Clements Center for Southwest Studies

Across four centuries, Apache (Ndé) groups in the North American West confronted slave trades and forced migrations intended to exploit, subjugate, or eliminate them. In reconstructing the far-flung Apache diaspora that resulted, Paul Conrad sheds new light on Apache history and the long history of colonialism in the Americas.

This article discusses a community-based participatory research project with university researchers, an urban inter-tribal center, and other community partners to develop, administer, and deliver a community needs assessment of an urban American Indian (AI) community. In the development process, community focus groups identified major domains of inquiry for a needs assessment survey: mental health and substance abuse, medical care, and social services, including cultural programming. Results are presented and discussed in each domain. Overall, this community needs assessment contributes to a better understanding of American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) urban challenges by providing information about the AI/AN population in a large southwest metropolitan area. Specifically, it highlights the relevance of local and state contexts for understanding issues facing AI/AN populations. A growing body of research indicates that AI/AN populations demonstrate some similar challenges in terms of health, social service needs, and mental health and substance abuse needs due to shared histories of colonization and misguided or underfunded government programs, among other factors. It remains true that AI/AN communities nonetheless are each distinctive and face unique challenges and opportunities within the local, state, and regional contexts in which they reside. The process described in this paper will inform policy, practice, and research communities interested in understanding the unique realities of an urban community representing many different AI tribes.

On the evening of October 18th, 1859, it had become clear that John Brown’s raid on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia had not only fallen short of expectations—the beginning of a slave insurrection eventually leading to collapse of the institution entirely—but had dismally failed. The raid had cost seventeen lives, among them two of Brown’s sons. Not a single slave had been freed. The raid, however, had touched off something else. It had shaken, in important ways for both North and South, the ideological foundations of the slave system and, consequently, the political and economic systems of the nation that sanctioned it. Utilizing the ideas of Hayden White regarding the moralizing nature of narrative historiography, this project analyzes newspaper articles and literature published soon after the raid as they attempt to re-incorporate the events in question into a larger historical narrative. They do so via various ideological social codes, referred to in the project as meta-narratives. My reading focuses on what is implied, assumed, and omitted. It is therefore semiological in nature, and utilizes a methodology of narrative analysis that borrows heavily from French theorist Roland Barthes. The project is an examination of the role or roles particular types of rhetoric can play in the production of historical and popular narrative.

The history of the Antarctic is one of hypothesis and abstraction. Aristotle and James Cook, both prominent figures in Antarctic historiography, never laid eyes on the continent. Despite further exploration and accurate mapping of the continent during the ''Heroic Age'' of the early twentieth century, competing territorial claims continued to render Antarctica in the abstract. The continent became a space of contested ideology, serving as a canvas for both nationalist pride and imperial might. RÉ SUMÉ L'histoire de l'Antarctique est marquée par les hypothèses et les abstractions. Aristote et James Cook – deux figures marquantes de l'historiographie de l'Antarctique – n'ont jamais vu de leurs yeux ce continent. Malgré les explorations de l'« e `re héroı¨que » du début du vingtième siècle qui ont permis d'e ´tablir une cartographie précise du continent, les différentes revendications territoriales sur l'Antarctique ont continué de le représenter dans l'abstrait. Ce continent est devenu un espace d'affrontements idéologiques, une toile de fond pour l'expression des fiertés nationales et des ambitions impérialistes.

Thomas Richards, Jr., "'Farewell to America': The Expatriation Politics of Overland Migrants, 1841-1846," Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 86, No. 1 (Feb. 2017), pp. 114-152. © 2017 by the Pacific Historical Review. Copying and permissions notice: Authorization to copy this content beyond fair use (as specified in Sections 107 and 108 of the U. S. Copyright Law) for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by [the Regents of the University of California/on behalf of the Sponsoring Society] for libraries and other users, provided that they are registered with and pay the specified fee via Rightslink® or directly with the Copyright Clearance Center.

The mid-nineteenth century territorial growth of the United States was complex and contradictory. Not only did Mexico, Britain, and Native Americans contest U.S. territorial objectives; so, too, did many within the United States and in some cases American western settlers themselves. The notion of manifest destiny reflects few of these complexities. The authors argue that manifest destiny was a partisan idea that emerged in a context of division and uncertainty intended to overawe opponents of expansion. Only in the early twentieth century, as the United States had consolidated its hold on the North American West and was extending its power into the Caribbean and Pacific, did historians begin to describe manifest destiny as something that it never was in the nineteenth century: a consensus. To a significant extent, historians continue to rely on the idea to explain U.S. expansion. The authors argue for returning a sense of context and contingency to the understanding of mid-nineteenth-century U.S. expansion.

Published as Andrew Isenberg, and Thomas Richards, Jr., "Alternative Wests: Rethinking Manifest Destiny," Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 86, No. 1 (Feb., 2017), pp. 4-17. © 2017 by the Pacific Historical Review. Copying and permissions notice: Authorization to copy this content beyond fair use (as specified in Sections 107 and 108 of the U. S. Copyright Law) for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by [the Regents of the University of California/on behalf of the Sponsoring Society] for libraries and other users, provided that they are registered with and pay the specified fee via Rightslink® or directly with the Copyright Clearance Center.

Mormon history is firmly rooted in, and a distinct product of, U.S. history. Yet, for much of the twentieth century, nineteenth-century United States historiography and nineteenth-century Mormon historiography have remained frustratingly apart. U.S. historians barely discussed the Mormons in their syntheses, while Mormon historians rarely cast their eyes beyond the narrow (albeit fascinating) confines of the early LDS Church and its adherents. In recent decades, scholars have done much to bring the two histories together, as topics such as Joseph Smith and the origins of Mormonism, polygamy, the Mormon Trail, and Mormon theories of government have all been placed in a wider American framework, yielding intriguing and fruitful results. Early Utah Territory, however, has stubbornly persisted in scholarly isolation. In many ways, this isolation makes sense, as Mormon leaders moved to the Great Basin to be isolated. Yet, as Brent Rogers, a documentary editor of the Joseph Smith Papers at the LDS Church History Library, demonstrates in his impressively researched new book Unpopular Sovereignty: Mormons and the Federal Management of Early Utah Territory, the drama of 1850s Utah was entangled with the drama of the 1850s United States. Rogers' wide-ranging study skillfully integrates the history of the antebellum United States with Mormon and Native-controlled Utah Territory, and definitively establishes that the 1857 Utah War was indeed a national event-one that informed the larger debate over popular sovereignty and slavery in the decade preceding the Civil War.