The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child
Carolyn L. Karcher
Published: (1998) 1994 Pages: 844 Illustrations: 10 b&w photographs
Cloth: ISBN: 0-8223-1485-1 Price: $37.95tr Paper: ISBN: 0-8223-2163-7 Price: $22.95tr
Indian Nation: Native American Literature and Nineteenth-Century Nationalisms
Cheryl Walker
Indian Nation documents the contributions of Native Americans to the notion of American nationhood and to concepts of American identity at a crucial, defining time in U.S. history. Departing from previous scholarship, Cheryl Walker turns the "usual" questions on their heads,
asking not how whites experienced indigenous peoples, but how Native Americans envisioned the United States as a nation. This project unfolds a narrative of participatory resistance in which Indians themselves sought to transform the discourse of nationhood.
Walker examines the rhetoric and writings of nineteenth-century Native Americans, including William Apess, Black Hawk, George Copway, John Rollin Ridge, and Sarah Winnemucca. Demonstrating with unique detail how these authors worked to transform venerable myths and icons of American identity, Indian Nation chronicles Native American participation in the forming of an American nationalism in both published texts and in speeches that were delivered throughout the United States. Pottawattomie Chief Simon Pokagon's "The Red Man's Rebuke," an important document of Indian oratory, is published here in its entirety for the first time since 1893.
By looking at this writing through the lens of the best theoretical work on nationality, postcoloniality, and the subaltern, Walker creates a new and encompassing picture of the relationship between Native Americans and whites. She shows that, contrary to previous studies, America in the nineteenth century was intercultural in significant ways. A groundbreaking contribution to American studies, Indian Nation will be welcomed by Native American and American literature scholars as well as by specialists across a range of disciplines interested in questions of nationalism and postcolonialism.
Cheryl Walker is Richard Armour Professor of Modern Languages and Director of the Humanities Institute at Scripps College. She is the author of The Nightingale's Burden: Women Poets and American Culture Before 1900.
New Americanists
264 pages, 6 b&w photographs
6 x 9 trim size
ISBN 0-8223-1944-6
paper, $16.95
Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769-1803
Kimberly S. Hanger
During Louisiana's Spanish colonial period, economic, political, and military conditions combined with local cultural and legal traditions to favor the growth and development of a substantial group of free blacks. In Bounded Lives, Bounded Places, Kimberly S. Hanger explores the origin of antebellum New Orleans' large, influential, and propertied free black--or libre--population, one that was unique in the South. Hanger examines the issues libres confronted as they individually and collectively contested their ambiguous status in a complexly stratified society.
Drawing on rare archives in Louisiana and Spain, Hanger reconstructs the world of late-eighteenth-century New Orleans from the perspective of its free black residents, and documents the common experiences and enterprises that helped solidify libres' sense of group identity. Over the course of three and a half decades of Spanish rule, free people of African descent in New Orleans made their greatest advances in terms of legal rights and privileges, demographic expansion, vocational responsibilities, and social standing. Although not all blacks
in Spanish New Orleans yearned for expanded opportunity, Hanger shows that those who did were more likely to succeed under Spain's dominion than under the governance of France, Great Britain, or the United States.
The advent of U.S. rule brought restrictions to both manumission and free black activities in New Orleans. Nonetheless, the colonial libre population became the foundation for the city's prosperous and much acclaimed Creoles of Color during the antebellum era. For its insights into questions of slavery and social identity, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places will be welcomed by scholars in the fields of Latin American history, African American studies, and southern history.
Kimberly S. Hanger is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tulsa.
256 pages, 4 photographs, 20 tables
6 x 9 trim size
ISBN 0-8223-1898-9
paper, $16.95
ISBN 0-8223-1906-3
library cloth edition, $49.95
December 4, 1999