Treatment Of Native Americans Research Articles

Saul Bellow in Utah: “Leaving the Yellow House”

ABSTRACT Saul Bellow wrote “Leaving the Yellow House” with a setting in Utah although it is based on his sojourn in Nevada in 1955 and 1956. The location at Sego Desert Lake is historically significant in relation to the theme, which concerns economic networks of exchange, notably gift exchange (potlatch). Central to the narrative is the treatment of native Americans, past and present, and the gifts they gave to the early Mormon settlers, which rebounded upon them. The protagonist, a self-styled pioneer who relies on gifts that come back to haunt her, is a woman and one of the few in Bellow’s fiction to turn her back on money and status and negotiate an identity outside intellectual and material frames.

Riding East—Western Myths, Nostalgia, and the Crossing of Generic Boundaries in Hidalgo (2004)

<i>Riding East</i>—Western Myths, Nostalgia, and the Crossing of Generic Boundaries in <i>Hidalgo</i> (2004)

Decolonization in Practice

Fundamental to Kari Marie Norgaard's Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People is the seizure of land most evident in the overtly violent era of state-sanctioned frontier genocide and forced relocation of the Karuk. Settler colonialism, Norgaard reminds us, is an ongoing state-led project up to this day—it is not just a moment relegated to the past and, thus, the inherent treatment of Native Americans as relics of U.S. history must be challenged.

Representations of Native Americans in Adamic’s Writing on (New) Immigrants

This article presents an overview of the attention Louis Adamic dedicated to Native Americans in various written works and public engagements and compares it with his writing on new immigrants in the light of his understanding of the importance of the preservation of immigrants’ identity and issues of integration and nation-building as they relate to American identity. The article also explores the views on interculturaland interethnic relationships in the United States that Adamic drew on in his treatment of Native Americans. Three works in particular will be analyzed: My America (1938), From Many Lands (1940), and A Nation of Nations (1945). The main finding is that Adamic does not deal as extensively with issues related to indigenous Americans as he does with those related to European immigrants. Nevertheless, Adamic does notcompletely neglect “the Indian story”. In some of his works, most extensively in A Nation of Nations, he specifically compares this story to the (problematic) position of African Americans in an American space that was colonized either “by sword or by book”.

"Better Dead than Red:" The Treatment of Native Americans in the Southwest during the Cold War

"Better Dead than Red:" The Treatment of Native Americans in the Southwest during the Cold War

Teaching Collegiate Ethics in a Nation with Laws that Permit Mutilation of the Unborn

&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The devaluing of life through abortion has a detrimental effect on the ethical decision-making processes of a nation of people. Encouraging college students to make ethical decisions in a nation with legalized abortion is challenging. Laws that permit women to have a voluntary abortion are in direct conflict with ethical decision-making. The consequences of decades of abortion in the United States are staggering. Approximately one abortion is performed for every five live births. Over 58,000,000 babies have been aborted in the United States since 1973, when the Supreme Court found that women have the “constitutional right” to have an abortion before “fetal” viability. The authors compared the current abortion law to other “black eyes” in the United States’ history including: slavery, the Separate But Equal doctrine, the treatment of Native Americans, and oppressive child labor. This paper then introduces a four-step ethical decision making model and a “toolbox” of questions that students may use when analyzing ethical issues. &lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime That Should Haunt America by Gary Clayton Anderson

