Americanizing the Ozarks

Chapter 3 charts the massive wave of Anglo-American settlement that populated the region between the War of 1812 and the Civil War. The majority of these settlers came from Appalachia and the greater Upland South – from places like East and Middle Tennessee, eastern Kentucky, and western and Piedmont North Carolina – and brought with them folkways that blended European customs and Native American practices. This chapter questions the popular notion of the Ozarks as a haven for the Scots-Irish and suggests instead the ethnic diversity that lay behind white settlement in the region. In addition, chapter 3 chronicles the views of early travelers in the Ozarks and the seeds of the backwoods image that would come to characterize the region.

You Zip Your Lips

This chapter describes the white settlement of the Blue Ridge Foothills of upper South Carolina and the documentation of slavery and slave life in the region prior to 1865. The chapter draws upon local (published) histories and some (oral) family histories to document the lives of several enslaved individuals as well. In these family stories are examples of resistance to enslavement and their agency in maintaining their lives.

Lynching in Late-Nineteenth-Century Michigan

This chapter examines the contexts and discourse surrounding the seven lynchings that occurred in Michigan in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. The relative infrequency of lynching in Michigan was due to the Wolverine State's somewhat earlier white settlement in the 1820s and 1830s, slightly before a prolonged culture conflict between “rough justice” and “due process” sentiments flared across extensive parts of the Midwest, West, and South. The comparative paucity of collective killing in Michigan also stemmed from its preponderance of Yankee settlers, and from its smaller proportion of emigrants from the Upland South. Sporadic lynchings in Michigan drew meaning from varied contexts that included the highly racialized discourse that accompanied the social and political alterations of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Spirituality in Place: Capturing the Essence of North Queensland through Painting

For centuries, artists have been inspired by place. This perception and awareness of place can also involve a spiritual connection. Artists from both Aboriginal culture and white settlement in Australia have painted works which reveal a deep spiritual connection to place. One of the geographical areas that has inspired several artists is North Queensland, which offers a rich tapestry of dry and wet tropical environments. This article considers an historical overview and deconstructs the work of four contemporary painters (Firth-Smith, Silver, Watson, and Cheshire) who have been inspired by the place that is North Queensland, in order to consider the ways in which their work reveals a spiritual connection to place.

Hoover Damn

Hoover Dam is a settler-colonial project, requiring Indigenous land and waterways while producing energy that enables further non-Indigenous settlement. In addition to the Dam’s engineering feats, its cultural production—art, pageantry, commemoration, and media—helped to buttress these claims to land. In this article, I offer the concept of dam/ning: how tactics used to preserve White settler memory, history, and claims to land and water seemingly appear to affirm Black and Indigenous lives but in fact veil violence. Also embedded in the term is damning: the strategies used to resist settler-colonial violence, dehumanization, displacement, and land theft. Dam/ning analyzes whose land these actions take place on, who claims this land and how, and what techniques people have used to resist. I draw from a tripartite archive: personal letters from Hoover Dam’s official artist (1920s-1940s), the Bureau of Reclamation’s magazine (1930s), and the town site’s local newspaper (1979). This article begins by establishing the practices of damming—the physical and cultural practices that enabled White settlement, which denigrated Indigenous and Black peoples while requiring their knowledge, art, and bodies; the second half of the article establishes the practices of damning, exposing ways Indigenous and Black communities fought these settler-colonial practices throughout the 20th century.

The Heildelberg School in forming Australianness

In 1788, English people settled down in Australia, cleared and cultivated the land, making a big turning point to this old continent. Australianness was still vague in these initial years of the white settlement. Heildelberg School, the first school in Australian art, which emerged in 1887, laid the foundation for Australia's visual arts history as well as forming the Autralianness with three mains characters: “strong, masculine labour”, “national myth” and “harsh land of unique nature diversity”. In this paper, the writer would like to introduce 7 masterpieces by three prominent Australian artists of the Heidelberg school: Tom Roberts, Frederic Mc.Cubbin, and Arthur Streeton.