal soldiers fought primarily to preserve the Union, although there were many for whom abolition became important as well. He does not mention slavery as a motive for Confederate soldiers; instead, they fought for independence and "their rights, however they defined them" (9). But slavery does appear in Cutrer's discussion of Trans-Mississippi secession movements, and he mentions the importance of slavery in the Indian Territory. Too, Cutrer declares that Texas Confederates invaded New Mexico because "for more than any other reason, the Southwest territories presented a potential empire for slavery" (94). Slavery is obviously important in Cutrer's narrative, even if it does not always appear in the right spot. There are slight errors in facts that some specialists will note, and the struggle to recount so many events does create problems in chronology that sometimes compel careful reading. The lack of illustrations will dismay some readers as well. But these are minor quibbles in such a well-researched volume. Cutrer has a substantial bibliography, with dozens of primary sources. His battle narratives are excellent, and he has a good eye for quotations, such as Chilly McIntosh's stirring but ultimately ineffectual speech before the Battle of...

Duty to Empire? South Africa's Invasion of German South West Africa, 1914-1918

Before war broke out in August 1914, the Union of South Africa had determined to include the German colony of South West Africa in the Union fold if ever an opportunity arose. So, when Britain went to war on 4 August 1914, the British War Cabinet request that South Africa put the German wireless stations in the South West African territory out of action was likely to be met with favourable response. It was, but not by all as this paper will set out.In 1914, South Africa as a country was only four years old and was still trying to heal the wounds caused by the Anglo-Boer or South African War of 1899-1902. The Union Defence Force (UDF) was even younger, having been approved in 1912. Where the Union had already had a number of years to develop, the UDF was in effect starting from zero.

A representação dos agricultores familiares em espaços institucionais de participação social no sudoeste do Paraná - Brasil

This study aims to present a research on the representation of family farmers process at institutional spaces of social participation. Data were obtained from City Council for Rural Development of Itapejara d’Oeste and Vitorino and Management Group of Southwest Territory of Parana. These spaces, which are institutional spaces originated from the process of decentralization of state institutions and effort to develop civil society participation in state management, determine the emergence of a differentiated process of representation, played by representatives of different social groups present in these spaces. The representation is analysed considering two dimensions: the representatives representativeness and the representatives ability to intervene in the several spaces. The research shows that different configurations of spaces, trajectories of representatives and associative trajectories of municipalities and region alter the process of representation from the distinction of the profiles of the representatives, the forms of relationship between representatives and the represented and how their own institutional spaces of social participation are identified with the associative conformations of family farmers in the territory.

The Failure of Popular Sovereignty: Slavery, Manifest Destiny, and the Radicalization of Southern Politics by Christopher Childers (review)

The Failure of Popular Sovereignty: Slavery, Manifest Destiny, and the Radicalization of Politics. By Christopher Childers. (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2012. Pp. 334. Cloth, $39. 95.)Reviewed by Amy S. GreenbergChristopher Childers has written the first monograph tracing the evolution of the concept of popular sovereignty from the establishment of the Southwest Territory in 1790 through the start of the Civil War. Most analyses of territorial expansion date the origins of popular sovereignty to the 1840s. But this latest offering from the University of Kansas Press series American Political Thought makes a compelling case that the idea as employed in the 1840s was the product of decades of debate and constitutional interpretation. The author argues that territorial expansion was a southern ideal as early as the 1780s, and that because territorial self-government, prior to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, always resulted in the expansion of slave territory, both northerners and southerners understood the idea as explicitly proslavery.With the northern appropriation of the concept in the 1840s, however, a crucial schism emerged over the point at which a territory became imbued with sovereignty. Northerners like Lewis Cass and Stephen A. Douglas declared that settlers, acting through their territorial legislature, could decide on the status of slavery when they wished, while southerners maintained that the status of slavery could only be determined upon the drafting of a state constitution. Doughfaces embraced popular sovereignty in the hopes of appeasing the South, but the resulting crisis, Childers argues, destroyed the bisectional Democratic Party, removed the South from the political mainstream of the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian era, and fostered the growth of a virulently radical form of southern politics designed to uphold states' rights (4). The author asserts that this crisis over popular sovereignty, rather than any of the other divisions of the era, became the key wedge dividing North and South. Sectionalism and the issue of Southern rights exploded over popular sovereignty before a drop of blood was shed in Kansas.Both the methodology and sources employed here-by and large public utterances of nationally prominent politicians and newspaper editors-are extremely traditional. This is not to say that the analysis is outdated. Although heavily influenced by David M. Potter's The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (New York, 1961), Childers is fully conversant in the relevant recent secondary literature, particularly works by Michael Morrison, Matthew Mason, and John Craig Hammond. Indeed The Failure of Popular Sovereignty ofi ers a novel interpretation of the role of slavery in territorial expansion. Popular sovereignty, the author argues, became the South's true manifest destiny.The great strength of this work is its narrative. The author links discrete moments together in a manner that highlights the continuity of a particular strain of political thought. The first chapter of the work, which traces the idea and practice of popular sovereignty in the early American territories, is perhaps the most illuminating. Childers convincingly shows that southerners never respected the Northwest Ordinance's ban on slavery, but instead assumed that the states created in the territory would ultimately determine the status of slavery within their boundaries. Clearly many of the settlers in Illinois and Indiana did not consider the Northwest Ordinance's ban on slavery as final, and the author does a wonderful job placing the continued presence of slaves in Illinois and Indiana in the larger context of popular sovereignty. Nor were questions of self-government resolved at later points: They arose every time the United States added territory to the nation. …