Reviewed by: Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime That Should Haunt America by Gary Clayton Anderson Ashley Sousa Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime That Should Haunt America. By Gary Clayton Anderson. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014. Pp. [x], 462. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8061-4421-4.) In Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime That Should Haunt America, Gary Clayton Anderson argues that colonial and United States policies toward and treatment of Native Americans were not genocidal, but are instead better understood as ethnic cleansing. Anderson examines the Indian policies of the British North American colonies and the United States from 1607 to the end of the allotment era, drawing on dozens of episodes to support his argument that Euro-Americans, from colonial governors to presidents and frontier settlers, pursued ethnic cleansing as a consistent, stated Indian policy. [End Page 135] Anderson’s argument is strongest where he shows, in painstaking detail, a centuries-long effort by colonists and American citizens, by means fair and foul, to strip Indians of their land. He ably illustrates this effort across different eras of Indian policy and regions of what is now the continental United States. Whether this constitutes a policy of ethnic cleansing is less clear, as he offers no definition of ethnic cleansing beyond mentioning the prohibition of forced deportation and relocation of populations under international law. His argument would benefit from drawing more on the theoretical scholarship on genocide and ethnic cleansing. On the question of genocide his intervention is less convincing, owing to inconsistencies in how he defines genocide. Anderson calls the legal definition of genocide—the one set out in the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide—a “dead letter” because it allows too many crimes and perpetrators to fall under its definition (p. 4). He relies on the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court as the standard against which to characterize violence against native peoples because he contends that for violence to be considered genocide, “a legitimate government must plan, organize, and implement the crime” (p. 13). Even with this narrower scope, he adds his own criteria to further refine the definition, maintaining that no genocide could have been perpetrated against native peoples because “large numbers of Indians survived” (p. 4)—a criterion inconsistent with the legal definition. Anderson’s argument is also confused by his inconsistent definition of “Indians.” In some cases, he treats native peoples as one group, which allows him to emphasize the large number of Indian survivors of white violence. This has the effect of diminishing the severity of violence perpetrated against Indian people while treating them as a monolithic group rather than as hundreds of distinct societies that engaged and experienced colonialism differently. In other cases, he argues that the deaths of specific groups in particular episodes of violence “hardly equal the numbers of those killed under other regimes,” suggesting that the murder of a few hundred or few thousand people does not constitute genocide (p. 217). Scholars familiar with particular regions or episodes covered in the book might take issue with Anderson’s use of evidence in certain cases. For example, in his discussion of California’s Indian policy, he fails to account for the explicitly genocidal rhetoric espoused by the state’s political leadership, including at least two governors, as well as their funding of militias bent on exterminating Indians. Such omissions cast doubt on his conclusion that “there is no evidence that any state or federal governmental entity ever supported” the actions of California militias that planned to exterminate the Indian population (p. 217). As an intervention into the growing field of scholarship on the question of genocide in North America, Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian deserves the attention of scholars in the field, as well as those teaching courses in the field of Native American history that grapple with the genocide question. Whether or not readers agree with Anderson’s conclusions, his arguments and evidence will surely provoke lively conversations. [End Page 136] Ashley Sousa Middle Tennessee State University Copyright © 2016 The Southern Historical Association

