{"title":"The Sand Creek Massacre","authors":"E. West","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.954","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.954","url":null,"abstract":"At dawn on November 29, 1864, a combined force of volunteer cavalry and regular army troops attacked a village of Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples on Sand Creek, or Big Sandy, a tributary of the Arkansas River in southeastern Colorado. Those in the village had surrendered at nearby Fort Lyon weeks earlier and were waiting for instructions about future negotiations with the federal government. In the eight-hour massacre that followed at least one hundred fifty Indians were killed, the great majority of them women and children. Although the massacre occurred through the failures of Colorado’s territorial governor, John Evans, and the ambitions of its military commander, Colonel John Chivington, it reflected more broadly the stresses generated by the discovery of gold in Colorado in 1858, the declining position of plains Indian peoples, and the disruptions of the Civil War. Those stresses had led to raiding by elements among the Indians most resistant to intrusions by White newcomers and to assaults by military, including ones against Native leaders seeking peaceful accommodation. The massacre was followed by extensive reprisals by Southern Cheyennes and allies among the western Sioux (Lakotas). Subsequent investigations by both the military and Congress documented the atrocities committed there, and one recommended prosecution of some of its principals. No legal action was taken, and within a few years Cheyennes and Arapahoes had been removed from Colorado.","PeriodicalId":105482,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History","volume":"142 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124529138","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Black Press","authors":"Kim Gallon","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.851","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.851","url":null,"abstract":"The term “Black Press” is an umbrella term that includes a diverse set of publications that include a small number of religious and mostly secular magazines and newspapers published by Black people in the United States from 1827 to the present. While religious newspapers are an integral part of the Black Press cultural tradition, of particular interest is how papers outside of formal Black religious dominations and institutions negotiated their self-defined racial uplift mission with their desire to attract readers to purchase and read newspapers. This focus does not deny the tremendous significance of Black religious print culture and the role it played in conveying African American cultural expression. Nineteenth-century religious papers like the Christian Recorder (1852–) were instrumental to the publication of early Black literature. Focusing on a small number of religious publications, then, provides a window into how they worked in conjunction with secular newspapers to define Black life in the United States. A newspaper is defined as “Black” if the publisher and principal editor or editors characterized themselves as such. Immigrant and foreign-language Black newspapers published in the United States were closer to the immigrant press.\u0000 The history of the Black Press in the United States is simultaneously rooted in uplift and protest against racial injustice. Two Black abolitionists—Presbyterian minister Samuel E. Cornish and John B. Russwurm, one of the nation’s first African American college graduates—created the first Black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, in 1827 to promote self-help and respond to anti-Black attacks in white papers. The first issue of Freedom’s Journal famously related the sentiments of its founders: “We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us. Too long has the public been deceived by misrepresentations in things which concern us dearly.” Indeed, Cornish and Russwurm’s statements define close to 200 years of Black journalism that created the necessary political and social space for African Americans to recover their humanity.\u0000 Despite the significant role the Black Press has and continues to play, to some degree, the cultural history of the Black Press is underexamined relative to the emphasis that historians place on the race advocacy and protest mission of African American newspapers. Close examination reveals that the Black Press’s power lay not only in its capacity to assert the rights and humanity of Black people through agitation but also in the ways it reinforced and amplified the unique and lively culture of African Americans. To this end, the Black Press created a countercultural public of Black peoples’ image and identity that was equally instrumental in refuting the discrimination they faced in American society.","PeriodicalId":105482,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130197421","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The African American Denominational Tradition: The Rise of Black Denominations","authors":"D. Dickerson","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.876","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.876","url":null,"abstract":"From the formation of the first independent African American Protestant denomination in the 1810s and 1820s to the opening decades of the 21st century, independent African American denominations have stood at the center of black religious life in the United States. Their longevity and influence have made them central to the preservation of black beliefs, practices, and rituals; have provided venues to promote movements for black freedom; and have incubated African American leadership in both the church and civic spheres. They have intertwined with every aspect of American and African American life, whether cultural, political, or economic, and they engaged the international involvement of American society and the diasporic interests of black people.