Slavery, Freedom and Expansion in the Early American West (review)

Slavery, Freedom and Expansion in Early American West. By John Craig Hammond. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007. Pp. 245. Cloth, $39.50.)Reviewed by Gwynne Langley RiversIn John Craig Hammond's Slavery, Freedom and Expansion in Early American West, debate over politics of slavery is moved out of Washington and into territories of Louisiana Purchase and Northwest Territory. Hammond traces debates over slavery in Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois from passage of Northwest Ordinance in 1790 until Missouri Crisis in 1820. As these states were admitted into Union, each contended with question of whether to allow slavery within their borders. Hammond argues that decisions made in local political arenas were far more important in securing nation as a slaveholder's republic than any laws passed in Congress. Because federal was rather weak and overextended in early republic, ample room was left for legislators and advocates in territories to lobby for proslavery legislation that would take effect when territories were admitted as states. Further, proslavery legislation was seen as critical to process of western expansion long before Missouri Controversy brought it to national attention. In spite of antislavery Article VI of Northwest Ordinance, Congress did not pass similar restrictions in Southwest Territories due in part to the weaknesses of federal . . . that greatly amplified influence that westerners could exercise over federal government (11). Because of this imbalance, proslavery settlers in Southwest Territories were able to advance their cause. The federal was more concerned with expanding settlement in West, and in many cases saw proslavery legislation as price they had to pay to continue course of expansion.Hammond therefore argues for a recentering of our about slavery debate. Instead of focusing on limited debates in Washington, important conversations happened in territories among westerners. The Washington-centric historiography produces a distorted understanding (5) of reasons why slavery was federally sanctioned and its expansion was not checked. By refocusing attention on territories themselves, Hammond demonstrates that securing nation as a slaveholder's republic was not done through a process of neglect, but instead was due to westerners' advocacy for proslavery laws. Hammond claims that this process of allowing each territory to decide question independently led directly to Missouri Controversy and ability of southern politicians to argue that slavery was both necessary and permanent by 1820.Hammond further claims that while Washington politicians could do little about deciding question of slavery, they were not indifferent to issue, and northerners did not leave debates to southern representatives. Instead of dismissing petitions from Indiana to repeal Article VI of Northwest Ordinance, Congress referred them to committees, where they were discussed but later tabled. This action, Hammond contends, goes against traditional view that House was in control of southerners, and instead he argues that northern politicians chose their battles carefully and were intent on preserving slavery in areas where it was possible, as in Indiana and Illinois (109). …

