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Acquisitions Fall 2023: History

These are some resources you might consider viewing as school kicks back up again.

Gender and Sexuality in Indigenous North America, 1400-1850

Groundbreaking historical scholarship on the complex attitudes toward gender and sexual roles in Native American culture, with a new preface and supplemental bibliography Prior to the arrival of Europeans in the New World, Native Americans across the continent had developed richly complex attitudes and forms of expression concerning gender and sexual roles. The role of the "berdache," a man living as a woman or a woman living as a man in native societies, has received recent scholarly attention but represents just one of many such occurrences of alternative gender identification in these cultures. Editors Sandra Slater and Fay A. Yarbrough have brought together scholars who explore the historical implications of these variations in the meanings of gender, sexuality, and marriage among indigenous communities in North America. Essays that span from the colonial period through the nineteenth century illustrate how these aspects of Native American life were altered through interactions with Europeans. Organized chronologically, Gender and Sexuality in Indigenous North America, 1400-1850 probes gender identification, labor roles, and political authority within Native American societies. The essays are linked by overarching examinations of how Europeans manipulated native ideas about gender for their own ends and how indigenous people responded to European attempts to impose gendered cultural practices at odds with established traditions. Many of the essays also address how indigenous people made meaning of gender and how these meanings developed over time within their own communities. Several contributors also consider sexual practice as a mode of cultural articulation, as well as a vehicle for the expression of gender roles. Representing groundbreaking scholarship in the field of Native American studies, these insightful discussions of gender, sexuality, and identity advance our understanding of cultural traditions and clashes that continue to resonate in native communities today as well as in the larger societies those communities exist within.

Sophie Morigeau

Sophie Morigeau (1836-1916) was a remarkable woman. Of mixed Indian-white heritage, she lived her life on her own terms. She traded in Canadian mining camps and ran pack trains across the Northern Rocky Mountains. For years she maintained a trading post on Tobacco Plains on the border between Canada and the United States. She broke through the accepted roles for women in the nineteenth century to become an Indian entrepreneur. Jean Barman's biography of Morigeau details the available historical evidence of a woman who cut her own path, was an important trader for the Kootenai Indians, and was a member of both the Indian and white communities in nineteenth-century northwest Montana and southern British Columbia. Sophie Morigeau was a resourceful and courageous woman on the cultural frontier.

Counterrevolution

In Black Reconstruction W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, "The slave went free; stood for a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery." His words echo across the decades as the civil rights revolution, marked by the passage of landmark civil rights laws in the '60s, has seen those gains steadily and systematically whittled away. As history testifies, revolution nearly always triggers its antithesis: counterrevolution. In this book Steinberg provides an analysis of this backlash, tracing the reverse flow of history that has led to the current national reckoning on race. Steinberg puts counterrevolution into historical and theoretical perspective, exploring the "victim-blaming" and "colorblind" discourses that emerged in the post-segregation era and undermined progress toward racial equality, and led to the gutting of affirmative action. This book reflects Steinberg's long career as a critical race scholar, culminating with his assessment of our current moment and the possibilities for political transformation.

The Struggle for Equality

Originally published in 1964, The Struggle for Equality presents an incisive and vivid look at the abolitionist movement and the legal basis it provided to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James McPherson explores the role played by rights activists during and after the Civil War, and their evolution from despised fanatics into influential spokespersons for the radical wing of the Republican Party. Asserting that it was not the abolitionists who failed to instill principles of equality, but rather the American people who refused to follow their leadership, McPherson raises questions about the obstacles that have long hindered American reform movements. This new Princeton Classics edition marks the fiftieth anniversary of the book's initial publication and includes a new preface by the author.