Methodism in the American Forest

In tracing the development of Methodist open air preaching in America, Russell Richey covers some ground already trodden in some of his previous books, notably Early American Methodism (1991). However in this new work, the backdrop of forests and glades is examined not just as location but as an agent for identity formation and a potential resource for theological reflection, albeit one that that Richey laments is under-utilized by both nineteenth-century pioneers and twentieth-century denominational consolidators.Richey begins by looking at Wesley's own practice of outdoor preaching before examining the adaptation of the resulting Methodist discipline for the American context. Some fascinating accounts follow from early American itinerants, and from these, Richey posits the idea of woodland as preaching place being tamed into ‘cathedral’ (shady grove) and resorted to for confession (garden).He then traces the augmentation of quarterly meetings by the introduction of camp meetings at the turn of the nineteenth century. Gathering in forest clearings, it was often possible, as in few places else, for racial mixing to take place, and Richey gives absorbing insights into many roles camp meetings played in the antebellum period in the divisions of American Methodism over issues of slavery and the treatment of Native Americans, as well as the development of institutional ecclesiology, all of which led to the emergence of rival Methodisms organizing their own outdoor gatherings.Following the Civil War, camp meetings and their settings became domesticated in a number of ways. Martha's Vineyard camp meeting had begun in 1835, but by the 1860s it developed into Wesleyan Grove, a permanent camp ground that Richey describes as a vocation-friendly ‘heavenly home, a resting place, a religious colony’ (160). Both in the rise of The National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness and in the Chautauqua education programme meetings, the emphasis became focused not on the conversion of those outside the faith but the improvement of those within it, either through entire sanctification or more instruction. Here, Richey claims, the taming of the great outdoors into permanent camp grounds consolidated a growing division between evangelical and liberal approaches to Christian discipleship which continues in the United Methodist Church and elsewhere today.Richey's book is a thoroughly absorbing and welcome exploration of a subject which, as he himself acknowledges, has been comparatively under-recorded or analysed since Charles A. Johnson's The Frontier Camp Meeting: Religion's Harvest Time in 1955. Most of the minor criticisms I have of Richey's book arise from being a British reader. It would have been very useful to have had the inclusion of a map and illustrations, particularly in the treatment of the establishment of permanent camp grounds toward the end of the book. A separate bibliography would have been invaluable, too, in order to follow up more easily on Richey's many sources. Also, James M. Buckley, whose A History of Methodists in the United States Richey refers to, does not attribute the origin of the British connexion which became established in the United States in 1840 as ‘Lorenzo Dow's Primitive Methodists’ (171), even though Buckley does repeatedly get William Clowes's name wrong!Perhaps Richey's most original claim is that early American Methodism missed an opportunity in not reflecting upon its sylvan ministry to develop a lived Wesleyan creation theology. Here it would have been helpful to have had contemporaneous examples from other traditions to avoid reading back from a twenty-first-century perspective what such theologizing might have looked like in the service of itinerant evangelistic ministry in the early nineteenth century. If Richey's appendix, giving entries of ‘John Wesley Preaching under Trees and in Groves’ from his Journal, is anything to go by, there is little indication that the British countryside impacted much upon Wesley's theological understanding of his preaching ministry as he documented it. In this outlook at least, his earliest American preachers seem to have followed his lead without adaptation.

Charles Lenox Sargent’s Life of Alexander Smith : Imagining Indian Removal in the South Pacific

The Boston sea captain Charles Lenox Sargent’s 1819 novel, The Life of Alexander Smith , retells the founding story of Pitcairn, a small island in the South Pacific settled by H.M.S. Bounty ’s mutineers and their Polynesian companions. Sargent’s version of the tale departs significantly from other accounts concurrently circulating in England and America: he eliminates the violence and death reported to have occurred and inserts an idealized narrative of ‘‘Indian’“ (what the narrator calls male Pacific Islanders) removal and population management. The novel has been neglected by scholars of the early United States, perhaps because of its departures from the accepted narrative of Pitcairn history, but in this essay I argue that these deviations are the source of the novel’s value. Sargent’s erasure of violence from the Pitcairn story naturalizes Indian removal policies by reproducing them on a distant island and shows the way forward for American expansionism—into the Pacific—well before the United States extended its legal boundaries to what would become its continental West Coast. Reassessing The Life of Alexander Smith advances our understanding of the relationship between the United States’ treatment of Native Americans and its push into the Pacific; the use of islands as test cases for American political and expansionist experiments; and the ways in which early U.S. literary culture articulated the terms of nascent American imperial aspirations.

Take Up Your Pen: Unilateral Presidential Directives in American Politics. By Graham G.Dodds. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. 309 pp.