\u0000 Parallel assemblies composed of black ministers pastoring black congregations that remained within white denominations also emerged within the traditional white denominations, including the white Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Congregational Protestant groups, plus the Catholic Church. Although they eschewed withdrawing from the white denominations, their extramural bodies functioned as a virtual black ecclesia, or institutional bodies, even though they remained smaller than the growing independent black denominations. Together, the black preachers and parishioners in independent black denominations and inside traditional white denominations maintained churches characterized by proud histories and long records of frontline involvements in black freedom pursuits.","PeriodicalId":105482,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122392256","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Jews and Jewish Communal Identity in Early America","authors":"H. Snyder","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.943","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.943","url":null,"abstract":"Jewish communities in the Americas followed in the wake of European contact with the western hemisphere at the end of the 15th century, and were a byproduct of the process of European colonization. Early Jewish settlements relied on a combination of economic investment, political negotiation, social networking, and subterfuge to establish the means of communal survival. While the Jewish experience in the Americas continued to operate within the sphere of European attitudes and modalities of behavior brought over to the western hemisphere by the colonizers, the remoteness of these New World communities and the friction caused by competing inter-imperial goals eventually allowed Jews to take advantage of new economic opportunities and expand their social and political range beyond what was feasible for Jewish communities in Europe in the same period.\u0000 New World colonization shifted the ways that Jews were seen within European cultures, as contact with Indigenous peoples of the Americas and the importation of Africans as slaves allowed Europeans to see Jews as comparatively less alien than they had previously been defined. While Jews, as individuals and as communities, continued to face discriminatory treatment (such as extraordinary taxation, prohibitions on voting and officeholding, scapegoating, and social exclusion), they were able to exercise many of the status privileges accorded to those with European Christian identities. These privileges included the capacity to freely pursue economic activities in trade and agriculture and to exploit enslaved peoples for their labor and for other purposes. With this elevated status came tension within the Jewish community over assimilation to European Christian norms, and an ongoing struggle to preserve Jewish identity and communal distinctiveness.","PeriodicalId":105482,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128532025","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Women and Medicine in Early America","authors":"R. Tannenbaum","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.942","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.942","url":null,"abstract":"Women from all cultural groups in British North America—European, African, and Indigenous American—played a central role in medicine in early America. They acted as midwives, healers, and apothecaries and drew on a variety of cultural traditions in doing so, even as they shared many beliefs about the workings of the human body. Healing gave women a route to authority and autonomy within their social groups. As the 18th century opened, women healers were able to enter the expanding world of capitalist commerce. Anglo-American women parlayed their knowledge of herbal medicine into successful businesses, and even enslaved midwives were sometimes able to be paid in cash for their skills. However, as academic medicine took more of an interest in topics such as childbirth, women practitioners faced increasingly bitter competition from professionalizing male physicians.","PeriodicalId":105482,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History","volume":"69 1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115934171","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Teacher Uprising, 2010–2021","authors":"Jon Shelton","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.960","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.960","url":null,"abstract":"When Chicago teachers went on strike in 2012, they highlighted an emergent militance among teachers in the United States. Led by the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE), the Chicago Teacher Union (CTU) in the 2010s sought to use the collective bargaining process not only to fight for better salaries and working conditions, but also to dramatically improve the lives of their students through racial justice initiatives and more services such as school nurses and social workers. Other big city unions, some in dialogue with the CTU through the United Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (UCORE), embarked on similar