Juan de Colonia and the west façade of Burgos Cathedral: 1442-1458

In the early 1440s, the west facade of Burgos Cathedral consisted of the three lower storeys and, at the least, part of today’s fabric of the fourth storey of the south tower. The cathedral had had this form since the last third of the thirteenth century, when the project of the facade construction had been abandoned. The bishop of Burgos, don Alonso de Cartagena (1435-1456), initiated the continuation of its construction in 1442 with the support of the cathedral chapter and civil authorities. Juan de Colonia (†1481) was the master builder who finished the construction of the facade in 1458 with the elevation of two openwork spires. The design of the Burgos spires consists of motifs and ideas that come from several tower projects of the southwest territories of the Empire. Nevertheless, the design of the Burgos spires is singular compared with coeval spire projects. The construction of the spires was integrated into the design of a project the purpose of which was to complete a work of architecture that h...

The Power to Undo Sin: Race, History and Literary Blackness in Rilla Askew's Fire in Beulah

Historically, the Southwest has been a place where cultural tension exists between the extremes of assimilation and outright genocidal conquest. Such tension has proved to be fertile ground for both fiction writers and historians, who continue to reconstruct these cultural interchanges by positing what can be known of the real past. Fiction writers like Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry, Dagoberto GiIb, Rudolfo Anaya, Leslie Marmon Silko, Linda Hogan, Louis Owens, M. Scott Momaday, William Humphrey and others, to some extent undermine the mythical assumptions of a great open Southwest territory, destined to be a newfound paradise for the white race. To do so, these writers understand the interpretive potential of historical analysis, frequently using it to subvert the sentimental notions of white supremacy still hung over from the days of Manifest Destiny. These writers create realistic plots, employing authentic dialogue, violent scenes and venerable references to the timeless landscape.A relatively new writer, Rilla Askew, follows the lead of fellow southwestern and western novelists who demythologize the assumptions of white power structures on the frontier. Her themes of racial and ecological tension are commensurate with similar issues found throughout American history of the southwest. Askew, a native Oklahoman, has set her first two novels, The Mercy Seat (1997) and Fire in Beulah (2001), in the landscape, a landscape that in no small way determines the actions of her characters. The Mercy Seat is set in pre-statehood, Indian Territory while Fire in Beulah is set in 1921, fourteen years after statehood, its plot climaxing with the historical event of the Tulsa race riot. In various interviews, Askew has made it clear that one of her purposes for writing is to convey a sense of accuracy about the shameful racial of in hopes that a reconciliation between white and non-white peoples might occur. For example, she tells Brad Gambill:My perspective on history has changed tremendously. Part of what has happened in this nation, especially for us as whites, is that we have tried to shut the door on all that. We have tried to say that it's in the past. Why don't they get a life? Why can't they let that go? What's happened is that we have never owned it, we have never dealt with it. In biblical terms, we've never repented of slavery and genocide, the slavery and genocide with which this nation was formed, and until we do, we can't talk about this. We can't get it. Things won't change. (Askew 2001, 113)Additionally, she has said, Oklahoma is a microcosm of the nation. Our state history is a microcosm of what's happened on the whole continent. We can't separate it from the past (2001, 114). In a yet-to-be published essay she explains:In language and history and culture, is such an extreme distillation of what has taken place on this continent over the last five hundred years that it is nearly unrecognizable to the rest of the nation. Too Southern to be Midwestern, too Western to be Southern, too Midwestern to be purely Southwest, has kept the secret of its identity as a chameleon does. To the degree we've been seen by outsiders at all, it's been in stereotype-Curly and Laurie, the Joads, tornadoes and trailer trash, cowboys and Indians, dust: worn one-dimensional sketches which we ourselves have been too willing to adopt. (Askew 2005, 4)Askew sees the implications of her fiction reaching farther than just a local story.Askew's philosophical assumptions are Christian, and this somewhat sets her apart from many other contemporary writers of literary fiction. She overtly uses the terms and sin, yet her story is neither sentimental nor evangelistic. She weaves these Christian terms into a realistic narrative that challenges any presupposed notion of their efficacy. At the end of the novel, it is still unclear to what extent repentance occurs within the main character, Althea. …