Take Up Your Pen: Unilateral Presidential Directives in American Politics. By Graham G. Dodds. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. 309 pp. Writing in the Notre Dame Lawyer in 1963, a young law student by the name of Robert B. Cash observed that history of executive orders is, to a great extent, a narrative of the evolution of presidential power. Graham G. Dodds' impressive book, Take Up Your Pen: Unilateral Presidential Directives in American Politics, shows how correct Cash was. Over the past two decades there has been no shortage of scholarly attention to unilateral presidential directives. During President George W. Bush's tenure, four fine books by political scientists were published: Kenneth Mayer's With the Stroke of Pen: Executive Orders and Presidential Power (Princeton University Press, 2001), Phillip Cooper's By Order of the President: The Use and Abuse of Executive Direct Action (University Press of Kansas, 2002), William Howell's Power without Persuasion: The Politics of Direct Presidential Action (Princeton University Press, 2003), and Adam Warber's Executive Orders and the Modern Presidency: Legislating from the Oval Office (Lynn Rienner, 2006). However, each of these books, in keeping with most presidency research, focuses on the post-Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) presidency. What sets Dodds' book apart is the careful attention he gives to the development of unilateral directives from the founding era through FDR. Of Dodds' six substantive chapters, only one is devoted to what most political scientists think of as the modern presidency: the post-WWII era to the present day. Of course, anyone with even a passing knowledge of American history has heard about the most famous nineteenth-century unilateral directives: Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, Andrew Jackson's Nullification Proclamation, and George Washington's Neutrality Proclamation. But Dodds' in-depth history takes us far beyond these well-known episodes of unilateral presidential action. In Chapter 3 (Judicial Sanction), he recounts the many unsung nineteenth- and early-twentieth century cases in which courts placed their stamp of approval on unilateral presidential directives--and in which they sometimes placed limits on what a president could do via executive action. The many cases that Dodds recounts occasionally make for tedious reading, but they amply support Dodds' contention that the judicial sanction of unilateral presidential directives helped pave the way for presidents' more expansive use of executive orders in the early twentieth century. Chapter 4 (Early Unilateral Presidential Directives) provides a fascinating sojourn through nineteenth-century presidential history. Dodds shows that on a wide range of domestic policy issues, including Reconstruction, the management of public lands, the treatment of Native Americans and Mormons, and labor disputes and domestic unrest, nineteenth-century presidents--especially after the Civil War--frequently resorted to unilateral executive action. Dodds' account is particularly helpful in dispelling the notion that these presidents were mere clerks (p. 119). Many of the executive orders were, of course, mundane--more housekeeping than policy making. But a number of the confrontations over executive orders have a decidedly modern ring. Take, for instance, Grover Cleveland's end-of-term proclamation in 1897 that set aside 21 million acres for forest in six western states, a move so unpopular in the West that Congress affixed a rider to an essential government funding bill to undo the president's action. Forced to choose between funding the federal government or preserving his forest reserves (p. 100), Cleveland opted for a government shutdown and pocket-vetoed the bill. Among William McKinley's first acts as president was to call Congress into session to repeal Cleveland's forest reserves. Not that McKinley objected to rule by executive action: in fact, by Dodds' count, McKinley issued executive orders more frequently than any of his predecessors, including Cleveland (p. …

Temperate Revenge: Religion, Profit, and Retaliation in 1622 Jamestown

My intemperate claim: the violence characterizing the treatment of native Americans by English settlers in the New World begins on 22 March 1622, the precise moment when temperance breaks its ethical mooring and sails into territory that once constituted its absolute negation. Jamestown began more propitiously. The Virginia Company of London received its charter from James I in 1606 and launched its first envoy to North America in December of that year. The first group of 104 “adventurers” completed their transatlantic voyage the following May, settling on a riverbank sixty miles from the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay (“History of Jamestown”). This New World endeavor would, of course, satisfy the Virginia Company’s pleonexia—first in the exportation of New World crops, which generated an enormous European appetite for novel luxury goods, and later in the slave trade, which infused natural and labor capital into the English economy. But early documents attest that the Virginia Company originally understood its mission as twofold: self-interested in its mercantile dimensions, but altruistic in its religious and political ones. The “Principall and Maine Ends” of “the hopefull Plantations begun in Virginia,” according to an official declaration issued in 1610, weare first to preach, & baptize into Christian Religion, and by propagation of that Gospell, to recover out of the armes of the Diuell, a number of poore and miserable soules, wrapt upp unto death, in almost invincible ignorance; to endeavour the fulfilling, and accomplishment of the number of the elect, which shall be gathered from out all corners of the earth; and to add our myte to the treasury of Heaven, that as we pray for the comming of the kingdome of glory, so to expresse in our actions, the same desire, if God have pleased, to use so weak instruments, to the ripening & consummation thereof. 1 (Conseil for Virginia, “A True and Sincere Declaration” 2–3)

Introduction

Abstract These four essays critique Ken Burns's PBS documentary series The National Parks: America's Best Idea. Burns has over the last several decades established himself as the central producer of PBS multi-part documentaries, addressing such topics as the Civil War, baseball, jazz, and World War II. National Park Service (NPS) leadership recognized the promotional opportunities for the NPS and aligned themselves closely with Burns and PBS. Critical discussion in the essays focuses in three areas: the treatment of Native Americans; the reverential treatment of “nature” in the national parks, and the distorted focus on the natural park in the West as the embodiment of the National Park system.

Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727–1834 , and: Divided Loyalties in a Doomed Empire: The French in the West from New France to the Lewis and Clark Expedition , and: In this Remote Country: French Colonial Culture in the Anglo–American Imagination, 1780–1860 (review)

Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727-1834. By Emily Clark. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Pp. 304. Cloth, $59.95.)Divided Loyalties in a Doomed Empire: The in the Westfront New France to the Lewis and Clark Expedition. By Daniel Royot. (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2007. Pp. 282. Cloth, $57.50.)In This Remote Country: Colonial Culture in the AngloAmerican Imagination, 1780-1860. By Edward Watts. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Pp. 288. Cloth, $59.95.)Reviewed by Darcy R. FryerWhen Thomas Jefferson negotiated to purchase Louisiana from Napoleonic France, he had two goals in mind: to sustain an economy grounded in small, owner-operated farms, and to guarantee American access to the Mississippi River and the port of New Orleans in perpetuity. Jefferson knew the land he was purchasing for the United States was not quite empty, and he admonished Lewis and Clark to document the indigenous presence in the regions they visited. But Jefferson had little to say about the enduring presence of Frenchmen and women in the same landscape. Like most Americans who had lived through the Seven Years' War, he probably envisioned the presence in North America primarily in the past tense. In fact, as the works of Daniel Royot, Emily Clark, and Edward Watts attest, attitudes, institutions, and Frenchdescended individuals were far from gone in the decades after France ceased to be a political power on the North American mainland.Daniel Royot's Divided Loyalties in a Doomed Empire is a straightforward account of life in Canada and the Illinois Country in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Royot vividly depicts the day-today life of coureurs de bois and their Metis offspring, arguing that the coureurs de bois, often deeply alienated from the colonial authorities and from their land of origin, existed somehow out of (63), while the Metis developed a culture characterized by resignation, stoicism, and fatalism (129). Royot's treatment of Native Americans, who are necessarily prominent figures in his account, seems oddly flat; his descriptions of torture and cannibalism, for example, sensationalize Indian violence without addressing why Native Americans engaged in these practices. The strength of the book lies largely in the detailed narrative. Here is the place to turn if one wants to know where an obscure Indian trader was living in 1 739 or why the Ottawa nation moved westward. In the later chapters, Royot returns again and again to questions such as How were the inhabitants of Upper Louisiana in 1803? (152) and How was Sacajawea? (175). His slightly hesitant answer to both questions is, not very. By the time the British conquered Canada, and certainly by the time that Thomas Jefferson dispatched the Lewis and Clark expedition westward, the French inhabitants of the North American interior spoke vernacular versions of that were over a century out of date and maintained only tenuous connections with the old country. The culture of North America, Royot suggests, became something other than wholly long before it came into contact with Anglo-American lifeways.In Masterless Mistresses, Emily Clark comes to a contrasting conclusion. Clark explores the development of the Ursuline Order of nuns, who arrived in New Orleans in 1727 and labored to educate Louisiana women of all races and social classes through the vicissitudes of French, Spanish, and American rule. As teaching nuns, the Ursulines challenged the medieval Catholic notion that religious women must be cloistered; as mistresses of real estate and slaves, they challenged the colonial equation of proprietorship with masculinity. Clark argues that and, to a lesser extent, Spanish authorities tolerated the Ursulines' autonomy because they understood its basis in a Catholic religious order; AngloProtestant authorities, on the other hand, struggled to reconcile the Ursulines' exercise of power with their belief that women exercised power most appropriately through republican wifehood and motherhood (4). …

