Behind the Book

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, many African Americans moved westward as Greater Reconstruction came to a close. Though, along with Euro-Americans, Black settlers appropriated the land of Native Americans, sometimes even contributing to ongoing violence against Indigenous people, this migration often defied the goals of settler states in the American West.

In Black Montana: Settler Colonialism and the Erosion of the Racial Frontier, 1877-1930 (U Nebraska Press, 2021), Anthony W. Wood explores the entanglements of race, settler colonialism, and the emergence of state and regional identity in the American West during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By producing conditions of social, cultural, and economic precarity that undermined Black Montanans' networks of kinship, community, and financial security, the state of Montana, in its capacity as a settler colony, worked to exclude the Black community that began to form inside its borders after Reconstruction.

Black Montana depicts the history of Montana's Black community from 1877 until the 1930s, a period in western American history that represents a significant moment and unique geography in the life of the U.S. settler-colonial project.

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Childbirth defines families, communities, and nations. In Birthing the West, Jennifer J. Hill fills the silences around historical reproduction with copious new evidence and an enticing narrative, describing a process of settlement in the American West that depended on the nurturing connections of reproductive caregivers and the authority of mothers over birth.

Economic and cultural development depended on childbirth. Hill’s expanded vision suggests that the mantra of cattle drives and military campaigns leaves out essential events and falls far short of an accurate representation of American expansion. The picture that emerges in Birthing the West presents a more complete understanding of the American West: no less moving or engaging than the typical stories of extraction and exploration but concurrently intriguing and complex.

Birthing the West: Mothers and Midwives in the Rockies and Plains (U Nebraska Press, 2022) unearths the woman-centric practice of childbirth across Montana, the Dakotas, and Wyoming, a region known as a death zone for pregnant women and their infants. As public health entities struggled to establish authority over its isolated inhabitants, they collaborated with physicians, eroding the power and control of mothers and midwives. The transition from home to hospital and from midwife to doctor created a dramatic shift in the intimately personal act of birth.

Jennifer J. Hill is an associate teaching professor of American studies at Montana State University and serves as the executive director of the Women’s Reproductive History Alliance, a digital museum dedicated to educating the public on reproductive history.

Troy A. Hallsell is the 341st Missile Wing Historian at Malmstrom AFB, Montana. The ideas represented in this podcast do not reflect the 341st Missile Wing, United States Air Force, or the Department of Defense.

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In less than half a century, the American West changed dramatically from a region of dynamic borders, politics, and identities to a more fixed zone of borders and demarcations. This is the argument made by Sarah Deutsch, professor of history at Duke University, in Making a Modern U.S. West: The Contested Terrain of a Region and Its Borders, 1898-1940 (U Nebraska Press, 2022), a major new synthetic work and part of Nebraska’s History of the American West series. In this wide ranging and transnational book. Deutsch connects movements often seen as separate, such radical organizing in the labor movement, in Mexican politics, and women’s suffrage, to make the case that Western politics in the early 20th century were particularly unsettled, the region’s political future yet undecided. Similarly fluid dynamics defined racial and sexual histories of the region. It was World War I and the years following when the US government found the tools it deemed necessary to define and categorize people and places in ways that would curtail this fluidity. A remarkable work, Deutsch strongly makes the case that the early 20th century was a crucial period for defining how exactly the modern US West would look.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

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For centuries Comanches have captivated imaginations. Yet their story in popular accounts abruptly stops in 1875, when the last free Comanches entered a reservation in southwestern Oklahoma. In Cinematic Comanches: The Lone Ranger in the Media Borderlands (U Nebraska Press, 2022), the first tribal-specific history of Comanches in film and media, Quanah Parker descendant Dustin Tahmahkera examines how Comanches represent themselves and are represented by others in recent media. Telling a story of Comanche family and extended kin and their relations to film, Tahmahkera reframes a distorted and defeated history of Comanches into a vibrant story of cinematic traditions, agency, and cultural continuity.

Co-starring a long list of Comanche actors, filmmakers, consultants, critics, and subjects, Cinematic Comanches moves through the politics of tribal representation and history to highlight the production of Comanchería cinema. From early silent films and 1950s Westerns to Disney’s The Lone Ranger and the story of how Comanches captured its controversial Comanche lead Johnny Depp, Tahmahkera argues that Comanche nationhood can be strengthened through cinema. Tahmahkera’s extensive research includes interviews with elder LaDonna Harris, who adopted Depp during filming in one of the most contested films in recent Indigenous cinematic history. In the fragmented popular narrative of the rise and fall of Comanches, Cinematic Comanches calls for considering mediated contributions to the cultural resurgence of Comanches today.

Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez an associate professor of History at Texas State University.

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Ask you average high school student or undergraduate about nineteenth century US history and if nothing else, they likely know the phrase "manifest destiny." The idea that the United States was destined, even pre-ordained, to construct a continent-spanning nation is widely assumed to have been a motivating force in American political life in during the pre-Civil War era, and is similarly thought to have largely come to fruition. 

Not so, argues Dr. Daniel Joseph Burge, research coordinator and associate editor at the Kentucky Historical Society. In A Failed Vision of Empire: The Collapse of Manifest Destiny, 1845-1872 (U Nebraska Press, 2022), Burge argues that the concept of manifest destiny was always controversial, partisan, and indeed, was ultimately a failure. Pro-expansionist writers like John O'Sullivan and politicians such as Henry Seward foresaw Cuba, Canada, and even Latin America as destined to become American states, but these places stubbornly retained their independence instead. Burge argues that historians have only reified the idea of Manifest Destiny in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, not questioning whether this idea was in fact the engine of expansion many assumed it to be. A Failed Vision of Empire joins a growing chorus of scholars who argue that manifest destiny was in fact neither American destiny, nor a reality which manifested itself at all.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

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In Engendering Islands: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Violence in the Early French Caribbean (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), Dr. Ashley M. Williard demonstrates how problematics of gender played a central role in defining colonial others, male and female, at the moment when slavery was first introduced in the French-controlled Antilles. The book argues that seventeenth-century French Caribbean reconstructions of masculinity and femininity helped sustain and justify occupation, slavery, and nascent ideas of race. In the face of historical silences, Williard’s close readings of archival and narrative texts reveals the words, images, and perspectives that reflected and produced new ideas of human difference in this colonial context. Juridical, religious, and medical discourses expose the interdependence of multiple conditions—male and female, enslaved and free, Black and white, Indigenous and displaced, normative and disabled—in the islands claimed for the French Crown.

R. Grant Kleiser is a Ph.D. candidate in the Columbia University History Department. His dissertation researches the development of the free-port system in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, investigating the rationale for such moves towards “free trade” and the impact these policies had on subsequent philosophers, policy-makers, and revolutionaries in the Atlantic world.

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Tonlé Sap is one of Southeast Asia’s, if not one of the world’s, natural wonders. Between the dry and wet seasons, the lake expands almost six times in size to cover an area the size of Kuwait. The flows are so strong that the Tonlé Sap river actually reverses course, with water from the lake flowing into the Mekong river.

And that means the lake is one of the most biodiverse in the world, with fish populations that have sustained fishing communities for generations.

But the lake is currently stressed by climate change, overfishing, and hydropower damming. Abby Seiff’s Troubling the Water: A Dying Lake and a Vanishing World in Cambodia (U of Nebraska Press, 2022) tells the stories of those who live along the lake’s shores, and how they try to keep their lives and livelihoods going.

In this interview, Abby and I talk about Tonlé Sap, how it’s changed in recent years–and what the lake’s communities tell us about what it means to be a climate refugee.

Abby Seiff is a journalist who was based in Southeast Asia for nearly a decade, working as an editor at the Cambodia Daily and the Phnom Penh Post and writing for publications such as Time, the Economist, Al Jazeera, and Pacific Standard, among others. She is now a freelance correspondent.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Troubling the Water. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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The Life of the Afterlife in the Big Sky State: A History of Montana's Cemeteries (U Nebraska Press, 2021) is a groundbreaking history of death in Montana. It offers a unique, reflective, and sensitive perspective on the evolution of customs and burial grounds. Beginning with Montana’s first known burial site, Ellen Baumler considers the archaeological records of early interments in rock ledges, under cairns, in trees, and on open-air scaffolds.

Contact with Europeans at trading posts and missions brought new burial practices. Later, crude “boot hills” and pioneer graveyards evolved into orderly cemeteries. Planned cemeteries became the hallmark of civilization and the measure of an educated community. Baumler explores this history, yet untold about Montana. She traces the pathway from primitive beginnings to park-like, architecturally planned burial grounds where people could recreate, educate their children, and honor the dead.

The Life of the Afterlife in the Big Sky State is not a comprehensive listing of the many hundreds of cemeteries across Montana. Rather it discusses cultural identity evidenced through burial practices, changing methods of interments and why those came about, and the evolution of cemeteries as the “last great necessity” in organized communities. Through examples and anecdotes, the book examines how we remember those who have passed on.

