Download or read book Saloons Prostitutes and Temperance in Alaska Territory written by Catherine Holder Spude and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2015-02-04 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prostitution, gambling, and saloons were a vital, if not universally welcome, part of life in frontier boomtowns. In Saloons, Prostitutes, and Temperance in Alaska Territory, Catherine Holder Spude explores the rise and fall of these enterprises in Skagway, Alaska, between the gold rush of 1897 and the enactment of Prohibition in 1918. Her gritty account offers a case study in the clash between working-class men and middle-class women, and in the growth of women’s political and economic power in the West. Where most books about vice in the West depict a rambunctious sin-scape, this one addresses money and politics. Focusing on the ambitions and resources of individual prostitutes and madams, landlords and saloon owners, lawmen, politicians, and reformers, Spude brings issues of gender and class to life in a place and time when vice equaled money and money controlled politics. Women of all classes learned how to manipulate both money and politics, ultimately deciding how to practice and regulate individual freedoms. As Progressive reforms swept America in the early twentieth century, middle-class women in Skagway won power, Spude shows, at the expense of the values and vices of the working-class men who had dominated the population in the town’s earliest days. Reform began when a citizens’ committee purged Skagway of card sharks and con men in 1898, and culminated when middle-class businessmen sided with their wives—giving them the power to vote—and in the process banned gambling, prostitution, and saloons. Today, a century after the era Spude describes, Skagway’s tourist industry perpetuates the stereotypes of good times in saloons and bordellos. This book instead takes readers inside Skagway’s real dens of iniquity, before and after their demise, and depicts frontier Skagway and its people as they really were. It will open the eyes of historians and tourists alike.
Download or read book Buffalo Soldiers in Alaska written by Brian G. Shellum and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2021-11 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The town of Skagway was born in 1897 after its population quintupled in under a year due to the Klondike gold rush. Balanced on the edge of anarchy, the U.S. Army stationed Company L, a unit of Buffalo Soldiers, there near the end of the gold rush. Buffalo Soldiers in Alaska tells the story of these African American soldiers who kept the peace during a volatile period in America's resource-rich North. It is a fascinating tale that features white officers and Black soldiers safeguarding U.S. territory, supporting the civil authorities, protecting Native Americans, fighting natural disasters, and serving proudly in America's last frontier. Despite the discipline and contributions of soldiers who served honorably, Skagway exhibited the era's persistent racism and maintained a clear color line. However, these Black Regulars carried out their complex and sometimes contradictory mission with a combination of professionalism and restraint that earned the grudging respect of the independently minded citizens of Alaska. The company used the popular sport of baseball to connect with the white citizens of Skagway and in the process gained some measure of acceptance. Though the soldiers left little trace in Skagway, a few remained after their enlistments and achieved success and recognition after settling in other parts of Alaska.
Download or read book All for the Greed of Gold written by Catherine Holder Spude and published by Washington State University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-27 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the steamship Cleveland left Seattle’s docks on March 1, 1898, William Jay Woodin was on board, traveling with his father and several others. They were chasing the nineteenth century’s last great gold rush, but instead of mining, they planned to earn their fortune by providing supplies. Enhanced with family photographs and skillfully edited, Will’s writings--including diaries, a short story, and a delightfully candid 1910 memoir--record events, emotions, and reflections, as well as his youthful wonder at the beauty surrounding him. Unlike many stampeders, Will’s party chose to take both the White Pass Trail and the Tutshi Trail, and his story offers a rare glimpse into ordeals suffered along this less common route. Will’s experiences also epitomize a mostly untold story of how working-class men endured a grueling Yukon journey. He was part of an emerging middle class who, with minimal formal education, left farm life to seek urban employment. Whether packing tons of goods on their own backs or building boats at the Windy Arm camp, Will brings to light the cooperation and camaraderie necessary for survival.
