This Book is a book of poetry that defines my life in many ways. I began writing it at the age of thirteen, when my life began to get filled with turmoil. I went from fear and loneliness to heartbreak and sadness. I picked my journal back up when I entered the U.S. armed forces and began to write again. I also wrote a lot of poetry about my life as a Pro and Amateur rough-stock rider in Rodeo. I finished the journal just last year and decided to publish it and share my life experience. I hope everyone that gets a copy of this book enjoys reading it as i enjoyed writing it for several years.
A Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize "A powerful book, crowded with telling details and shrewd observations." —Michael Kazin, New York Times Book Review The transcontinental railroads were the first corporate behemoths. Their attempts to generate profits from proliferating debt sparked devastating economic panics. Their dependence on public largesse drew them into the corridors of power, initiating new forms of corruption. Their operations rearranged space and time, remade the landscape of the West, and opened new ways of life and work. Their discriminatory rates sparked a new antimonopoly politics. The transcontinentals were pivotal actors in the making of modern America, but the triumphal myths of the golden spike, Robber Barons larger than life, and an innovative capitalism all die here. Instead we have a new vision of the Gilded Age, often darkly funny, that shows history to be rooted in failure as well as success.
Powerful . . . equal parts heartwarming and heart-wrenching. White is a gifted storyteller." —Washington Post From the streets of Baltimore to the halls of the New Mexico Philharmonic, a musician shares his remarkable story in I'm Possible, an inspiring memoir of perseverance and possibility. Young Richard Antoine White and his mother don't have a key to a room or a house. Sometimes they have shelter, but they never have a place to call home. Still, they have each other, and Richard believes he can look after his mother, even as she struggles with alcoholism and sometimes disappears, sending Richard into loops of visiting familiar spots until he finds her again. And he always does—until one night, when he almost dies searching for her in the snow and is taken in by his adoptive grandparents. Living with his grandparents is an adjustment with rules and routines, but when Richard joins band for something to do, he unexpectedly discovers a talent and a sense of purpose. Taking up the tuba feels like something he can do that belongs to him, and playing music is like a light going on in the dark. Soon Richard gains acceptance to the prestigious Baltimore School for the Arts, and he continues thriving in his musical studies at the Peabody Conservatory and beyond, even as he navigates racial and socioeconomic disparities as one of few Black students in his programs. With fierce determination, Richard pushes forward on his remarkable path, eventually securing a coveted spot in a symphony orchestra and becoming the first African American to earn a doctorate in music for tuba performance. A professor, mentor, and motivational speaker, Richard now shares his extraordinary story—of dreaming big, impossible dreams and making them come true.
A centerpiece of the New History of the American West, this book embodies the theme that, as succeeding groups have occupied the American West and shaped the land, they have done so without regard for present inhabitants. Like the cowboy herding the dogies, they have cared little about the cost their activities imposed on others; what has mattered is the immediate benefit they have derived from their transformation of the land. Drawing on a recent flowering of scholarship on the western environment, western gender relations, minority history, and urban and labor history, as well as on more traditional western sources, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own is about the creation of the region rather than the vanishing of the frontier. Richard White tells how the various parts of the West—its distinct environments, its metropolitan areas and vast hinterlands, the various ethnic and racial groups and classes—are held together by a series of historical relationships that are developed over time. Widespread aridity and a common geographical location between the Missouri River and the Pacific Ocean would have provided but weak regional ties if other stronger relationships had not been created. A common dependence on the deferral government and common roots in a largely extractive and service-based economy were formative influences on western states and territories. A dual labor system based on race and the existence of minority groups with distinctive legal status have helped further define the region. Patterns of political participation and political organization have proved enduring. Together, these relationships among people, and between people and place, have made the West a historical creation and a distinctive region. From Europeans contact and subsequent Anglo-American conquest, through the civil-rights movement, the energy crisis, and the current reconstructing of the national and world economies, the West has remained a distinctive section in a much larger nation. In the American imagination the West still embodies possibilities inherent in the vastness and beauty of the place itself. But, Richard White explains, the possibilities many imagined for themselves have yielded to the possibilities seized by others. Many who thought themselves cowboys have in the end turned out to be dogies.
