Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860 |
Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860
University of Nebraska Press
2011
648 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8032-2405-6
Anne F. Hyde, William R. Hochman Professor of History
Colorado College
- Winner of the 2012 Bancroft Prize
- 2012 Pulitzer Prize Finalist
To most people living in the West, the Louisiana Purchase made little difference: the United States was just another imperial overlord to be assessed and manipulated. This was not, as Empires, Nations, and Families makes clear, virgin wilderness discovered by virtuous Anglo entrepreneurs. Rather, the United States was a newcomer in a place already complicated by vying empires. This book documents the broad family associations that crossed national and ethnic lines and that, along with the river systems of the trans-Mississippi West, formed the basis for a global trade in furs that had operated for hundreds of years before the land became part of the United States.
Empires, Nations, and Families shows how the world of river and maritime trade effectively shifted political power away from military and diplomatic circles into the hands of local people. Tracing family stories from the Canadian North to the Spanish and Mexican borderlands and from the Pacific Coast to the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, Anne F. Hyde’s narrative moves from the earliest years of the Indian trade to the Mexican War and the gold rush era. Her work reveals how, in the 1850s, immigrants to these newest regions of the United States violently wrested control from Native and other powers, and how conquest and competing demands for land and resources brought about a volatile frontier culture—not at all the peace and prosperity that the new power had promised.
Table of Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Maps
- Acknowledgments: Adventures in the Land of the Dead
- Introduction: The Geography of Empire in 1804
- Part I: Replacing a State: The Continental Web of Family Trade
- Chapter 1: Families and Fur: The Personal World of the Early
- Chapter 2: Fort Vancouver’s Families: The Custom of the Country
- Chapter 3: Three Western Places: Regional Communities
- Part II: Americans All: The Mixed World of Indian Country
- Chapter 4: The Early West: The Many Faces of Indian Country
- Chapter 5: Empires in Transition: Indian Country at Midcentury, 1825–1860
- Part III: From Nations to Nation: Imposing a State, 1840–1865
- Chapter 6: Unintended Consequences: Families, Nations, and the Mexican War
- Chapter 7: Border Wars: Disorder and Disaster in the 1850s
- Chapter 8: The State and Its Handmaidens: Imposing Order
- Epilogue: How It All Turned Out
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Read an excerpt here.
Tags: Anne F. Hyde, Anne Farrar Hyde, Anne Hyde, University of Nebraska Press