The Strange Career Of William Ellis The Texas Slave Who Became A Mexican Millionaire

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Author by Karl Jacoby
Genre : History
Editor : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN : 9780393253863
Type Books : PDF & Epub
File Pages : 352
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Winner of the Ray Allen Billington Prize and the Phillis Wheatley Book Award "An American 'Odyssey,' the larger-than-life story of a man who travels far in the wake of war and gets by on his adaptability and gift for gab." —Wall Street Journal A black child born on the US-Mexico border in the twilight of slavery, William Ellis inhabited a world divided along ambiguous racial lines. Adopting the name Guillermo Eliseo, he passed as Mexican, transcending racial lines to become fabulously wealthy as a Wall Street banker, diplomat, and owner of scores of mines and haciendas south of the border. In The Strange Career of William Ellis, prize-winning historian Karl Jacoby weaves an astonishing tale of cunning and scandal, offering fresh insights on the history of the Reconstruction era, the US-Mexico border, and the abiding riddle of race in America.


Country Of The Cursed And The Driven

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Author by Paul Barba
Genre : History
Editor : U of Nebraska Press
ISBN : 9781496208354
Type Books : PDF & Epub
File Pages : 474
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A sweeping, comparative analysis of the slaving regimes of Hispanic, Comanche, and Anglo American communities in the Texas borderlands during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.


Reassembling The Strange

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Author by Thomas Anderson
Genre : Political Science
Editor : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN : 9781498576062
Type Books : PDF & Epub
File Pages : 250
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This book examines how Western naturalists and missionaries understood the environment of Madagascar during the nineteenth century.


Black Land

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Author by Nadia Nurhussein
Genre : Social Science
Editor : Princeton University Press
ISBN : 9780691234625
Type Books : PDF & Epub
File Pages : 280
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The first book to explore how African American writing and art engaged with visions of Ethiopia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries As the only African nation, with the exception of Liberia, to remain independent during the colonization of the continent, Ethiopia has long held significance for and captivated the imaginations of African Americans. In Black Land, Nadia Nurhussein delves into nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American artistic and journalistic depictions of Ethiopia, illuminating the increasing tensions and ironies behind cultural celebrations of an African country asserting itself as an imperial power. Nurhussein navigates texts by Walt Whitman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Pauline Hopkins, Harry Dean, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, George Schuyler, and others, alongside images and performances that show the intersection of African America with Ethiopia during historic political shifts. From a description of a notorious 1920 Star Order of Ethiopia flag-burning demonstration in Chicago to a discussion of the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie as Time magazine’s Man of the Year for 1935, Nurhussein illuminates the growing complications that modern Ethiopia posed for American writers and activists. American media coverage of the African nation exposed a clear contrast between the Pan-African ideal and the modern reality of Ethiopia as an antidemocratic imperialist state: Did Ethiopia represent the black nation of the future, or one of an inert and static past? Revising current understandings of black transnationalism, Black Land presents a well-rounded exploration of an era when Ethiopia’s presence in African American culture was at its height.


Porous Borders

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Author by Julian Lim
Genre : Social Science
Editor : UNC Press Books
ISBN : 9781469635507
Type Books : PDF & Epub
File Pages : 321
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With the railroad's arrival in the late nineteenth century, immigrants of all colors rushed to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, transforming the region into a booming international hub of economic and human activity. Following the stream of Mexican, Chinese, and African American migration, Julian Lim presents a fresh study of the multiracial intersections of the borderlands, where diverse peoples crossed multiple boundaries in search of new economic opportunities and social relations. However, as these migrants came together in ways that blurred and confounded elite expectations of racial order, both the United States and Mexico resorted to increasingly exclusionary immigration policies in order to make the multiracial populations of the borderlands less visible within the body politic, and to remove them from the boundaries of national identity altogether. Using a variety of English- and Spanish-language primary sources from both sides of the border, Lim reveals how a borderlands region that has traditionally been defined by Mexican-Anglo relations was in fact shaped by a diverse population that came together dynamically through work and play, in the streets and in homes, through war and marriage, and in the very act of crossing the border.


The Allure Of Blackness Among Mixed Race Americans 1862 1916

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Author by Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly
Genre : Social Science
Editor : U of Nebraska Press
ISBN : 9781496205070
Type Books : PDF & Epub
File Pages : 313
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In The Allure of Blackness among Mixed-Race Americans, 1862–1916, Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly examines generations of mixed-race African Americans after the Civil War and into the Progressive Era, skillfully tracking the rise of a leadership class in Black America made up largely of individuals who had complex racial ancestries, many of whom therefore enjoyed racial options to identity as either Black or White. Although these people might have chosen to pass as White to avoid the racial violence and exclusion associated with the dominant racial ideology of the time, they instead chose to identify as Black Americans, a decision that provided upward mobility in social, political, and economic terms. Dineen-Wimberly highlights African American economic and political leaders and educators such as P. B. S. Pinchback, Theophile T. Allain, Booker T. Washington, and Frederick Douglass as well as women such as Josephine B. Willson Bruce and E. Azalia Hackley who were prominent clubwomen, lecturers, educators, and settlement house founders. In their quest for leadership within the African American community, these leaders drew on the concept of Blackness as a source of opportunities and power to transform their communities in the long struggle for Black equality. The Allure of Blackness among Mixed-Race Americans, 1862–1916 confounds much of the conventional wisdom about racially complicated people and details the manner in which they chose their racial identity and ultimately overturns the “passing” trope that has dominated so much Americanist scholarship and social thought about the relationship between race and social and political transformation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.


