“Western Zombies and Their Killers: Exceptionalism, the Empty West, and Mixed Race Families” a lecture by Dr. Anne Hyde

Posted in History, Live Events, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2014-11-15 17:59Z by Steven

“Western Zombies and Their Killers: Exceptionalism, the Empty West, and Mixed Race Families” a lecture by Dr. Anne Hyde

Colorado State University
Cherokee Park Ballroom, Lory Student Center
Fort Collins, Colorado
2014-12-04, 16:30-18:30 MST (Local Time)

Please join us for a public lecture and book signing/reception by Dr. Anne Hyde, William R. Hochman Professor of History at Colorado College. The title of her talk is drawn from her prize-winning book, Empires, Nations, and Families: The North American West, 1800-1860, which won the 2012 Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for a Pulitzer…

For more information, click here.

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“Hiding in Plain Sight: Mixed Blood Families and Race in the 19th-Century United States West”

Posted in Audio, History, Interviews, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2014-04-01 02:23Z by Steven

“Hiding in Plain Sight: Mixed Blood Families and Race in the 19th-Century United States West”

Public Radio Tulsa
Studio Tulsa
Tulsa, Oklahoma
2014-03-25

Rich Fisher, General Manager & Host

Our guest on ST is Anne Hyde, the William R. Hochman Professor of History at Colorado College. She’ll be giving the 2014 H.G. Barnard Distinguished Lecture, which is presented annually by the TU Department of History, tonight (Tuesday the 25th) at the Gilcrease Museum Auditorium here in Tulsa. The lecture begins at the 7pm and is free to the public. Prof. Hyde, who mainly teaches courses on the history of Native America as well as that of North America, received her A.B. degree in American Studies from Mount Holyoke College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in History from the University of California at Berkeley. She has published widely on the history of the American West, has served on editorial boards for the Pacific Historical Review and the Western Historical Quarterly, and has been elected to the Councils of the Western Historical Association and the American Historical Association. Her address at Gilcrease tonight is entitled “Hiding in Plain Sight: Mixed Blood Families and Race in the 19th-Century United States West” — and it’s derived from her book, “Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the North American West, 1800-1860.” A reviewer for the Western Quarterly Review has called this text: “Ingenious. A magnificent scholarly achievement. A sweeping new narrative account of [western] history. A book to ponder and plunder.”

Listen to or download the interview (00:28:58) here.

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Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860

Posted in Books, History, Monographs, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2014-04-01 01:35Z by Steven

Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860

University of Nebraska Press
2011
648 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8032-2405-6

Anne F. Hyde, William R. Hochman Professor of History
Colorado College

  • Winner of the 2012 Bancroft Prize
  • 2012 Pulitzer Prize Finalist

To most people living in the West, the Louisiana Purchase made little difference: the United States was just another imperial overlord to be assessed and manipulated. This was not, as Empires, Nations, and Families makes clear, virgin wilderness discovered by virtuous Anglo entrepreneurs. Rather, the United States was a newcomer in a place already complicated by vying empires. This book documents the broad family associations that crossed national and ethnic lines and that, along with the river systems of the trans-Mississippi West, formed the basis for a global trade in furs that had operated for hundreds of years before the land became part of the United States.

Empires, Nations, and Families shows how the world of river and maritime trade effectively shifted political power away from military and diplomatic circles into the hands of local people. Tracing family stories from the Canadian North to the Spanish and Mexican borderlands and from the Pacific Coast to the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, Anne F. Hyde’s narrative moves from the earliest years of the Indian trade to the Mexican War and the gold rush era. Her work reveals how, in the 1850s, immigrants to these newest regions of the United States violently wrested control from Native and other powers, and how conquest and competing demands for land and resources brought about a volatile frontier culture—not at all the peace and prosperity that the new power had promised.

