Bøker i Emil and Kathleen Sick Book Series in Western History and Biography-serien

Every winter, early settlers of the US and Canadian Mountain West could expect to lose dozens of lives to deadly avalanches. This book uncovers stories of survival struggles, frightening avalanches, and how local knowledge challenged legal traditions that defined avalanches as Acts of God.

Presents the history of the political economy of Butte and Montana.

Shadow Tribe offers the first in-depth history of the Pacific Northwests Columbia River Indians -- the defiant River People whose ancestors refused to settle on the reservations established for them in central Oregon and Washington. Largely overlooked in traditional accounts of tribal dispossession and confinement, their story illuminates the persistence of off-reservation Native communities and the fluidity of their identities over time. Cast in the imperfect light of federal policy and dimly perceived by non-Indian eyes, the flickering presence of the Columbia River Indians has followed the treaty tribes down the difficult path marked out by the forces of American colonization.Based on more than a decade of archival research and conversations with Native people, Andrew Fishers groundbreaking book traces the waxing and waning of Columbia River Indian identity from the mid-nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries. Fisher explains how, despite policies designed to destroy them, the shared experience of being off the reservation and at odds with recognized tribes forged far-flung river communities into a loose confederation called the Columbia River Tribe. Environmental changes and political pressures eroded their autonomy during the second half of the twentieth century, yet many River People continued to honor a common heritage of ancestral connection to the Columbia, resistance to the reservation system, devotion to cultural traditions, and detachment from the institutions of federal control and tribal governance. At times, their independent and uncompromising attitude has challenged the sovereignty of the recognized tribes, earning Columbia River Indians a reputation as radicals and troublemakers even among their own people.Shadow Tribe is part of a new wave of historical scholarship that shows Native American identities to be socially constructed, layered, and contested rather than fixed, singular, and unchanging. From his vantage point on the Columbia, Fisher has written a pioneering study that uses regional history to broaden our understanding of how Indians thwarted efforts to confine and define their existence within narrow reservation boundaries.

The Manhattan ProjectΓÇöthe World War II race to produce an atomic bombΓÇötransformed the entire country in myriad ways, but it did not affect each region equally. Acting on an enduring perception of the American West as an ΓÇ£emptyΓÇ¥ place, the U.S. government located a disproportionate number of nuclear facilitiesΓÇöparticularly the ones most likely to spread pollutionΓÇöin western states. The Manhattan Project manufactured plutonium at Hanford, Washington; designed and assembled bombs at Los Alamos, New Mexico; and detonated the worldΓÇÖs first atomic bomb at Alamagordo, New Mexico, on June 16, 1945.In the years that followed the war, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission selected additional western sites for its work. Many westerners initially welcomed the atom. Like federal officials, they, too, regarded their region as ΓÇ£empty,ΓÇ¥ or underdeveloped. Facilities to make, test, and base atomic weapons, sites to store nuclear waste, and even nuclear power plants were regarded as assets. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, regional attitudes began to change. At a variety of locales, ranging from Eskimo Alaska to Mormon Utah, westerners devoted themselves to resisting the atom and its effects on their environments and communities. Just as the atomic age had dawned in the American West, so its artificial sun began to set there.The Atomic West brings together contributions from several disciplines to explore the impact on the West of the development of atomic power from wartime secrecy and initial postwar enthusiasm to public doubts and protest in the 1970s and 1980s. An impressive example of the benefits of interdisciplinary studies on complex topics, The Atomic West advances our understanding of both regional history and the history of science, and does so with human communities as a significant focal point. The book will be of special interest to students and experts on the American West, environmental history, and the history of science and technology.

Western historians offer a dozen essays grouped by the themes of Indians and non-Indians, race in the urban West, environment and economy, and gender on the unique geography, actions, and expectations that have shaped today's US West. Originated from a Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest

Scholars discuss the theme of resistance within 20th-century Japanese American communities.