Trakų vaivadijos genezė

The present article is aimed at an analysis of political – administrative structures in Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The Dukes Stakys and Živinbudas, mentioned in a source before the Grand Duke of Lithuania, could have been brothers. Their patrimonial estates were Lithuania (proper mean) and Kernavė. Terra Lithuania (in proper mean) was the patrimony of Mindaugas. Later Kernavė was the domain of Traidenis. Irrefutable is Mindaugas’ relationship with Stakys and Traidenis’ relationship with Živinbudas. When Mindaugas’ family died out, the rule of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was in the hands of Mindaugas’ relatives at least until 1285. The domain of Gediminaičiai was Mindaugas’ and Traidenis’ domains. Trakai became the second most important centre at the end of the 13th century. After the intensification of fights in the west, Lithuania changed its tradition and Trakai became the first most important centre until 1323, when Vilnius became the capital of the Grand Duchy. Kernavė lost its importance and Trakai was ruled by the second man of the hierarchy. The Duke of Trakai was responsible for the southwest territories. Gardinas was dependent on the Duke of Trakai. Its ruler was Dovydas Gardiniškis and later – his son Patrikas. Kęstutis made Gardinas the patrimony of Vytautas, who after 1413 annexed it to the Trakai lands. The system of Panemunės Castles was a part of the Duke’s domain. However, long-lasting fights with the Order was the reason why the system of Panemunės Castles was not annexed to Trakai Vaivadija (district) in 1413. The Vóivòde District of Trakai contained all the lands of Kęstutaičiai, except Naugardukas and Panemunė.

Local Origins of National Indian Policy: Cherokee and Tennessean Ideas about Sovereignty and Nationhood, 1790-1811

A series of remarkable phenomena marked the bitter last years of the two-decade intermittent conflict between the Cherokees and the pioneers in the Tennessee region. Chronicled by the Knoxville Gazette, numerous frontiersmen recounted attacks against them by Indians in which bullets passed through their clothes without touching their flesh. The first published account in 1792 originated in eastern Tennessee when a man hunting horses related that a party of Indians fired on him. Four balls passed through his clothes and shattered his powder horn without injuring him. Over the next several years, settlers described numerous similar occurrences throughout the territory. This bizarre chain of events terminated in 1796 when Oconostotee, a Cherokee chief, responded to the Gazette that the settlers attacked the Cherokees. The white men removed and fired into their own clothing to establish self-defense in order to escape prosecution by the national government, which was pressuring the frontier people to keep the peace under the federal treaties.1Oconostotee's letter and the Gazette's publication of his rebuttal revealed significant tensions in the tripartite relationship between the Cherokees, Tennesseans, and the federal government-frictions generated by different ideas about Indian policy, Cherokee sovereignty, and nationhood. This article explores the ideas and assumptions underlying the construction by the Cherokees and the settlers of their relationship with the United States from the organization of the Southwest Territory in 1790 and the recognition of statehood in 1796 until the advent of the War of 1812. My focus is on local perceptions and the robust ways in which these ideas informed and were transformed by events. I study federal thought only inasmuch as it impacted or was influenced by Cherokee or settler formulations.Historians narrate a story about Indian policy from the formation of the American nation through removal in the 1830s in which federal officials are the lead and (especially in the earlier period) almost the only actors. In these accounts, the United States originated and implemented a policy that aimed to civilize Indians. The national government entered into treaties with Indian tribes as separate political entities but believed that they would soon be absorbed into the superior white society. When this failed to occur, pressure grew to appropriate Indian lands. In response to state aggression on Indian jurisdiction in the 1830s, Chief Justice John Marshall, a Federalist, judicially recognized partial Indian sovereignty. Granting the states the right to determine policy about Indians in their jurisdiction, Democratic President Andrew Jackson refused to enforce Marshall's rulings and permitted removal of the eastern Indians to the region west of the Mississippi.2The traditional narrative neglects the role played by transmontane local parties-both aboriginal peoples and settlers-in promulgating ideas about sovereignty and nationhood that informed federal policy. Writing primarily from the perspective of the northwestern tribes, Native-American students generally conclude that the decline of European influence in the United States in the 1790s terminated the ability of the aboriginal peoples to play off one European power against another and foreshadowed their decline. This finding inadvertently discourages examination of the intellectual formulations by Indians of the connection between the first peoples and the national government.3 Meanwhile, most students of the trans-Appalachian West have overlooked the contentious development of nationalism among the settlers in this region. Writers have studied the internal political strife associated with moving into statehood, but few have examined the difficulties of the larger adjustment between the national and local governments. The federal government's handling of Indian affairs was the cause of much of this friction.4 Scholars have further overlooked the connection between these local ideas about nationalism and theories about Indian sovereignty. …

