Cynthia Culver Prescott's Books

Pioneer Mother Monuments

Constructing Cultural Memory

By: Cynthia Culver Prescott

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Pioneer Mother Monuments

Constructing Cultural Memory

By: Cynthia Culver Prescott

For more than a century, American communities erected monuments to western pioneers. Although many of these statues receive little attention today, the images they depict—sturdy white men, saintly mothers, and wholesome pioneer families—enshrine prevailing notions of American exceptionalism, race relations, and gender identity. Pioneer Mother Monuments is the first book to delve into the long and complex history of remembering, forgetting, and rediscovering pioneer monuments. In this book, historian Cynthia Culver Prescott combines visual analysis with a close reading of primary-source documents. Examining some two hundred monuments erected in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the present, Prescott begins her survey by focusing on the earliest pioneer statues, which celebrated the strong white men who settled—and conquered—the West. By the 1930s, she explains, when gender roles began shifting, new monuments came forth to honor the Pioneer Mother. The angelic woman in a sunbonnet, armed with a rifle or a Bible as she carried civilization forward—an iconic figure—resonated particularly with Mormon audiences. While interest in these traditional monuments began to wane in the postwar period, according to Prescott, a new wave of pioneer monuments emerged in smaller communities during the late twentieth century. Inspired by rural nostalgia, these statues helped promote heritage tourism. In recent years, Americans have engaged in heated debates about Confederate Civil War monuments and their implicit racism. Should these statues be removed or reinterpreted? Far less attention, however, has been paid to pioneer monuments, which, Prescott argues, also enshrine white cultural superiority—as well as gender stereotypes. Only a few western communities have reexamined these values and erected statues with more inclusive imagery. Blending western history, visual culture, and memory studies, Prescott’s pathbreaking analysis is enhanced by a rich selection of color and black-and-white photographs depicting the statues along with detailed maps that chronologically chart the emergence of pioneer monuments.

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507

Publisher

University of Oklahoma Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0806163887

ISBN 13

9780806163888

Pioneer Mother Monuments

Constructing Cultural Memory

By: Cynthia Culver Prescott

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Pioneer Mother Monuments

Constructing Cultural Memory

By: Cynthia Culver Prescott

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

507

Publisher

University of Oklahoma Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0806163887

ISBN 13

9780806163888

Gender and Generation on the Far Western Frontier

By: Cynthia Culver Prescott

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Gender and Generation on the Far Western Frontier

By: Cynthia Culver Prescott

As her family traveled the Oregon Trail in 1852, Mary Ellen Todd taught herself to crack the ox whip. Though gender roles often blurred on the trail, families quickly tried to re-establish separate roles for men and women once they had staked their claims. For Mary Ellen Todd, who found a “secret joy in having the power to set things moving,” this meant trading in the ox whip for the more feminine butter churn. In Gender and Generation on the Far Western Frontier, Cynthia Culver Prescott expertly explores the shifting gender roles and ideologies that countless Anglo-American settlers struggled with in Oregon’s Willamette Valley between 1845 and 1900. Drawing on traditional social history sources as well as divorce records, married women’s property records, period photographs, and material culture, Prescott reveals that Oregon settlers pursued a moving target of middle-class identity in the second half of the nineteenth century. Prescott traces long-term ideological changes, arguing that favorable farming conditions enabled Oregon families to progress from accepting flexible frontier roles to participating in a national consumer culture in only one generation. As settlers’ children came of age, participation in this new culture of consumption and refined leisure became the marker of the middle class. Middle-class culture shifted from the first generation’s emphasis on genteel behavior to a newer genteel consumption. This absorbing volume reveals the shifting boundaries of traditional women’s spheres, the complicated relationships between fathers and sons, and the second generation’s struggle to balance their parents’ ideology with a changing national sense of class consciousness.

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232

Publisher

University of Arizona Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0816549451

ISBN 13

9780816549450

Gender and Generation on the Far Western Frontier

By: Cynthia Culver Prescott

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Gender and Generation on the Far Western Frontier

By: Cynthia Culver Prescott

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Page Count

232

Publisher

University of Arizona Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0816549451

ISBN 13

9780816549450

Book's by Cynthia Culver Prescott

Pioneer Mother Monuments

Pioneer Mother Monuments

Pioneer Mother Monuments

Pioneer Mother Monuments

Gender and Generation on the Far Western Frontier

Gender and Generation on the Far Western Frontier

Gender and Generation on the Far Western Frontier

Gender and Generation on the Far Western Frontier

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