Love comes in many forms and touches all our lives, and despite its changing history, it remains constant in human experience. Love's Philosophy explores the basic expressions of love. In this book, White looks at friendship, romance, parenthood, and humanitarian love in classical and contemporary perspective. He argues that the philosophical oblivion of love has been a mistake. By examining both the historical and contemporary formations of love, he proposes alternative models to guide both our thinking and our experience of loving.
An acclaimed book and widely acknowledged classic, The Middle Ground steps outside the simple stories of Indian-white relations - stories of conquest and assimilation and stories of cultural persistence. It is, instead, about a search for accommodation and common meaning. It tells how Europeans and Indians met, regarding each other as alien, as other, as virtually nonhuman, and how between 1650 and 1815 they constructed a common, mutually comprehensible world in the region around the Great Lakes that the French called pays d'en haut. Here the older worlds of the Algonquians and of various Europeans overlapped, and their mixture created new systems of meaning and of exchange. Finally, the book tells of the breakdown of accommodation and common meanings and the re-creation of the Indians as alien and exotic. First published in 1991, the 20th anniversary edition includes a new preface by the author examining the impact and legacy of this study.
Winner of the 2021 California Book Award (Californiana category) A brilliant California history, in word and image, from an award-winning historian and a documentary photographer. “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” This indelible quote from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance applies especially well to California, where legend has so thoroughly become fact that it is visible in everyday landscapes. Our foremost historian of the West, Richard White, never content to “print the legend,” collaborates here with his son, a talented photographer, in excavating the layers of legend built into California’s landscapes. Together they expose the bedrock of the past, and the history they uncover is astonishing. Jesse White’s evocative photographs illustrate the sites of Richard’s historical investigations. A vista of Drakes Estero conjures the darkly amusing story of the Drake Navigators Guild and its dubious efforts to establish an Anglo-Saxon heritage for California. The restored Spanish missions of Los Angeles frame another origin story in which California’s native inhabitants, civilized through contact with friars, gift their territories to white settlers. But the history is not so placid. A quiet riverside park in the Tulare Lake Basin belies scenes of horror from when settlers in the 1850s transformed native homelands into American property. Near the lake bed stands a small marker commemorating the Mussel Slough massacre, the culmination of a violent struggle over land titles between local farmers and the Southern Pacific Railroad in the 1870s. Tulare is today a fertile agricultural county, but its population is poor and unhealthy. The California Dream lives elsewhere. The lake itself disappeared when tributary rivers were rerouted to deliver government-subsidized water to big agriculture and cities. But climate change ensures that it will be back—the only question is when.
What is a good life? What does it mean to be a good person? Richard White answers these questions by considering aspects of moral goodness through the virtues: courage, temperance, justice, compassion, and wisdom. White explores how moral virtues affect and support social movements such as pacifism, environmentalism, multiculturalism, and animal rights. Drawing on the classics, White includes historical and cross-cultural analysis and examines the lives of Socrates, Buddha, and Gandhi, who lived virtuous lives, to help the reader understand and acquire moral wisdom. Book jacket.
The newest volume in the Oxford History of the United States series, The Republic for Which It Stands argues that the Gilded Age, along with Reconstruction--its conflicts, rapid and disorienting change, hopes and fears--formed the template of American modernity.