Dr. Ellen Baumler was was the interpretive historian at the Montana Historical Society from 1992 until her retirement in 2018. She is the author or editor of numerous books, including Girl from the Gulches: The Story of Mary Ronan and Dark Spaces: Montana’s Historic Penitentiary at Deer Lodge. Baumler won Montana’s Governor’s Award for the Humanities and the Peter Yegen Jr. Award from the Montana Association of Museums for excellence and distinction in fostering the advancement of Montana’s museums.

Troy A. Hallsell, PhD is the 341st Missile Wing Historian at Malmstrom AFB. The ideas expressed in this podcast do not represent the 341st Missile Wing, United States Air Force, or the Department of Defense.

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Josefa Velasquez lived a long and full life. When Josefa wasn't co-running a tamale factory and cantina just outside of Wastonville, she was hosting friends and family at her saloon, where "drinking, dancing, and eating tomales" abounded. Josefa's friend, Maria Ascenciόn Solόrsano, was surprised she lived so long: "this woman lived like a rich woman, she ate of the best and drank of the best, and in spite of that she lasted long." "Surely," deduced Maria, Josefa "must have taken after her ancestors." Josefa Velasquez "had no fear of anything," another testament to her ancestors. Josefa had been born in a mission, and she outlived the institution that silenced generations of Indigenous peoples across California starting in the late eighteenth century. Josefa "lasted long," and so have her descendants, who today make up the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band.

Read a conventional history of the California missions, and you may not meet the lively Josefa Velasquez, hear the voice of her friend Maria Ascenciόn Solόrsano, or know that their descendants still live in the Santa Cruz region today. But when Indigenous voices are placed at the center of California history, they create a remarkable collective testimony to Indigenous survival. This is what makes We Are Not Animals: Indigenous Politics of Survival, Rebellion, and Reconstitution in Nineteenth-Century California (University of Nebraska Press, 2022) such a powerful book. With creative use of mission archives and oral history, author Martin Rizzo-Martinez shows how Indigenous peoples in the Santa Cruz region resisted waves of colonization throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This politics of rebellion took many forms, ranging from mass mobilization against missions themselves (like the 1793 Quiroste-led rebellion against Mission Santa Cruz) to unflinching assertions of Indigenous identity (such as Macedonia Lorenzo's 1851 testimony who, after stating "himself an Indian," was deemed an "incompetent" witness in American courts). Against increasingly considerable odds, Indigenous peoples repeatedly rejected various efforts of erasure, in turn revealing them as colonialism's great failure. An homage to Indigenous peoples' long struggle against colonization in California, We Are Not Animals narrates a critical history of how Indigenous families fought for their futures.

Author Martin Rizzo-Martinez is the state park historian of California State Park's Santa Cruz District. Dr. Rizzo-Martinez is currently producing a podcast, Challenging Colonialism, that brings Indigenous voices back to the center of California history. He is also working on a documentary project about the 2015 Walk for the Ancestors pilgrimage in honor of Indigenous ancestors who suffered and perished in the Mission system. Listeners can purchase We Are Not Animals from the University of Nebraska Press for 40% off using discount code: 6AS21.

Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. You can find her on Twitter @labrcq.

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In Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the U.S. Northern Plains and Canadian Rockies (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), Molly P. Rozum explores the two related concepts of regional identity and sense of place by examining a single North American ecological region: the U.S. Great Plains and the Canadian Prairie Provinces. All or parts of modern-day Alberta, Montana, Saskatchewan, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Manitoba form the center of this transnational region. As children, the first postconquest generation of northern grasslands residents worked, played, and traveled with domestic and wild animals, which introduced them to ecology and shaped sense-of-place rhythms. As adults, members of this generation of settler society worked to adapt to the northern grasslands by practicing both agricultural diversification and environmental conservation. Rozum argues that environmental awareness, including its ecological and cultural aspects, is key to forming a sense of place and a regional identity. The two concepts overlap and reinforce each other: place is more local, ecological, and emotional-sensual, and region is more ideational, national, and geographic in tone. This captivating study examines the growth of place and regional identities as they took shape within generations and over the life cycle.

Molly P. Rozum is the Ronald R. Nelson Chair of Great Plains and South Dakota History and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of South Dakota.

Troy A. Hallsell is the 341st Missile Wing Historian at Malmstrom AFB, MT. The opinions expressed in this podcast do not represent the 341st Missile Wing, United States Air Force, and Department of Defense.

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