Research Catalog

A field of their own : women and American Indian history, 1830-1941

Title
A field of their own : women and American Indian history, 1830-1941 / John M. Rhea.
Author
Rhea, John M., 1967-
Publication
Norman : University of Oklahoma Press, 2016.

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TextUse in library JFE 17-4167Schwarzman Building - Main Reading Room 315

Details

Description
xviii, 293 pages : illustrations; 24 cm
Summary
  • "In the mid-nineteenth century, women scholars launched the formal study of American Indian history. This historiographic study asks how and why their work began, examining nine influential women whose publications shaped the field. From Helen Hunt Jackson to Angie Debo, their scholarship marks a distinct trajectory in the writing of American Indian history"--
  • "One hundred and forty years before Gerda Lerner established women's history as a specialized field in 1972, a small group of women began to claim American Indian history as their own domain. A Field of Their Own examines nine key figures in American Indian scholarship to reveal how women came to be identified with Indian history and why they eventually claimed it as their own field. From Helen Hunt Jackson to Angie Debo, the magnitude of their research, the reach of their scholarship, the popularity of their publications, and their close identification with Indian scholarship makes their invisibility as pioneering founders of this specialized field all the more intriguing. Reclaiming this lost history, John M. Rhea looks at the cultural processes through which women were connected to Indian history and traces the genesis of their interest to the nineteenth-century push for women's rights. In the early 1830s evangelical preachers and women's rights proponents linked American Indians to white women's religious and social interests. Later, pre-professional women ethnologists would claim Indians as a special political cause. Helen Hunt Jackson's 1881 publication, A Century of Dishonor, and Alice Fletcher's 1887 report, Indian Education and Civilization, foreshadowed the emerging history profession's objective methodology and established a document-driven standard for later Indian histories. By the twentieth century, historians Emma Helen Blair, Louise Phelps Kellogg, and Annie Heloise Abel, in a bid to boost their professional status, established Indian history as a formal specialized field. However, enduring barriers continued to discourage American Indians from pursuing their own document-driven histories. Cultural and academic walls crumbled in 1919 when Cherokee scholar Rachel Caroline Eaton earned a Ph. D. in American history. Eaton and later indigenous historians Anna L. Lewis and Muriel H. Wright would each play a crucial role in shaping Angie Debo's 1940 indictment of European American settler colonialism, And Still the Waters Run. Rhea's wide-ranging approach goes beyond existing compensatory histories to illuminate the national consequences of women's century-long hegemony over American Indian scholarship. In the process, his thoughtful study also chronicles indigenous women's long and ultimately successful struggle to transform the way that historians portray American Indian peoples and their pasts"--
Subjects
Genre/Form
  • Biography.
  • History.
Bibliography (note)
  • Includes bibliographical references (pages 241-279) and index.
Contents
Introduction: "White" women and the specialized field of American Indian historical scholarship -- Part I: Women's early American Indian scholarship, 1830-1889. Women's rights, American Indians, and capitol politics -- The Washington Vanguard and the birth of women's Indian scholarship -- American Darwinism, women, and American Indians -- Helen Hunt Jackson and the history of American Indian treaties -- Alice Fletcher and the scholarship of American Indian politics -- Professionalization and the twilight of women's American Indian scholarship -- Part II: A new frontier for women historians, 1890-1941. The Pacific frontier : women historians and a new kind of Indian history -- Déjà vu : Oklahoma women and the new ethno-political Indian history -- Conclusion: Women historians, American Indian history, and gender politics.
Call Number
JFE 17-4167
ISBN
  • 9780806152271
  • 0806152273
LCCN
  • 2015035111
  • 40026038343
OCLC
923651146
Author
Rhea, John M., 1967- author.
Title
A field of their own : women and American Indian history, 1830-1941 / John M. Rhea.
Publisher
Norman : University of Oklahoma Press, 2016.
Edition
First edition.
Type of Content
text
Type of Medium
unmediated
Type of Carrier
volume
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 241-279) and index.
Chronological Term
1800-1999
Other Standard Identifier
40026038343
Research Call Number
JFE 17-4167
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