A true crime investigation that not only sheds new light on Myrtle Underwood Cook’s unsolved killing but also explores the confluence of the social, political, and economic forces that brought the Klan, lawless street gangs, a local mob boss, and the temperance movement together in a small American town.

Two African American giants, Booker T. Washington in education and Oscar Micheaux in filmmaking, came to Lincoln, Nebraska, at pivotal points in their careers. This article weaves together the history of both events in Lincoln as well as Micheaux’s personal visits to many towns in Nebraska to sell his novels.

Krainz’s examination of how Progressive Era residents cared for refugees uncovers a significant segment of welfare policies and practices that have remained largely obscured. These examples of informal, short-term assistance efforts profoundly challenge our standard depiction of local Progressive Era welfare practices as anemic and unresponsive to those in crisis.

The Midwest is typically defined as a site of Indigenous erasure. But citizens of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma continue to live in their original homeland despite the official removal of their people from the Wabash River Valley in 1846. Despite their keen understanding of American property law, settlers in the Hoosier state crafted “Red Codes,” laws and enforcement regimes targeting Indigenous peoples, to achieve their dispossession.

Ethnographer and American Indian studies scholar David Kamper examines how Indigenous youth and adults are making basketball and skateboarding meaningful to their communities by sustaining the transmission of intergenerational knowledge and combatting intergenerational trauma. 

Follows the forced indoctrination of Native American students and then details how each of them “turned the power,” using their English knowledge and work experience in the anthropological field to embrace, document, and preserve their Native cultures rather than abandoning their heritage.

Wilder expert Pamela Smith Hill dives back into the Little House books, closely examining Wilder’s text, her characters, and their stories. Hill reveals that these gritty, emotionally complex novels depict a realistic coming of age for a girl in the American West. This realism in Wilder’s novels, once perceived as a fatal flaw, can lead to essential discussions not only about the past but about the present—and the underlying racism young people encounter when reading today.

Mari Sandoz’s The Battle of the Little Bighorn encouraged a change in how Americans viewed this infamous fight. The scholarly essays in this collection contextualize Sandoz’s work in the moment of its writing, situating her treatment of the past within the pivotal moments of her present.

Given the growing number of humanities programs facing closure and the familiar calls that college education be more “practical,” this article takes seriously the fundamental question about the field of American women writers: Is it valuable and useful? Should we still be studying American women writers? Okker proposes why—far from being a useless and even dangerous field that poisons the minds of our students—gender studies and the study of American women writers in particular are as important as ever.

Tells two intertwined American origin stories: a Korean family’s struggle to become Americans during the World War II era and the contributions of Korean Americans to the creation of modern U.S. intelligence and special operations. 

One of the best primary accounts of the Utah War comes from William Clark, a young teamster hired by Russell, Majors and Waddell, the West’s greatest freighters. Clark’s narrative, “A Trip Across the Plains in 1857,” was not published until 1922 and only then in an obscure journal with little annotation. MacKinnon and Alford have remedied this historiographical oversight by providing material entirely missing from the original printing.

In this first account of the intimate and compelling stories forged by an October 1979 tragedy at Camp Fuji, Japan, journalist Chas Henry uses years of exhaustive research and interviews to document the incident and uncover the causes of what many have called the U.S. Marine Corps’ worst-ever peacetime disaster.