campaigns. Elsewhere, teachers staged state-wide walkouts. In February 2018, teachers in all of West Virginia’s fifty-five counties went on strike to protest stagnant pay and escalating healthcare costs. Their efforts, which forced a Republican legislature to substantially increase education spending, inspired similar red-state walkouts in the months that followed. Strikes in Oklahoma and Arizona also won major funding hikes, for example. Then, in early 2019, militant teachers walked out in Los Angeles, Oakland, and Denver, and in the fall, the CTU was on strike again, this time with even broader demands than in 2012. Another year of militance might have occurred in 2020, but the global COVID-19 pandemic forced school districts and unions to focus on the immediate public health crisis. Unions pivoted to demanding that districts maintain protocols to ensure teachers, students, and their families were kept safe from the virus.","PeriodicalId":105482,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126785992","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Indigenous Peoples and Euro-American Frontiers, Borderlands, and Borders in North America","authors":"Brendan W. Rensink","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.772","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.772","url":null,"abstract":"On July 27, 1882, a group of at least seventy-five “Turtle Mountain Indians from Canada” crossed the US–Canada border near Pembina, Dakota Territory, ordered white settlers off the land, and refused to pay customs duties assessed against them. “We recognize no boundary line, and shall pass as we please,” proclaimed their leader, Chief Little Shell. Native to the Red River region long before the Treaty of 1818 between the United States and Great Britain drew imaginary cartographies across the region or the 1872 International Boundary Survey left physical markers along the 49th parallel, Little Shell’s Chippewas and Métis navigated expansive homelands bounded by the natural environment and surrounding Native peoples, not arbitrary latitudinal coordinates. Over a century later, Indigenous leaders from the United States, Canada, and Mexico formed the Tribal Border Alliance and hosted a “Tribal Border Summit” in 2019 to assert that “Tribes divided by international borders” had natural inherent and treaty-bound rights to cross for various purposes. These Indigenous sentiments, expressed over centuries, reveal historic and ongoing conflicts born from the inherent incongruity between Native sovereignty and imposed non-Native boundaries and restrictions.\u0000 Issues of land provide a figurative bedrock to nearly all discussion of interactions between and boundary making by non-Native and Native peoples in North America. Indigenous lands and competing relations to it, natural resources and contest over their control, geography and territoriality: these issues underpin all North American history. Adjacent to these more familiar topics are complex stories of boundaries and borders that were imposed, challenged, ignored, violated, or co-opted. Native histories and experiences at the geographic edges of European empires and nation-states uncover rough and untidy processes of empire-building and settler colonial aspirations. As non-Natives drew lines across maps, laying claim to distant Indigenous lands, they also divided the same in arbitrary manners. They rarely gave serious consideration to Native sovereignty or rights to traditional or evolving relationships to homelands and resources. It is a wonder, therefore, that centuries of non-Natives have been surprised when Indigenous peoples refused to recognize the authority of imposed borders or co-opted their jurisdictional “power” for their own uses.\u0000 Surveying examples of Indigenous peoples and their histories across imposed boundaries in North America forces historians to ask new questions about intercultural exchange, geopolitical philosophies, and the histories of nations, regions, and peoples. This is a worthy, but complex, pursuit that promises to greatly enrich all intersecting topics and fields.","PeriodicalId":105482,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134032415","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Railroad Workers and Organized Labor","authors":"P. Taillon","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.966","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.966","url":null,"abstract":"Railroad workers occupy a singular place in United States history. Working in the nation’s first “big businesses,” they numbered in the hundreds of thousands, came from a wide range of ethnic and racial groups, included both men and women, and performed a wide range of often esoteric tasks. As workers in an industry that shaped the nation’s financial, technological, and political-economic development, railroaders drove the leading edge of industrialization in the 19th century and played a central role in the nation’s economy for much of the 20th. With the legends of “steel-driving” John Henry and “Cannonball” Casey Jones, railroad workers entered the national folklore as Americans pondered the benefits and costs of progress in an industrial age. Those tales highlighted the glamor and rewards, the risks and disparities, and the gender-exclusive and racially hierarchical nature of railroad work. They also offer insight into the character of railroad unionism, which, from its beginnings in the 1860s, oriented toward craft-based, male-only, white-supremacist forms of organization. Those unions remained fragmented, but they also became among the most powerful in the US labor movement, leveraging their