Western Historical Quarterly
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Mission
Statement The Western Historical Quarterly strives to be a congenial home for the study and teaching of all aspects of North American Wests, frontiers, homelands, and borderlands. Our mission is to cultivate the broadest appreciation of this diverse history. |
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Utah
State University ISSN: 0043-3810 |
Volume
XLIV - Number 3 Abstract:
This article explores Washington artist Vanessa Helder’s Grand
Coulee Suite, twenty-two watercolors created during the construction
of the Grand Coulee Dam. Helder’s Precisionist style challenged
landscape painting traditions that depicted the American West as
a pristine or sublime wilderness, untouched by civilization. The
uneasy silence and precise details in her work force viewers to
grapple with the effects of technology on the land and the relationship
between people and the environment. Now housed at Spokane’s
Northwest Museum of Art & Culture, Helder’s Grand Coulee
Suite suggests an ambivalent view surrounding western development,
hydropower, and technology in New Deal America. Abstract: While
Spanish persisted as a foreign language in the United States, its
long presence in New Mexico and Puerto Rico provided the opportunity
for native Spanish speakers to bolster their regional identity.
New Mexico’s identity was as a leader valuable to hemispheric
goodwill while Puerto Rico solidified a separate national identity. Abstract: Recent
scholarship has explored the construction of legal wildernesses
out of landscapes that were once inhabited and productive. In contrast,
residents and authorities of Big Sur, California, created a hybrid
space: an area renowned for its natural beauty and lack of development
in which residents preserved not only the landscape but their own
right to live in it. Book Reviews:
_________________ Articles: Silvana R. Siddali, "Regulating the Jackals of the Monetary World: Banking and Constitutional Reform in the Antebellum Northwest" Abstract: This
article describes the fights over banks and paper money in state
constitutional conventions in the antebellum Northwest. These debates
played a central role in the development of popular self-government
and democracy in the region. Citizens demanded fundamental constitutional
reforms that would circumvent irresponsible legislatures and thwart
undemocratic financial institutions. Abstract: In the
aftermath of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, runaway slaves from
Texas and debt peons from Northern Mexico put the new borderline
to an unexpected use. Aware that it separated two very different
countries, each sought refuge on the other side. Thus, a line intended
to seal off one side from the other and keep laborers bounded in
their place served a contrary function. The flood of refugees across
the border produced a guerra sorda—cold war—between
Mexico and the United States over their differing ideas of labor
and race. On the ground, this war of words constantly threatened
to degenerate into a hot shooting war. And when runaway slaves and
Mexican peons became unexpected allies, the situation only deteriorated
further. Ultimately, neither Mexican nor U.S. officials could disabuse
their servile laborers of the notion that the new border represented
a line of liberty and that greater opportunity lay in greater mobility.. Abstract: This essay examines the evolution and politics of the Chicano movement in South Texas. Framed around the mysterious death of Dr. Fred E. Logan Jr., the author argues that concerns around public health were at the heart of a long struggle to end poverty and overturn years of Anglo political rule in the small town of Mathis..
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updated 14 June 2011 |
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