Bøger i Grover E. Murray Studies in th serien

Blackdom, New Mexico, was a township that lasted about thirty years. In this book, Timothy E. Nelson situates the township's story where it belongs: along the continuum of settlement in Mexico's Northern Frontier. Dr. Nelson illuminates the set of conscious efforts that helped Black pioneers develop Blackdom Township into a frontier boomtown. "Blackdom" started as an inherited idea of a nineteenth-century Afrotopia. The idea of creating a Blackdom was refined within Black institutions as part of the perpetual movement of Black Colonization. In 1903, thirteen Black men, encouraged by the 1896 Plessy decision, formed the Blackdom Townsite Company and set out to make Blackdom a real place in New Mexico, wher ethey were outside the reach of Jim Crow laws. Many believed that Blackdom was simply abandoned. However, new evidence shows that the scheme to build generational wealth continued toexist throughout the twentieth century in other forms. During Blackdom's boomtimes, in December 1919, Blackdom Oil Company shifted town business from aregenerative agricultural community to a more extractive model. Nelson has uncovered new primary source materials that suggest for Blackdom a newlydiscovered third decade. This story has never been fully told or contextualized until now. Reoriented to Mexico's "northern frontier," one observes Black ministers, Black military personnel, and Black freemasons who colonized as part of the transmogrification of Indigenous spaces into the American West. Nelson's concept of the Afro-Frontier evokes a "Turnerian West," but it is also fruitfully understood as a Weberian "Borderland." Its history highlights a brief period and space that nurtured Black cowboy culture. While Blackdom's civic presence was not lengthy, its significance--and that of the Afro-Frontier--is an important window in the history of Afrotopias, Black Consciousness, and the notion of an American West.

A turn-of-the century photography collection of one family's automobile travels through the early American West.

The Edge Rover chronicles the expansive life of Isaac Slover, a fur trapper who was born in Pennsylvania during the Revolutionary War and who ranged throughout the early American West. The variety and extensiveness of Slover's encounters among Indigenous peoples and the Hispanic Southwest distinguish his experience from that of other "mountain men" of his time. A lifespan from 1777 to 1854 meant that Isaac Slover saw a transformed America, and he endured through frequently shifting borders, particularly in what became the young country's southwest region. Among his numerous adventures are a youth consumed by the Revolutionary War in Western Pennsylvania, then later farming in Kentucky, trapping and trading in New Mexico, and finally making his way to Southern California. Throughout, Slover sifted between cultures, jumped across borders, navigated conflict, and hid along the margins of history. Sparse evidence documents Slover's adventures, but what remains is meticulously compiled here for the first time by Timothy E. Green, who grew up with fireside tales of the mountain man's exploits. At any given stage of his life, Isaac Slover can be situated at a critical juncture in the history of the West, roving beyond the edges and back again. The Edge Rover is therefore a welcome addition to early American West biographies, showing that boundaries, borders, and identities during this early period could be as fluid and wild as the land itself.