Columbus discovered America. So they say. But what of Leif Ericsson? What of St. Brendan? Who inscribed that anguished message on the Kensington Rune Stone? And who was The Westford Knight? We are sure that Columbus made it to San Salvador - and back. And the Icelandic Saga shores up faith in Leif Ericsson's voyage to North America, although scholarly opinion of the Vinland map seems to change every 10 years or so. St. Brendan's adventure has been pretty generally dismissed as mere myth- as if myth could not be rooted in truth. And the case of the Kensington Rune Stone continues to generate controversy, despite an impressive accumulation of evidence, both environmental and linguistic. And then there is the Westford Knight. In 1954, the late Frank Glynn uncovered the figure of a knight in full armor incised on a slab of glacial rock along a roadside in Westford, Massachusetts. The Knight's helmet, sword and shield all date to a specific decade in the evolution of armor and arms. And the emblem on the shield represents the armorial bearings of Clan Gunn, a noble family based in Scotland's County Caithness. The figure is, in fact, a classic military effigy, a type of monument commonly found in ancient gravesites in Scotland and in the north of England. So what was the Knight doing here? Facts cited in this little book suggest that The Westford Knight sailed westward with his high-born kinsman, Henry Sinclair, baron of Rosslyn and Earl of Orkney, in the service of The Lady King. The author presents the evidence: THESE STONES BEAR WITNESS. The verdict is for the reader to decide.
Richard White's study of the collapse into 'dependency' of three Native American subsistence economies represents the best kind of interdisciplinary effort. Here ideas and approaches from several fields--mainly anthropology, history, and ecology--are fruitfully combined in one inquiring mind closely focused on a related set of large, salient problems. . . . A very sophisticated study, a 'best read' in Indian history."--American Historical Review "The book is original, enlightening, and rewarding. It points the way to a holistic manner in which tribal histories and studies of Indian-white relations should be written in the future. It can be recommended to anyone interested in Indian affairs, particularly in the question of the present-day dependency plight of the tribes."--Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., Western Historical Quarterly "The Roots of Dependency is a model study. With a provocative thesis tightly argued, it is extensively researched and well written. The nonreductionist, interdisciplinary approach provides insight heretofore beyond the range of traditional methodologies. . . . To the historiography of the American Indian this book is an important addition."--W. David Baird, American Indian Quarterly Richard White is a professor of history at the University of Washington. He is the winner of the Albert J. Beveridge Award of the American Historical Asso-ciation, the James A. Rawley Prize presented by the Organization of Ameri-can Historians and the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians. His books include The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815, "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own": A History of the American West and The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River
Named One of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2022 by the Los Angeles Times A premier historian penetrates the fog of corruption and cover-up still surrounding the murder of a Stanford University founder to establish who did it, how, and why. In 1885 Jane and Leland Stanford cofounded a university to honor their recently deceased young son. After her husband’s death in 1893, Jane Stanford, a devoted spiritualist who expected the university to inculcate her values, steered Stanford into eccentricity and public controversy for more than a decade. In 1905 she was murdered in Hawaii, a victim, according to the Honolulu coroner’s jury, of strychnine poisoning. With her vast fortune the university’s lifeline, the Stanford president and his allies quickly sought to foreclose challenges to her bequests by constructing a story of death by natural causes. The cover-up gained traction in the murky labyrinths of power, wealth, and corruption of Gilded Age San Francisco. The murderer walked. Deftly sifting the scattered evidence and conflicting stories of suspects and witnesses, Richard White gives us the first full account of Jane Stanford’s murder and its cover-up. Against a backdrop of the city’s machine politics, rogue policing, tong wars, and heated newspaper rivalries, White’s search for the murderer draws us into Jane Stanford’s imperious household and the academic enmities of the university. Although Stanford officials claimed that no one could have wanted to murder Jane, we meet several people who had the motives and the opportunity to do so. One of these, we discover, also had the means.
