19th Century US West

This article reconstructs the life and times of Peter Biggs, a free African American man in 1850s and 1860s Los Angeles, revealing the social and economic niche that he fashioned between the U.S.-Mexican War and the Civil War. Biggs’s little-known biography illuminates a forgotten moment in the temporal and spatial history of American racial construction.

Introduction: The current narratives about Black people migrating from the South to America’s western frontier at the turn of the Twentieth Century fundamentally fail to capture the full nature of the extraordinary undertaking Black migrants endured with both great success and failure. Exoduster was a pervasive term that characterizes Black migration during the late Nineteenth Century and early Twentieth Century. The theme of Exoduster literature filtered the activities of Black people
through the lens of fear. The “exodus” captured the idea that Black people migrated to escape the horrors of racist subjugation and violence indicative of Southern politics and culture. Often stories of All-Black Towns describe a promised land—one ordained by God and predetermined for the refugees. These scholarly narratives imply Black inferiority or lacking control over their fate.
Narratives about frontier spaces reflect peoples’ entrepreneurship, opportunism, and grit. However, compared to the narratives focused on White frontiersmen, Black peoples within the same period and in the same spaces appear feckless side notes to the historical trajectory of history. Blackdom’s history offers the opportunity to construct a new narrative that allows for the further expansion in the study of Black People of the West with the use of a new conceptual framework. Afro-Frontierism.

Sandpoint Idaho grew up alongside of the Northern Pacific Railroad tracks beginning with the construction of the line in 1882.  In 1900, most of the townspeople relocated to a new townsite west of the original and the railroad right-of-way became abandoned by 1915.  The Idaho Transportation Department designed a Highway 95 bypass of today's town that affected the western half of the original Sandpoint as well as the major town industry after 1900, the Humbird Lumber Company mill complex.  Archaeological mitigation unearthed remnants of the businesses (hotels, meat market, pharmacy, saloons, and mercantile stores); a discrete Chinese laundry complex; a "restricted district" composed of a dance hall, bordello, brothel and saloon; and the industrial blacksmith shop from the sawmill.

Volume 4 provides detailed history of the different operations areas as well as documentation of field methods and data on the different artifact classes.

This is an introduction to the limited free download of the current issue of the Pacific Historical Review's  SPECIAL ISSUE: Alternative Wests: Rethinking Manifest Destiny (guest editor Andrew C. Isenberg, Temple University)  Free at: http://phr.ucpress.edu/content/86/1

It’s hard to avoid the name of Stephen F. Austin in Texas. The state capital is named after him, as are Austin County, Austin College, Stephen F. Austin State University, Stephen F. Austin State Park and numerous schools, buildings and associations. He has been called the father of Texas and the founder of Texas. Austin led the Anglo-American colonization of Texas, paving the way for the state’s independence from Mexico, although this was not something he initially wanted.

... is unknown, John Charles Fremont popularized the appellation in his famous guidebook, Narrative Of The Exploring Expedition To The Rocky Mountains In ... Headed to Oregon in 1850, SolomonZumwalt's company proved that hearing could help detect approaching Indians. ...