Download or read book Stampede written by Brian Castner and published by Doubleday. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gripping and wholly original account of the epic human tragedy that was the great Klondike Gold Rush of 1897-98. One hundred thousand men and women rushed heedlessly north to make their fortunes; very few did, but many thousands of them died in the attempt. In 1897, the United States was mired in the worst economic depression that the country had yet endured. So when all the newspapers announced gold was to be found in wildly enriching quantities at the Klondike River region of the Yukon, a mob of economically desperate Americans swarmed north. Within weeks tens of thousands of them were embarking from western ports to throw themselves at some of the harshest terrain on the planet--in winter yet--woefully unprepared, with no experience at all in mining or mountaineering. It was a mass delusion that quickly proved deadly: avalanches, shipwrecks, starvation, murder. Upon this stage, author Brian Castner tells a relentlessly driving story of the gold rush through the individual experiences of the iconic characters who endured it. A young Jack London, who would make his fortune but not in gold. Colonel Samuel Steele, who tried to save the stampeders from themselves. The notorious gangster Soapy Smith, goodtime girls and desperate miners, Skookum Jim, and the hotel entrepreneur Belinda Mulrooney. The unvarnished tale of this mass migration is always striking, revealing the amazing truth of what people will do for a chance to be rich.
Download or read book In League Against King Alcohol written by Thomas John Lappas and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2020-02-13 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many Americans are familiar with the real, but repeatedly stereotyped problem of alcohol abuse in Indian country. Most know about the Prohibition Era and reformers who promoted passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, among them the members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. But few people are aware of how American Indian women joined forces with the WCTU to press for positive change in their communities, a critical chapter of American cultural history explored in depth for the first time in In League Against King Alcohol. Drawing on the WCTU’s national records as well as state and regional organizational newspaper accounts and official state histories, historian Thomas John Lappas unearths the story of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in Indian country. His work reveals how Native American women in the organization embraced a type of social, economic, and political progress that their white counterparts supported and recognized—while maintaining distinctly Native elements of sovereignty, self-determination, and cultural preservation. They asserted their identities as Indigenous women, albeit as Christian and progressive Indigenous women. At the same time, through their mutual participation, white WCTU members formed conceptions about Native people that they subsequently brought to bear on state and local Indian policy pertaining to alcohol, but also on education, citizenship, voting rights, and land use and ownership. Lappas’s work places Native women at the center of the temperance story, showing how they used a women’s national reform organization to move their own goals and objectives forward. Subtly but significantly, they altered the welfare and status of American Indian communities in the early twentieth century.
Download or read book The Big Wild Soul of Terrence Cole written by Frank Soos and published by University of Alaska Press. This book was released on 2019-02-15 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays honors beloved Alaska historian Terrence Cole upon his retirement. Contributors include former students and colleagues whose personal and professional lives he has touched deeply. The pieces range from appreciative reflections on Cole’s contributions in teaching, research, and service, to topics he encouraged his students to pursue, plus pieces he inspired directly or indirectly. It is an eclectic collection that spans the humanities and social sciences, each capturing aspects of the human experience in Alaska’s vast and variable landscape. Together the essays offer readers complementary perspectives that will delight Cole’s many fans—and gain him new ones.
Download or read book Haunted Histories in America written by Nancy Hendricks and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you believe in ghosts, you're in good company. Haunted Histories brings America's most ghostly locales to life, illuminating their role in shaping U.S. history and detailing how they became the nation's most feared places. Haunted Histories takes readers on a state-by-state journey across the United States, exploring the nation's most feared places. Along the way, the text introduces readers to new ghostly tales and takes a fresh look at familiar stories and locations, with an eye to history. From well-known spooky spots like Salem, Massachusetts, to such lesser-known ones as the Shanghai Tunnels of Portland, Oregon, where spirits are supposedly trapped, readers will discover not only where America's most haunted places are but also why they are said to be haunted. The ghosts of the doomed Donner Party allow readers to experience the arduous and often deadly journey of America's westward wagon trains, while different kinds of "spirits" haunting old distilleries allow readers to discover how whiskey almost derailed the new American nation before it was born. This book can be studied for academic purposes as a historical reference, used as a source for classroom assignments, or simply read for the pleasure of a great story.
Download or read book Girly Drinks written by Mallory O'Meara and published by Harlequin. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *A Finalist for the Spirited Award for Best New Book on Drinks Culture, History or Spirits* “At last, the feminist history of booze we’ve been waiting for!” —Amy Stewart, author of The Drunken Botanist The James Beard Award-winning history of women drinking through the ages Strawberry daiquiris. Skinny martinis. Vodka sodas with lime. These are the cocktails that come in sleek-stemmed glasses, bright colors and fruity flavors—these are the Girly Drinks. From the earliest days of civilization, alcohol has been at the center of social rituals and cultures worldwide. But when exactly did drinking become a gendered act? And why have bars long been considered “places for men” when, without women, they might not even exist? With whip-smart insight and boundless curiosity, Girly Drinks unveils an entire untold history of the female distillers, drinkers and brewers who have played a vital role in the creation and consumption of alcohol, from ancient Sumerian beer goddess Ninkasi to iconic 1920s bartender Ada Coleman. Filling a crucial gap in culinary history, O’Meara dismantles the long-standing patriarchal traditions at the heart of these very drinking cultures, in the hope that readers everywhere can look to each celebrated woman in this book—and proudly have what she’s having.
