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Understanding 9/11tv American Frontier Book Collection CSPAN February 5, 2017 11:08am-11:18am EST
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recent visit to fresno california, we explored the thomas j ebert run to your collection which includes over 2000 books on the american frontier at fresno state university. >> when i was a kid, public library consigned to the children in the basement at the library. only nonfiction books they had were books on the american west and since i've always been a nonfiction person, i bought, i read everything good there, on the american west, primarily on native american. over the years, the 50s when i was growing up was a time when you had all the movies,
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cowboy movies and cowboy programs were on tv so you were sort of, when i was a kid you are saturated with the american west and i just fell in love with it. then, 1993 i began traveling through the west and just fell in love with it. and i quickly became to understand that there was much more to the residence than cowboys and indian fights. there wasjust the artistry of the landscape , the culture. the history. the really deep history, the history of that involved so many different groups that was quite a different west thanwhat i had learned from hollywood . and you learned americans and anglo-americans, but there were asian americans, african americans, hispanic americans all contributing to the
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culture and that the west was in fact are more diverse in many ways then the lands, some of the places east of the mississippi. first of all i'm going to talk about the books i have purchased on africa, african americans in the west. and then i'm going to talk about the hispanic west. and finally, talk about some of the books on native american culture. we forget that african-americans were in the west. they were brought to the west enslaved first in texas and to the union territory that the five civilized tribes when they left these were moved to oklahoma. and so african-americans have always been in the west. they didn't just show up. but after the civil war, more african-americans left the south to form communities in thewest . they are in fact referred to
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as xo busters or exodus, the word from the bible. most recently i bought a book from the university of oklahoma which was just published on the town of nicodemus inkansas . and this is now a state park in kansas. this was one of the many all-black communities as they tried to find a new life of freedom in a place in the american west. if you watched the cowboy movies or if you watched cowboy programs, 100 percent, almost 100 percent of the cowboys are anglos. in fact, over 30 percent of cowboys in the west were either african-american, hispanic american and even native american. in fact, out here east of
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fresno, east of clovis, the blazing game ranch they hired many native americans to run their sheep and cattle so this is something that you don't see in the cowboy movies. but there were black cowboys and this book, black cowboys of the old west covers that period and when you see many of these cowboys , they look just like everything their white counterparts did but not only were they cowboys, they were marshals and lawmen. for example, this is a biography of vast reeves who was a famous marshall in the indian territory under the
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famous judge parker, the portsmouth arkansas. and that is certainly noted as a outstanding lawmen of his time. this is a picture of vast reeves. he was tough. he didn't worry about sparing himself, and catching outlaws. he caught many an outlaw that was brought to justice at judge parker's infamous court. now when we talk about native americans, even though i have purchased material on the indian wars per se, i thought it was important to buy books on native american culture, especially material culture. this book on what's called narratives, you can see the various parts of the native peoples.
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this is ledger art, this is basically them sketching in notebooks or pieces of paper they would find. they were describing the cause they did not have a written language. they were describing battle scenes. there would be sets and four of what was actually going wrong. even before the reservation., if native americans were deprived of a notebook or something they could write on, they would do ledger art. and for much of the native american history, we had this part either in their accounts or in these notebooks and so for example for the battle of little big horn we had quite a few works that describe the bathroom and what happened especially after the battles.
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these are two of my favorite books. on native american culture. this book is entitled american indian horses in africa and it talks and you can see the decorative masks that they put on their horses. not only did paint their horses but they had air force masks. here's an example of how much more modern horses travel but in this book you can find more traditional examples of the native american tree before the reservation. they specifically painted you to their horses in a specific way given their medicine. this book, the last thing i will show you, called rivals of theamericans . it's offers indian silver. and this is just an example. of the various types of native american silver that
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was used. and the native americans had essential trade routes between each other. you would find items that were made on the washington coast, 1000 miles in land on the great plains so it was an extensive trading route for the native americans which again, we sort of dismiss because we reduced native americans the warring indians which unfortunately was not always the case. the history of the east tends to be more white, more anglo, more protestant in its initial story. the history of the west is more reflective because from the beginning it is more multicultural. and that is an important thing for americans to realize. in that everybody, hispanics,
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african-americans, native americans, asian americans, they all contributed to the history of the development by the west and shaped by the west. quest during book tvs recent visit to fresno california we spoke with author blain roberts who reports on another side of the civil rights movement in the jim crow south. >> the title of my book is "pageants, parlors and pretty women: race and beaauty in the twentieth-century south" one of the real jumping off points of this aside from all these conversations that i had with others about how seven willie women were beautiful is the fact that white southern women have a track record of doing very well at beauty pageants. and you can document this, we can see that we have a dispro
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