The Truth Is on the Reservation: American Indians and Conspiracy Culture

Homeland security Fighting Terrorism Since 1492. - slogan on t-shirts, posters, and bumper stickers printed with image of Native American warriors As we enter the '90s, the FBI's slaughter of AIM militants has long since been completed and hidden from view. ... concerning the form and function of the FBI, things have never been OK. -Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, COINTELPRO Papers The history [of US treatment of Native Americans] is bad enough -there's no need to embellish it. - Russell Thornton to Scott Jaschik in New Ward Churchill Controversy, Inside Higher Ed American Indian conspiracy theories evoke particular sense of uneasiness in society built upon Native lands, phenomenon evident in the controversy surrounding Ward Churchill, writer, activist, academic, and self-identified Native American who has himself been denounced for spreading lies. For several decades, Churchill has been piecing together narrative of American history in which conspiratorial US government perpetuates crimes and covers them up with propaganda and lies. With Jim Vander Wall, he published two polemical exposes characterizing the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as government agency whose main function is not to fight crime-and thus keep Americans safe-but to actively repress political diversity through counterintelligence programs targeting Indians and other citizens: Agents of Repression: FBI's secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement and COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI's secret Wars Against Domestic Dissent. In addition to challenging the public image of the heroic G-man, Churchill has repeatedly flaunted the ugly g-word that undermines many cultural myths of America's founding: genocide. colonization of the Americas is explicitly linked to acts of genocide in the titles of full four of Churchill's books, most recently in A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present? Churchill's version of American history takes issue with the common understanding that the decimation of Native American populations by European diseases such as small pox was accidental and not part of larger conspiracy to commit genocide. Despite the controversial nature of this earlier writing, Churchill did not receive national attention until 2005 when the media noticed an essay he wrote on September 11, 2001, Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens. Whereas Churchill's books protesting govern ment-sponsored domestic terrorism and genocide failed to raise public outcry against him or the government, this article's invocation of Malcolm X's response to John F. Kennedy's assassination-it was merely case of 'chickens coming home to roost' -gained him instant notoriety. After protestors at Hamilton College cited the 9/11 essay to oppose the Kirkland Project Panel with Ward Churchill-scheduled for February 3, 2005 but officially cancelled due to threats of violence2 - media frenzy and national debate ensued. Churchill's writing and speeches had compared the United States to Nazi Germany in previous discussions of genocide without receiving much notice, but his description in this article of the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers evoked widespread indignation. reference stems from his argument that many of the workers at the World Trade Center were specifically targeted by terrorists as a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire, not as innocent civilians. attack, he contends, was retaliatory, strike back for years of oppressive US policies aided by the stockbrokers, lawyers, and government employees in the World Trade Center. Beyond blaming foreign policy for eliciting this strike, Churchill argues that many of the citizens who died were guilty of complicity: he connects government and civilian employees as coconspirators driven to protect their capitalist interests. …

Review of the Literature on Risk and Protective Factors of Offending Among Native Americans

The social and economic conditions faced by much of the Native American population, as well as the history and treatment of Native Americans in our society, create many risk factors for criminal offending. At the same time, however, the cultures, traditions, and spiritualities of Native American tribes likely provide unique protective factors against offending in light of these risks. While these issues, especially drug and alcohol abuse, have received considerable attention by a handful of scholars, the level of research on risk and protective factors of offending have not, although recent research and funding decisions are beginning to make this topic a priority. This paper provides a brief review of the literature on risk and protective factors among Native Americans, highlighting some of the major factors likely to receive the most research attention over the next several years.

Issues in the Treatment of Native Americans With Alcohol Problems

The author reviews the literature on the treatment of Native Americans who have alcohol abuse or dependence disorders and provides an interpretation of the research on this topic. The most common alcohol treatment modalities used with Native Americans are described and critiqued, including adapted versions of standard treatments. Several practiced recommendations are made regarding revising standard treatments to make them more culturally appropriate for Native Americans.