members’ strategic location in a central infrastructural industry, especially those who operated the trains. That strategic location also ensured that any form of collective organization—and therefore potential disruption of the national economy—would lead to significant state intervention. Thus, the epic railroad labor conflict of the late 19th century generated the first federal labor relations laws in US history, which in turn set important precedents for 20th-century national labor relations policy. At the same time, the industry nurtured the first national all-Black, civil-rights-oriented unions, which played crucial roles in the 20th-century African American freedom struggle. By the mid-20th century, however, with technological change and the railroads entering a period of decline, the numbers of railroad workers diminished and with them, too, their once-powerful unions.","PeriodicalId":105482,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133539052","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The PATCO Strike and the Decline of Labor","authors":"J. McCartin","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.867","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.867","url":null,"abstract":"In 1981, US President Ronald Reagan decisively broke the illegal strike of the Federal Aviation Administration’s air traffic controllers, which had been organized by their union, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO). Because of its timing, its notoriety, and its impact in encouraging private sector employers to follow Reagan’s example and break strikes, the PATCO debacle contributed significantly to the continuing decline of the labor movement in the decades following 1981.\u0000 The breaking of PATCO took place at a crucial inflection point in US labor history. Changing political, ideological, and economic trends made unions vulnerable as the 1980s began. In this volatile context, the PATCO strike garnered unprecedented attention and enormous influence. The walkout, which started on August 3, 1981, took place in every US state and territory, and Americans watched it play out in real time on live television. They saw President Reagan warn strikers that since they were government workers their walkout was illegal, issuing an ultimatum that they would be fired in forty-eight hours if they did not return to work. Then they saw Reagan fire more than eleven thousand strikers who defied his order, replacing them with military controllers and hastily trained substitutes, all with strong public backing.\u0000 This event shocked rank-and-file unionists, frightened union leaders, and encouraged private sector employers to emulate Reagan in their own dealings with unions. Thus, following the PATCO strike, numerous private sector employers took advantage of weak protections for strikers in US labor law to break strikes in their industries. Workers’ willingness to strike in order to advance or defend workplace standards plummeted thereafter. Declining labor militancy in turn exacerbated the continuous decline in union membership after 1981, leaving the union movement in a deepening crisis by the early 21st century.","PeriodicalId":105482,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131283737","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The History of Route 66","authors":"Stephen Mandrgoc, D. Dunaway","doi":"10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.967","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.967","url":null,"abstract":"During its existence from 1926 to its formal decommissioning in 1985, US Highway 66, or Route 66, came to occupy a special place in the American imagination. For a half-century and more, it symbolized American individualism, travel, and the freedom of the open road with the transformative rise of America’s automobile culture. Route 66 was an essential connection between the Midwest and the West for American commercial, military, and civilian transportation. It chained together small towns and cities across the nation as America’s “Main Street.” Following the path of older trails and railroads, Route 66 hosted travelers in many different eras: the adventurous motorist in his Ford Model A in the 1920s, the Arkies and Okies desperate for a new start in California in the 1930s, trucks carrying wartime soldiers and supplies in the 1940s, and postwar tourists and travelers from the 1950s onward. By its nature, it brought together diverse cultures of different regions, introducing Americans to the “others” that were their regional neighbors, and exposing travelers to new arts, music, foods, and traditions. It became firmly embedded in pop culture through songs, books, television, and advertisements for its attractions as America’s most famous road.\u0000 Travel on Highway 66 steadily declined with the development of controlled-access interstate highways in the 1960s and 1970s. The towns and cities it connected and the many businesses and attractions dependent on its traffic and tourism protested the removal of the highway designation by the US Transportation Department in 1985, but their efforts failed. Nonetheless, revivalists who treasured the old road worked to preserve the road sections and attractions that remained, as well as founding a wide variety of organizations and donating to museums and libraries to preserve Route 66 ephemera. In the early 21st century, Route 66 is an international icon of America, traveled by fans from all over the world.","PeriodicalId":105482,"journal":{"name":"Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125426183","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}