Download or read book Great American Outpost written by Maya Rao and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A surreal, lyrical work of narrative nonfiction that portrays how the largest domestic oil discovery in half a century transformed a forgotten corner of the American West into a crucible of breakneck capitalism. As North Dakota became the nation's second-largest oil producer, Maya Rao set out in steel-toe boots to join a wave of drifters, dreamers, entrepreneurs, and criminals. With an eye for the dark, absurd, and humorous, Rao fearlessly immersed herself in their world to chronicle this modern-day gold rush, from its heady beginnings to OPEC's price war against the US oil industry. She rode shotgun with a surfer-turned-truck driver braving toxic fumes and dangerous roads, dined with businessmen disgraced during the financial crisis, and reported on everyone in between -- including an ex-con YouTube celebrity, a trophy wife mired in scandal, and a hard-drinking British Ponzi schemer--in a social scene so rife with intrigue that one investor called the oilfield Peyton Place on steroids. As the boom receded, a culture of greed and recklessness left troubling consequences for investors and longtime residents. Empty trailers and idle oil equipment littered the fields like abandoned farmsteads, leaving the pioneers who built this unlikely civilization to reckon with their legacy. Part Barbara Ehrenreich, part Upton Sinclair, Great American Outpost is a sobering exploration of twenty-first-century America that reads like a frontier novel.
Download or read book Montana written by and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Guide to the Notorious Bars of Alaska written by Doug Vandegraft and published by Epicenter Press. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New, revised second edition! Since A Guide to the Notorious Bars of Alaska was first published in 2014, eight of the bars that were described in the first edition have closed their doors forever. The revised second edition includes five additional bars that meet the criteria. Also added to the second edition are regional maps, and more historic photos and advertisements. The Lower 48 have created myths and legends about things Alaskan: Things in Alaska are bigger, colder, wilder, fiercer, more independent, more rugged, more resourceful, to name just a few of the qualities that surround the Alaska myth. However, the one that says Alaskan bars stand head and shoulders above bars anywhere else just might be true. When author Doug Vandegraft moved to Alaska after graduating college in 1983, he found himself in the wild-west-style bar scene in Anchorage. Nearly two decades later, he officially began conducting research on Alaskan bars that he found as unique as everyone believed. A Guide to the Notorious Bars of Alaska details the rich history and atmosphere of remarkable, one-of-a-kind Alaskan bars, many of which have been around since the end of Prohibition in 1933, and have become legendary in their communities and beyond as places to socialize, meet friends, come in from the cold, and sometimes as community centers or even as churches. Despite stricter laws regarding alcohol sale and consumption, Alaska's bars remain notorious in many ways.
Download or read book That Fiend in Hell written by Catherine Holder Spude and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2012-09-28 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the Klondike gold rush peaked in spring 1898, adventurers and gamblers rubbed shoulders with town-builders and gold-panners in Skagway, Alaska. The flow of riches lured confidence men, too—among them Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith (1860–98), who with an entourage of “bunco-men” conned and robbed the stampeders. Soapy, though, a common enough criminal, would go down in legend as the Robin Hood of Alaska, the “uncrowned king of Skagway,” remembered for his charm and generosity, even for calming a lynch mob. When the Fourth of July was celebrated in ’98, he supposedly led the parade. Then, a few days later, he was dead, killed in a shootout over a card game. With Smith’s death, Skagway rid itself of crime forever. Or at least, so the story goes. Journalists immediately cast him as a martyr whose death redeemed a violent town. In fact, he was just a petty criminal and card shark, as Catherine Holder Spude proves definitively in “That Fiend in Hell”: Soapy Smith in Legend, a tour de force of historical debunking that documents Smith’s elevation to western hero. In sorting out the facts about this man and his death from fiction, Spude concludes that the actual Soapy was not the legendary “boss of Skagway,” nor was he killed by Frank Reid, as early historians supposed. She shows that even eyewitnesses who knew the truth later changed their stories to fit the myth. But why? Tracking down some hundred retellings of the Soapy Smith story, Spude traces the efforts of Skagway’s boosters to reinforce a morality tale at the expense of a complex story of town-building and government formation. The idea that Smith’s death had made a lawless town safe served Skagway’s economic interests. Spude’s engaging deconstruction of Soapy’s story models deep research and skepticism crucial to understanding the history of the American frontier.