Continental Divides: Revisioning American Literature by Anne E. Goldman

BOOK REVIEWS 1 1 7 apparent in the reading of a Wasco tale in which a competent warrior’s spirit animal rebukes and leaves him after his father pushes him to hunt excessively (84-85). The story reveals that what Ramsey calls the “ecological imagina­ tion” is a fundamental component of the culture of tribal groups, a component that members of the contemporary West would do well to incorporate. Ramsey shows that even the Le Petit Jean tales of French-Canadian voyageurs and Bible stories of missionaries are absorbed and reworked to conform to the cul­ ture of their tellers. Most important to those who would like to teach or study oral stories, however, is Ramsey’s concluding chapter, which serves as an excellent primer on how to avoid some of the many critical mistakes that have entrapped casual readers and advanced scholars alike. Needless to say, Ramsey’s book is a worth­ while read, if not model, for the field. Continental Divides: Revisioning American Literature. By Anne E. Goldman. New York: Palgrave, 2000. 208 pages, $45.00. Reviewed by Andrea Tinnemeyer Utah State University, Logan The ambitious undertaking of Continental Divides is nothing short of un­ settling New England as the cultural, geographic, and literary center of the United States. Goldman models the kind of scholarship she advocates: con­ sidering Henry? James and Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton in light of both authors’ treatment of Boston, placing the Mexican American War alongside the Civil War, highlighting the western experience of an African American author. What results is a more complex, nuanced set of readings that are the­ matically linked by issues of regionality and mobility. Goldman calls for more flexible models in our imaginings of U.S. literature that permit a careful analy­ sis of the West, which she terms a “third geographical register” (xvi). As a third space, the West exposes the limitations of all Manichean binaries: North/South, Black/White, upper class/laboring class. A t the heart of Goldman’s text is a well-placed and carefully crafted metaphor: the continental divide, a more organic image of the nation-space, intent on displacing the primacy, historical legacy, and limiting scope of race relations invoked by the Mason-Dixon line. Goldman defines the nature of her methodology in the following: [EJxpose one stress point and watch as this hairline break runs and splits, breaking into different channels, connecting up with other divides only to be carved deeper in its turn: the heavy incursions of nonnative Californians in the wake of the railroad and the Gold Rush, the difficulty of defining what constitutes the nation with “foreigners” WAL 37.1 SPRING 2002 on two different coasts, the pressure of movements for suffrage and labor, the economic transition to what the nineteenth century called “speculation.” (118) Tracing fractures and fissures at once denaturalizes the linear divisions of civ­ ilization moving west from the eastern seaboard, multiplies lines of regional and racial differences beyond the Mason-Dixon line and implicitly argues for the centrality of the West in the literature and culture of the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Goldman’s readings of seemingly unlikely pairings (Gertrude Atherton and Pauline Hopkins, Willa Cather and Owen Wister) force readers to consider the interconnectedness between regions. She argues particularly for the influence of the Southwest, the Mexican War, and the Gold Rush in the national imaginary, tracing out novels that draw on, substi­ tute, cross-dress, and otherwise play out national tensions on the Southwest territory, the land taken from Mexico in 1848. This focus on the Southwest is by no means reductive: she demonstrates how this landscape, its history and inhabitants, impact African Americans, Jews, Anglo-Europeans, as well as Native Americans and Mexican Americans. Ultimately, Goldman puts forth a compelling and complex argument that models the kind of scholarship that it calls for: interregional studies enriched in both scope and content through metaphors of mobility (tourism, Mexican War, train travel, migration, Gold Rush, forced removals, immigration), each ofwhich has its own regional, racial, gendered, and class dynamics. Continental Divides is an invitation to American studies and western scholars to examine relationships and interconnectedness in the way one studies a...