How does thinking illuminate the spiritual view of life? How does a close examination of key spiritual thinkers help us to live in the modern world? And in what way does philosophy enhance spirituality? In this book, Richard White answers these questions by analysing a range of important philosophers, from Schopenhauer in the first half of the 19th century to Irigaray in the present day. Each chapter examines the work of a single writer and one closely associated theme, such as Nietzsche on generosity, Benjamin on wisdom, and Derrida on mourning. The author looks at philosophy and spirituality in the tradition of continental philosophy, and he views spirituality as something that can be separated from religion. With the rise of reductive scientific materialism becoming ever more prevalent in modern society, White seeks to recover the idea of a spiritual tradition which is not otherworldly but philosophical in nature. The thinkers discussed in this book articulate some of the deepest possibilities of human existence. Spiritual Philosophers offers an approach to philosophy as a spiritual practice, which the author sees as an integral part of our life. As a pioneering work in an emerging field – the philosophy of spirituality -- this book contributes to several key debates surrounding spirituality, theology and the role of philosophy in the contemporary world.
Shattered Glass is a book of dark poetry in memory of students author Richard White went to school with, that lost their fight with depression, or their fight with drug abuse. Shattered Glass explores themes of mental health, depression, anxiety, PTSD, drug addiction, and suicide. It is a documentation of struggle and triumph, a celebration of life and of living. White's wit, empathy, and passion for poetry produce a work of endless wonder.
Many people ask, "How can I live a more spiritual life, a life that can ultimately lead to enlightenment?" And by way of an answer this book describes four of the most important steps that we can take along the spiritual path--staying open to suffering, living a generous life, cultivating mindfulness and wonder, and accepting death but affirming joy. The Spiritual Guide offers a clear discussion of basic spiritual themes. It does not assume the truth of any given standpoint, and it has something to say to all people, regardless of their religious affiliation or lack of it. Most of us are profoundly concerned with meaning-of-life issues, but academic philosophy is remote while "new age" spirituality can be impossibly vague. This book uses parables, philosophical ideas, and stories from a variety of religious and philosophical traditions to illuminate what it means to live in a spiritual way. The Spiritual Guide is both practical and theoretical, and it speaks directly to readers as students of life.
The Hill and Wang Critical Issues Series: concise, affordable works on pivotal topics in American history, society, and politics. In this pioneering study, White explores the relationship between the natural history of the Columbia River and the human history of the Pacific Northwest for both whites and Native Americans. He concentrates on what brings humans and the river together: not only the physical space of the region but also, and primarily, energy and work. For working with the river has been central to Pacific Northwesterners' competing ways of life. It is in this way that White comes to view the Columbia River as an organic machine--with conflicting human and natural claims--and to show that whatever separation exists between humans and nature exists to be crossed.
In The Wallace-White Family: Images, Letters, and Legacies, Richard White takes an innovative approach to connecting with his 16 great-great grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, and 4 grandparents plus one. Using black-and-white photos from the 1860s to the 2020s, White uses brief biographies as springboards for letters to his ancestors. He asks his great-great grandparents, Alexander McRobbie and Wilhelm Christian Sauer, why they left their native Scotland and Germany in the 1850s and what it was like to settle in their adopted communities of Milford, New Hampshire and Brooklyn, New York. The answers to Whites’ questions about his relatives’ lives, their decisions and motivations, their triumphs and sorrows, are lost in time and in the distant past. But the very act of posing the questions and imagining their answers gives White a profound sense of engaging in conversation with his ancestors. He feels closer to them than ever before--and this is the hope he shares with his readers.
What is God? What does it mean to believe in God? What happens to God after the death of God? This book examines “the death of God” from a philosophical standpoint. It focuses on monotheism, polytheism, and nature, and it discusses the renewed importance of spirituality—and the “spiritual but not religious”—in response to the death of God. In recent years, religious belief has been in decline, but secularism cannot satisfy our spiritual needs. We are now living in a “post-secular” age in which the relationship between philosophy, spirituality, and religion must be re-examined. As an exploratory essay, this book engages the reader at a profound level, and considers a variety of modern thinkers, including Nietzsche, Hegel, Freud, Levinas, Assmann, and Buber. It offers a sustained meditation on the origin of God, the death of God, and the future of “God” as a guiding ideal.