Download or read book Pioneer Mother Monuments written by Cynthia Culver Prescott and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2019-04-04 with total page 507 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than a century, American communities erected monuments to western pioneers. Although many of these statues receive little attention today, the images they depict—sturdy white men, saintly mothers, and wholesome pioneer families—enshrine prevailing notions of American exceptionalism, race relations, and gender identity. Pioneer Mother Monuments is the first book to delve into the long and complex history of remembering, forgetting, and rediscovering pioneer monuments. In this book, historian Cynthia Culver Prescott combines visual analysis with a close reading of primary-source documents. Examining some two hundred monuments erected in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the present, Prescott begins her survey by focusing on the earliest pioneer statues, which celebrated the strong white men who settled—and conquered—the West. By the 1930s, she explains, when gender roles began shifting, new monuments came forth to honor the Pioneer Mother. The angelic woman in a sunbonnet, armed with a rifle or a Bible as she carried civilization forward—an iconic figure—resonated particularly with Mormon audiences. While interest in these traditional monuments began to wane in the postwar period, according to Prescott, a new wave of pioneer monuments emerged in smaller communities during the late twentieth century. Inspired by rural nostalgia, these statues helped promote heritage tourism. In recent years, Americans have engaged in heated debates about Confederate Civil War monuments and their implicit racism. Should these statues be removed or reinterpreted? Far less attention, however, has been paid to pioneer monuments, which, Prescott argues, also enshrine white cultural superiority—as well as gender stereotypes. Only a few western communities have reexamined these values and erected statues with more inclusive imagery. Blending western history, visual culture, and memory studies, Prescott’s pathbreaking analysis is enhanced by a rich selection of color and black-and-white photographs depicting the statues along with detailed maps that chronologically chart the emergence of pioneer monuments.
Download or read book Brothels Bordellos Bad Girls written by Jan MacKell Collins and published by UNM Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This look at prostitution in Colorado, 1860-1930, uncovers the lives and woes of "working girls" in mining towns such as Cripple Creek.
Download or read book Fifty Miles from Tomorrow written by William L. Iggiagruk Hensley and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2009 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Documents the author's traditional childhood north of the Arctic Circle, his education in the continental U.S., and his lobbying efforts that convinced the government to allocate resources to Alaska's natives in compensation for incursions on their way of life.
Download or read book Testimonios written by and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2015-08-10 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When in the early 1870s historian Hubert Howe Bancroft sent interviewers out to gather oral histories from the pre-statehood gentry of California, he didn’t count on one thing: the women. When the men weren’t available, the interviewers collected the stories of the women of the household—sometimes almost as an afterthought. These interviews were eventually archived at the University of California, though many were all but forgotten. Testimonios presents thirteen women’s firsthand accounts from the days when California was part of Spain and Mexico. Having lived through the gold rush and seen their country change so drastically, these women understood the need to tell the full story of the people and the places that were their California.
Download or read book Eldorado written by Catherine Holder Spude and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2011-12-01 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When gold was discovered in the far northern regions of Alaska and the Yukon in the late nineteenth century, thousands of individuals headed north to strike it rich. This massive movement required a vast network of supplies and services and brought even more people north to manage and fulfill those needs. In this volume, archaeologists, historians, and ethnologists discuss their interlinking studies of the towns, trails, and mining districts that figured in the northern gold rushes, including the first sustained account of the archaeology of twentieth-century gold mining sites in Alaska or the Yukon. The authors explore various parts of this extensive settlement and supply system: coastal towns that funneled goods inland from ships; the famous Chilkoot Trail, over which tens of thousands of gold-seekers trod; a host of retail-oriented sites that supported prospectors and transferred goods through the system; and actual camps on the creeks where gold was extracted from the ground. Discussing individual cases in terms of settlement patterns and archaeological assemblages, the essays shed light on issues of interest to students of gender, transience, and site abandonment behavior. Further commentary places the archaeology of the Far North within the larger context of early twentieth-century industrialized European American society.