Table of Contents

  • List of Illustrations
  • List of Maps
  • Acknowledgments: Adventures in the Land of the Dead
  • Introduction: The Geography of Empire in 1804
  • Part I: Replacing a State: The Continental Web of Family Trade
    • Chapter 1: Families and Fur: The Personal World of the Early
    • Chapter 2: Fort Vancouver’s Families: The Custom of the Country
    • Chapter 3: Three Western Places: Regional Communities
  • Part II: Americans All: The Mixed World of Indian Country
    • Chapter 4: The Early West: The Many Faces of Indian Country
    • Chapter 5: Empires in Transition: Indian Country at Midcentury, 1825–1860
  • Part III: From Nations to Nation: Imposing a State, 1840–1865
    • Chapter 6: Unintended Consequences: Families, Nations, and the Mexican War
    • Chapter 7: Border Wars: Disorder and Disaster in the 1850s
    • Chapter 8: The State and Its Handmaidens: Imposing Order
  • Epilogue: How It All Turned Out
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Index

Read an excerpt here.

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Negotiating Racial and Ethnic Lines in the Borderlands: Mixed Peoples in Transitional North America

Posted in Caribbean/Latin America, Family/Parenting, History, Media Archive, Mexico, Native Americans/First Nation, Papers/Presentations, United States on 2012-11-22 18:22Z by Steven

Negotiating Racial and Ethnic Lines in the Borderlands: Mixed Peoples in Transitional North America

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

AHA Session 108
Friday, 2013-01-04, 10:30-12:00 CST (Local Time)
Cornet Room (Sheraton New Orleans)

Chair: Stephen Aron, University of California, Los Angeles

Papers:

Comments: Margaret Jacobs, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

The 2000 U.S. census revealed that an increasing number of Americans identified themselves as multi-racial and the recent 2010 census indicates the same trend. President Barak Obama’s 2008 election also called into question debates about multi-racial identities and the validity of racial categories given the long history of intimate mixing in the United States. This panel attempts to historically situate processes of identity-formation by people of mixed racial and ethnic backgrounds in North America, focusing particularly on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We argue that some mixed-race and multi-ethnic individuals and families struggled against mainstream racial discourses that discouraged any acceptance of complex identities. Some mixed individuals faced pressures to select and perform one racial identity in public and even within their communities and families. However, the research of this panel demonstrates that individual identities remained contested, negotiated, and in some cases fluid, especially in the American west where racial paradigms extended beyond black and white to include Native Americans and Mexicans in the evolution of racial categories and ideologies.

The first paper by Erika Perez evaluates how the offspring of Spanish-Mexican and European ancestry struggled to find their niche in the aftermath of the U.S. conquest of California in the wake of the Gold Rush. Mixed offspring soon discovered that their options for social mobility were shaped largely by gender, class, education and racial identity, and despite the presence of a European or Anglo-American father, this did not necessarily guarantee mixed offspring success in a changing social climate in American California. While mixed girls experienced increasing social and marriage options in California society, their brothers expressed fear and frustration that they would never attain the success of the previous generation. Anne Hyde’s paper demonstrates how U.S. bureaucrats and policy-makers of Indian affairs attempted to impose their own concepts of gender and the nuclear family upon Native American communities towards the latter part of the nineteenth century. However, Hyde shows that these bureaucratic efforts were contested by indigenous-influenced meanings of family and kinship, thereby contributing to confusion about racial categories, legal identities, and legitimacy in Indian country. Finally, Andrew Graybill’s paper tells the story of one man, John L. Clarke, a Montana artist, who held fast and firm to an Indian identity throughout his life and in his art despite the potential for him to lay claim to some white privilege because of his marriage and mixed heritage. Although other members of Clarke’s family claimed an “in-between” identity, affirming both their Indian and European roots, he remained determined to express himself as an Indian. As this abstract makes clear, all of these papers touch upon identity-formation and developing ideas of race in the North American borderlands and how this process was not always geared towards assimilation but entailed great complexity and negotiation among mixed individuals and even members of the same family. Members interested in racial identities, borderland studies, and the American West will find this panel useful.

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