Superficiality and Bias: The (Mis)Treatment of Native Americans in U. S. Government Textbooks

Many of the problems facing Americans today stem from bias, stereotype, and basic misunderstanding on the part of non-Indians. As racist tendencies and generalizations begin at an early age, education and proper treatment in textbooks is essential in remedying the problem. However, education and learning do not end in one's teen years. Perceptions (both positive and negative) can be molded, reshaped, or solidified in later years. Thus, while adequate and accurate coverage of the role of Americans in the governmental system should be standard fare in college textbooks, it is not. In this paper we analyze the way in which issues are addressed in some of the leading government and democracy textbooks being used at the college level. Our examination considers the texts on two levels. First, we look at the amount of space devoted to Americans relative to other minority groups and between the federal government and other subnational units of government. An examination of index references and a simple word count should reveal where the priorities of various authors lie. (We assume that areas given greater weight by an author will be written upon more extensively.) Second, we examine the texts for any bias or the fostering of misunderstanding. For example, simply lumping Americans into a section on minority politics is inherently misinforming if the separate legal status of nations as well as individuals living in Country is not specified.' (By admission, our word count analysis appears to lean toward the same style of categorization but it is unavoidable since Americans are among the many ethnic minority groups in the United States; however, the term Indian or Native American also connotes a particular political or legal status). Other possible areas of bias include the discussion of tribes with regard to

Lost and Found Department: A Gilded Age President

Ari Hoogenboom's fine Rutherford B. Hayes: Warrior and President is the first full life of the nineteenth president since Harry Barnard's 1954 biography. Gracefully written and rich with quotations from Hayes's voluminous diaries and letters, Hoogenboomr's lengthy account offers a highly sympathetic portrait of both as a representative nineteenth-century American and as an effective politician. Contrary to most textbook images of the Gilded Age, Hoogenboom argues that Hayes's presidency strengthened the office and contributed to the evolution of twentieth-century American political institutions. Hoogenboom, thoroughly familiar with the rich literature of the past forty years on Reconstruction and Gilded Age politics, replaces Barnard as the historian's guide to Hayes's public life. Like Barnard, he makes the case for a president whose entire career, both as a candidate and chief executive, was awash in controversies-between sections, between president and Congress, between parties, and within his own GOP. Hoogenboom sees as a man committed to achieving as much political reform as the era and his party's needs would tolerate. author sympathetically assesses Hayes's role in the major issues of his presidency: the federal government's abandonment of the remaining Reconstruction governments in the South, the use of federal troops to end the nationwide railroad strike of 1877, the currency question, civil service reform, the treatment of Native Americans and Chinese Americans. Good arguments are made for the probity of Hayes's intentions, the moderation of his actions, and the political impossibility of achieving better results than he did. Also like Barnard, Hoogenboom begins his biography with Thomas Wolfe's invocation of Garfield, Arthur, Harrison, and Hayes as The Four Lost Men in his famous meditation-short story of that title in From Death to Morning (1935), a work that still challenges historians of the late nineteenth-

