Julie Courtwright's Books

Prairie Fire

A Great Plains History

By: Julie Courtwright

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Prairie Fire

A Great Plains History

By: Julie Courtwright

Prairie fires have always been a spectacular and dangerous part of the Great Plains. Nineteenth-century settlers sometimes lost their lives to uncontrolled blazes, and today ranchers such as those in the Flint Hills of Kansas manage the grasslands through controlled burning. Even small fires, overlooked by history, changed lives-destroyed someone's property, threatened someone's safety, or simply made someone's breath catch because of their astounding beauty. Julie Courtwright, who was born and raised in the tallgrass prairie of Butler County, Kansas, knows prairie fires well. In this first comprehensive environmental history of her subject, Courtwright vividly recounts how fire-setting it, fighting it, watching it, fearing it-has bound Plains people to each other and to the prairies themselves for centuries. She traces the history of both natural and intentional fires from Native American practices to the current use of controlled burns as an effective land management tool, along the way sharing the personal accounts of people whose lives have been touched by fire. The book ranges from Texas to the Dakotas and from the 1500s to modern times. It tells how Native Americans learned how to replicate the effects of natural lightning fires, thus maintaining the prairie ecosystem. Native peoples fired the prairie to aid in the hunt, and also as a weapon in war. White settlers learned from them that burns renewed the grasslands for grazing; but as more towns developed, settlers began to suppress fires-now viewed as a threat to their property and safety. Fire suppression had as dramatic an environmental impact as fire application. Suppression allowed the growth of water-wasting trees and caused a thick growth of old grass to build up over time, creating a dangerous environment for accidental fires. Courtwright calls on a wide range of sources: diary entries and oral histories from survivors, colorful newspaper accounts, military weather records, and artifacts of popular culture from Gene Autry stories to country song lyrics to Little House on the Prairie. Through this multiplicity of voices, she shows us how prairie fires have always been a significant part of the Great Plains experience-and how each fire that burned across the prairies over hundreds of years is part of someone's life story. By unfolding these personal narratives while looking at the bigger environmental picture, Courtwright blends poetic prose with careful scholarship to fashion a thoughtful paean to prairie fire. It will enlighten environmental and Western historians and renew a sense of wonder in the people of the Plains.

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Page Count

288

Publisher

University Press of Kansas

Published Date

ISBN 10

0700635130

ISBN 13

9780700635139

Building God's Kingdom

Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction

By: Julie J. Ingersoll

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Building God's Kingdom

Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction

By: Julie J. Ingersoll

For the last several decades, at the far fringes of American evangelical Christianity has stood an intellectual movement known as Christian Reconstruction. The proponents of this movement embrace a radical position: that all of life should be brought under the authority of biblical law as it is contained in both the Old and New Testaments. They challenge the legitimacy of democracy, argue that slavery is biblically justifiable, and support the death penalty for all manner of "crimes" described in the Bible including homosexuality, adultery, and Sabbath-breaking. But, as Julie Ingersoll shows in this fascinating new book, this "Biblical Worldview" shapes their views not only on political issues, but on everything from private property and economic policy to history and literature. Holding that the Bible provides a coherent, internally consistent, and all-encompassing worldview, they seek to remake the entirety of society--church, state, family, economy--along biblical lines. Tracing the movement from its mid-twentieth-century origins in the writings of theologian and philosopher R.J. Rushdoony to its present-day sites of influence, including the Christian Home School movement, advocacy for the teaching of creationism, and the development and rise of the Tea Party, Ingersoll illustrates how Reconstructionists have broadly and subtly shaped conservative American Protestantism over the course of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. Drawing on interviews with Reconstructionists themselves as well as extensive research in Reconstructionist publications, Building God's Kingdom offers the most complete and balanced portrait to date of this enigmatic segment of the Christian Right.