Sara Walsh was born in 1919 in the west of Ireland, in a land of storytellers. In prose that is neither history nor memoir but something larger and brighter than both,Remembering Ahanagrancaptures her memories of her early years in Ireland, her migration to the United States, and her marriage to Harry White, the Harvard-educated son of Russian Jewish emigrants. Her son, eminent historian Richard White, in collaboration with Sara, forces history as it is traditionally written into conversation with personal recollections. Richard Whiteis Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford University. "Richard White gives us a beautifully rendered account of his mother's life, tracing her journey as a young girl from Ireland toward the new identities she forged for herself in Boston and Chicago. Subtly weaving memory and history to suggest how the two reinforce but also challenge each other,Remembering Ahanagranis a powerful meditation on the immigrant experience in America. It is an absolutely wonderful book." - William Cronon "In this brilliant book, Richard White proves that he is not only one of the finest historians in America but also one of the most eloquent and ambitious. Through a loving but clear-eyed examination of the tales his immigrant mother tells of her early life in Ireland and the United States, he has managed to uncover a host of surprising truths--about his own family, about the complex, often poignant relationship between history and memory, and about what it means to be an American." - Geoffrey C. Ward "Remembering Ahanagranis a rare and remarkable achievement: a book that carries as great a charge in emotional power as it does in intellectual energy. Sara Walsh's 'memory' and Richard White's 'history' travel through terrain from the most urgent American concerns of immigration and intermarriage to the most elemental, universal issues of love and death. This book gives its readers access to the company of two people with extraordinary gifts for life's basic enterprise: taking in experience, and making sense of it." - Patricia Nelson Limerick "With equal and equally tender respect for document, memory, and lore, Richard White recreates and joins his Irish and his Jewish ancestry. An extraordinary book." - Lore Segal
This study is an important contribution to our understanding of the professionalization of civil engineering, and to the modernization of business practices in nineteenth-century Canada."--BOOK JACKET.
Whidbey and Camano, two of the largest of the numerous beautiful islands dotting Puget Sound, together form the major part of Island Country. Taking this county as a case study and following its history from Indian times to the present, Richard White explores the complex relationship between human induced environmental change and social change. This new edition of his classic study includes a new preface by the author and a foreword by William Cronon.
Log cabins and wagon trains, cowboys and Indians, Buffalo Bill and General Custer. These and other frontier images pervade our lives, from fiction to films to advertising, where they attach themselves to products from pancake syrup to cologne, blue jeans to banks. Richard White and Patricia Limerick join their inimitable talents to explore our national preoccupation with this uniquely American image. Richard White examines the two most enduring stories of the frontier, both told in Chicago in 1893, the year of the Columbian Exposition. One was Frederick Jackson Turner's remarkably influential lecture, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History"; the other took place in William "Buffalo Bill" Cody's flamboyant extravaganza, "The Wild West." Turner recounted the peaceful settlement of an empty continent, a tale that placed Indians at the margins. Cody's story put Indians—and bloody battles—at center stage, and culminated with the Battle of the Little Bighorn, popularly known as "Custer's Last Stand." Seemingly contradictory, these two stories together reveal a complicated national identity. Patricia Limerick shows how the stories took on a life of their own in the twentieth century and were then reshaped by additional voices—those of Indians, Mexicans, African-Americans, and others, whose versions revisit the question of what it means to be an American. Generously illustrated, engagingly written, and peopled with such unforgettable characters as Sitting Bull, Captain Jack Crawford, and Annie Oakley, The Frontier in American Culture reminds us that despite the divisions and denials the western movement sparked, the image of the frontier unites us in surprising ways.