Continent In Crisis

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Author by Brian Schoen
Genre : History
Editor : Fordham Univ Press
ISBN : 9781531501303
Type Books : PDF & Epub
File Pages : 166
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Written by leading historians of the mid–nineteenth century United States, this book focuses on the continental dimensions of the U.S. Civil War. It joins a growing body of scholarship that seeks to understand the place of America’s mid-nineteenth-century crisis in the broader sweep of world history. However, unlike other studies that have pursued the Civil War’s connections with Europe and the Caribbean, this volume focuses on North America, particularly Mexico, British Canada, and sovereign indigenous states in the West. As the United States went through its Civil War and Reconstruction, Mexico endured its own civil war and then waged a four-year campaign to expel a French-imposed monarch. Meanwhile, Britain’s North American colonies were in complex and contested negotiations that culminated in confederation in 1867. In the West, indigenous nations faced an onslaught of settlers and soldiers seeking to conquer their lands for the United States. Yet despite this synchronicity, mainstream histories of the Civil War mostly ignore its connections to the political upheaval occurring elsewhere in North America. By reading North America into the history of the Civil War, this volume shows how battles over sovereignty in neighboring states became enmeshed with the fratricidal conflict in the United States. Its contributors explore these entangled histories in studies ranging from African Americans fleeing U.S. slavery by emigrating to Mexico to Confederate privateers finding allies in Halifax, Nova Scotia. This continental perspective highlights the uncertainty of the period when the fate of old nations and possibilities for new ones were truly up for grabs.


Apostle Of Progress

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Author by J. Justin Castro
Genre : Biography & Autobiography
Editor : U of Nebraska Press
ISBN : 9781496212498
Type Books : PDF & Epub
File Pages : 464
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From the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, Mexico experienced major transformations influenced by a global progressive movement that thrived during the Mexican Revolution and influenced Mexico's development during subsequent governments. Engineers and other revolutionary technocrats were the system builders who drew up the blueprints, printed newspapers, implemented reforms, and constructed complexity--people who built modern Mexico with an eye on remedying long-standing problems through social, material, and infrastructural development during a period of revolutionary change. In Apostle of Progress J. Justin Castro examines the life of Modesto C. Rolland, a revolutionary propagandist and a prominent figure in the development of Mexico, to gain a better understanding of the role engineers played in creating revolution-era policies and the reconstruction of the Mexican nation. Rolland influenced Mexican land reform, petroleum development, stadium construction, port advancements, radio broadcasting, and experiments in political economy. In the telling of Rolland's story, Castro offers a captivating account of the Mexican Revolution and the influence of global progressivism on the development of twentieth-century Mexico.


The Limits Of Liberty

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Author by James David Nichols
Genre : History
Editor : U of Nebraska Press
ISBN : 9781496207258
Type Books : PDF & Epub
File Pages : 378
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The Limits of Liberty chronicles the formation of the U.S.-Mexico border from the perspective of the “mobile peoples” who assisted in determining the international boundary from both sides in the mid-nineteenth century. In this historic and timely study, James David Nichols argues against the many top-down connotations that borders carry, noting that the state cannot entirely dominate the process of boundary marking. Even though there were many efforts on the part of the United States and Mexico to define the new international border as a limit, mobile peoples continued to transgress the border and cross it with impunity. Transborder migrants reimagined the dividing line as a gateway to opportunity rather than as a fence limiting their movement. Runaway slaves, Mexican debt peones, and seminomadic Native Americans saw liberty on the other side of the line and crossed in search of greater opportunity. In doing so they devised their own border epistemology that clashed with official understandings of the boundary. These divergent understandings resulted in violence with the crossing of vigilantes, soldiers, and militias in search of fugitives and runaways. The Limits of Liberty explores how the border attracted migrants from both sides and considers border-crossers together, whereas most treatments thus far have considered discrete social groups along the border. Mining Mexican archival sources, Nichols is one of the first scholars to explore the nuance of negotiation that took place between the state and mobile peoples in the formation of borders.


Shadows At Dawn

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Author by Karl Jacoby
Genre : History
Editor : Penguin
ISBN : 9781101159514
Type Books : PDF & Epub
File Pages : 384
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A masterful reconstruction of one of the worst Indian massacres in American history In April 1871, a group of Americans, Mexicans, and Tohono O?odham Indians surrounded an Apache village at dawn and murdered nearly 150 men, women, and children in their sleep. In the past century the attack, which came to be known as the Camp Grant Massacre, has largely faded from memory. Now, drawing on oral histories, contemporary newspaper reports, and the participants? own accounts, prize-winning author Karl Jacoby brings this perplexing incident and tumultuous era to life to paint a sweeping panorama of the American Southwest?a world far more complex, diverse, and morally ambiguous than the traditional portrayals of the Old West.