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Page Count

315

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0199390282

ISBN 13

9780199390281

Mud, Blood, and Ghosts

Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West

By: Julie Carr

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Mud, Blood, and Ghosts

Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West

By: Julie Carr

Populism has become a global movement associated with nationalism and strong-man politicians, but its root causes remain elusive. Mud, Blood, and Ghosts exposes one deep root in the soil of the American Great Plains. Julie Carr traces her own family's history through archival documents to draw connections between U.S. agrarian populism, spiritualism, and eugenics, helping readers to understand populism's tendency toward racism and exclusion. Carr follows the story of her great-grandfather Omer Madison Kem, three-term Populist representative from Nebraska, avid spiritualist, and committed eugenicist, to explore persistent themes in U.S. history: property, personhood, exclusion, and belonging. While recent books have taken seriously the experiences of poor whites in rural America, they haven't traced the story to its origins. Carr connects Kem's journey with that of America's white establishment and its fury of nativism in the 1920s. Presenting crucial narratives of Indigenous resistance, interracial alliance and betrayal, radical feminism, lifelong hauntings, land policy, debt, shame, grief, and avarice from the Gilded Age through the Progressive Era, Carr asks whether we can embrace the Populists' profound hopes for a just economy while rejecting the barriers they set up around who was considered fully human, fully worthy of this dreamed society.

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Page Count

437

Publisher

U of Nebraska Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1496235525

ISBN 13

9781496235527

Change or Continuity in Drug Policy

The Roles of Science, Media, and Interest Groups

By: Julie Tieberghien

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Change or Continuity in Drug Policy

The Roles of Science, Media, and Interest Groups

By: Julie Tieberghien

While evidence-based policy is an emerging rhetoric of the desire by and for governments to develop policies based on the best available evidence, drug policy is an area where particular challenges abound. This book is a detailed and comprehensive examination of the contours of drug policy development through the consideration of the particular roles of science, media, and interest groups. Using Belgium as the primary case-study, supplemented by insights gathered from other countries, the author contributes to a richer understanding of the science-policy nexus in the messy, real-world complexities of drug policy. Change or Continuity in Drug Policy: The Roles of Science, Media, and Interest Groups is the first book to bring together policy and media theories, knowledge utilisation models, and public scholarship literature. As such, the book provides unique insights relevant to aspects of change or continuity in drug policies in Europe and beyond. This book will be of great value to undergraduate and graduate students, as well as to academics, practitioners and policymakers with interest in the science-policy nexus with a particular focus on the drug policy domain.

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Page Count

213

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Published Date

ISBN 10

1315472368

ISBN 13

9781315472362

Mason County, West Virginia Marriages, 1806-1915

By: Julie Chapin Hesson,Sherman Gene Hesson,Jane J. Russell

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Mason County, West Virginia Marriages, 1806-1915

By: Julie Chapin Hesson,Sherman Gene Hesson,Jane J. Russell

This remarkable book is an alphabetical listing of nearly the entire adult male (and some of the female) population of Monmouth County during the American Revolution--some 6,000 Monmouth Countians between 1776 and 1783. For roughly half of the persons listed, we find one or two identifying pieces of information, and in an equal number of cases we are presented with enough information to trace the allegiance or comings and goings of a Monmouth County resident over a number of years.

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Page Count

289

Publisher

Genealogical Publishing Com

Published Date

ISBN 10

0806346736

ISBN 13

9780806346731

Prairie Fire

A Great Plains History

By: Julie Courtwright

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Prairie Fire

A Great Plains History

By: Julie Courtwright

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

288

Publisher

University Press of Kansas

Published Date

ISBN 10

0700635130

ISBN 13

9780700635139

Book's by Julie Courtwright

Prairie Fire

Prairie Fire

Building God's Kingdom

Building God's Kingdom

Mud, Blood, and Ghosts

Mud, Blood, and Ghosts

Change or Continuity in Drug Policy

Change or Continuity in Drug Policy

Mason County, West Virginia Marriages, 1806-1915

Mason County, West Virginia Marriages, 1806-1915

Prairie Fire

Prairie Fire

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