The Shortest Path to Federal Dollars: GSA Schedules is the newest in a series of books that explain both the basics and the intricate nuances of one of the most popular "preapproved price" methods used by the federal government to buy commercial products and services. GSA schedule contracts are one of the most misunderstood aspects of federal contracting. Schedule purchasing by government agencies speeds up the time it takes to make a buy at the expense of open competition. All of the large federal contractors (the insiders) have GSA schedules so read the book if you want to become an insider. The book reveals what's good, bad, and ugly in the world of GSA schedules and how they are used to close federal sales quickly. The focus is on three key points: What is a GSA schedule? Why are they so popular with federal buyers? How can my company obtain one? The author, Richard J. White, is the CEO of Fedmarket.com and has more than forty years of experience in selling to the federal market.
Richard White has always enjoyed writing family history and stories. His four previous books include a family history, two books of travelogues, and letters to his ancestors. In My Life in Stories and Photos, his autobiography, Richard connects the stories of his youth and adulthood with over 130 photos from 1950 to 2023. He writes, “This book is a far cry from the detailed draft of my autobiography, which I wrote in the 2000’s. It was hiding for years in a thick three-ring binder in the basement, and it only went as far as New Year’s Eve 2000. I wondered, ‘How should I tell my story?’ I opted for a substantially pruned-down narrative complemented by photos capturing special moments in my life through the years. So many details have been left out. But I hope what I have included here will be an interesting and at times compelling story.”
In life there are times when we are overwhelmed by what is happening around and within us. It is like being caught in floodwaters with no way out. King David describes his life this way in Psalm 69. To the neck and rising explores his thoughts, feelings, emotions and attitudes throughout the Psalm. The journey that David takes is not dissimilar to ours and can provide us with valuable personal insights. Choices we make while in the place of the floodwaters determine whether we remain in that place of emotional turmoil or we begin to make steps towards recovery.
Richard White Jr. situates young Roosevelt within the exciting events of the Gilded Age, the Victorian era, and the gay nineties. He describes Roosevelt's relationships with family, friends, colleagues, and adversaries.
From the moment he took office as governor in 1928 to the day an assassin’s bullet cut him down in 1935, Huey Long wielded all but dictatorial control over the state of Louisiana. A man of shameless ambition and ruthless vindictiveness, Long orchestrated elections, hired and fired thousands at will, and deployed the state militia as his personal police force. And yet, paradoxically, as governor and later as senator, Long did more good for the state’s poor and uneducated than any politician before or since. Outrageous demagogue or charismatic visionary? In this powerful new biography, Richard D. White, Jr., brings Huey Long to life in all his blazing, controversial glory. White taps invaluable new source material to present a fresh, vivid portrait of both the man and the Depression era that catapulted him to fame. From his boyhood in dirt-poor Winn Parish, Long knew he was destined for power–the problem was how to get it fast enough to satisfy his insatiable appetite. With cunning and crudity unheard of in Louisiana politics, Long crushed his opponents in the 1928 gubernatorial race, then immediately set about tightening his iron grip. The press attacked him viciously, the oil companies howled for his blood after he pushed through a controversial oil processing tax, but Long had the adulation of the people. In 1930, the Kingfish got himself elected senator, and then there was no stopping him. White’s account of Long’s heyday unfolds with the mesmerizing intensity of a movie. Pegged by President Roosevelt as “one of the two most dangerous men in the country,” Long organized a radical movement to redistribute money through his Share Our Wealth Society–and his gospel of pensions for all, a shorter workweek, and free college spread like wildfire. The Louisiana poor already worshiped him for building thousands of miles of roads and funding schools, hospitals, and universities; his outrageous antics on the Senate floor gained him a growing national base. By 1935, despite a barrage of corruption investigations, Huey Long announced that he was running for president. In the end, Long was a tragic hero–a power addict who squandered his genius and came close to destroying the very foundation of democratic rule. Kingfish is a balanced, lucid, and absolutely spellbinding portrait of the life and times of the most incendiary figure in the history of American politics.
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