Articles and Publications

Articles and Publications Mary Ellen Chijioke and Claire B. Shetter Anniversaries always provoke publications. To honor William Penn's 350th, Jean R. Soderlund guest co-edited a special issue ofPennsylvania History (61.4: 1994). In "William Penn's Gentry Commonwealth: An Interpretation of the Constitutional History ofEarly Pennsylvania, 1681-1701" (pp. 393-428), Richard Alan Ryerson seeks a new understanding ofthe old problem ofhow Penn's initial enthusiasm for self-governance in his new province changed in such a short period into a defender of proprietorial privilege. The elements he uses for his synthesis are: seventeenth-century political theory, Gary Nash's 1968 book, Quakers and Politics, Pennsylvania, 1681-1726, and the economic and social bases of both Penn and the colonists. Alison Duncan Hirsch challenges traditional views of Gulielma and Hannah Penn in "A Tale of Two Wives: History and Mythmaking in the Lives ofGulielma and Hannah Penn" (pp. 429^156). In '"Good Will to all Men ... Fromthe King on the Throne to the Beggar on the Dunghill' : William Penn, the Roman Catholics, and Religious Toleration," Paul Douglas Newman draws upon the seventeenth-century distinction between liberty of conscience and toleration to explain Penn's support for toleration of Catholics under James II, despite his longstanding enmity towards "the Romish whore." To underscore the continuing fascination ofthe conflict between Penn and his colonists, Irma Corcoran presents another review in "William Penn and His Purchasers: Problems in Paradise" (Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 138.4 (1994): 476-486). In his assessment of "One Monumental Man" (Swarthmore College Bulletin 92.3 (1995): 10-15), J. William Frost seeks to get beyond Penn as cultural icon to evaluate his religious and cultural legacy. He finds four lasting contributions: the beliefthat there is no innate inconsistency in being a devout Christian and exercising political power; a demonstration that accepting diversity in religious faith need not lead to apathy about one's own religious commitment; his tolerance of differences, influenced by his treatment of Native Americans, which became a testimony of Friends everywhere in the U.S.; and his confidence that education and learning foster religion. Elsewhere in the seventeenth century, Richard G. Bailey's "Research Note on Judge Thomas Fell (1598-1658)" (The Journal ofthe Friends Historical Society 51A (1994): 1-4) described in detail what Fell's very important position of the Chancellor ofthe Duchy ofLancaster, 1654-58, meant in his own time. David L. Wykes examines the issues of why Quakers were included in the Toleration Act of 1689, despite Penn's identification with James II, and why they accepted its terms, despite their long-standing refusal to compromise with the state over matters of religion, then follows Quaker reaction to the operation of the Act to 1810. With a growing body of literature on seventeenth-century Quaker women, Margaret Hope Bacon's article "An International Sisterhood: Eighteenth-Century Quaker Women in Overseas Ministry" (The Friends ' Quarterly 28.5 (1995): 193206 ) reviews the experiences ofthe 31 British and 43 American Quaker women who crossed the Atlantic in ministry between 1700 and 1800. In "Further Thoughts on Leeds Friends and the Beaconite Controversy" (The Articles and Publications159 Journal ofthe Friends Historical Society 57.1 (1994): 57-73), Mark A. Ellison examines the role ofthe 1836 separation in Manchester in energizingthe evangelical tide in London Yearly Meeting. Edward H. Milligan discusses conservative resistance to that tide in the 185Os and 60s. The Christian basis of Quakerism continues to be a source of division among Friends. Based in part upon his own wide experience, Dean Freiday reviews the recenthistory of"Quakers, Ecumenism andthe WCC [WorldCouncil ofChurches]" (Ecumenical Review 46.4 (1994): 413-419). Not primarily historical in approach but bound to become a major source document for future historians is the full text ofthe Autumn 1991 Pendle Hill Lecture Series, Realignment: Nine Views Among Friends (Pendle Hill Occasional Paper). There is a wide range of new publications related to issues ofpeace and war. Meredith Baldwin Weddle examines the origins and early development of the Peace Testimony in her dissertation, "Walking in the Way of Peace: Quaker Pacifism in the Seventeenth Century" (Yale University, Ph.D., 1993). In Algie I. Newlin's "The Battle...

The Responsibility of Historians

During twenty years as an historian teaching Native American Studies at California State University, I have regularly required students to complete a specific research project: they must read or reread and analyze one university-level U.S. history text in current use, assessing the treatment of Native Americans, looking for both distortions and omissions. In this way I have followed U.S. history textbook development over two decades. In preparation for this panel I have read a number of new and revised textbooks and the commentaries published annually since 1992 in the Joumal of American History. My conclusion, in answer to the question posed for this panel—what has changed, what needs to change?—is that everything has changed and nothing has changed. The new textbooks include materials on the previously marginalized—Indians, Africans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Filipinos—who were forced into the United States project of wealth and empire building, as well as women, workers, socialists, pacifists, anti-imperialists—albeit mainly portraying them as victims, not actors. What has not changed, and why nothing has changed, is the essential origin myth.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.