Books by Boyd Cothran
This volume presents women warriors and hero cults from a number of cultures since the early mode... more This volume presents women warriors and hero cults from a number of cultures since the early modern period. The first truly global study of women warriors, individual chapters examine figures such as Joan of Arc in Cairo, revenging daughters in Samurai Japan, a transgender Mexican revolutionary and WWII Chinese spies.
Exploring issues of violence, gender fluidity, memory and nation-building, the authors discuss how these real or imagined female figures were constructed and deployed in different national and transnational contexts.
Divided into four parts, they explore how women warriors and their stories were created, consider the issue of the violent woman, discuss how these female figures were gendered, and highlight the fate of women warriors who live on. The chapters illustrate the ways in which female fighters have figured in nation-building stories and in the ordering or re-ordering of gender politics, and give the history of women fighters a critical edge. Exploring women as military actors, women after war, and the strategic use of women's stories in national narratives, this intellectually innovative volume provides the first global treatment of women warriors and their histories.
On October 3, 1873, the U.S. Army hanged four Modoc headmen at Oregon's Fort Klamath. The condemn... more On October 3, 1873, the U.S. Army hanged four Modoc headmen at Oregon's Fort Klamath. The condemned had supposedly murdered the only U.S. Army general to die during the Indian wars of the nineteenth century. Their much-anticipated execution marked the end of the Modoc War of 1872–73. But as Boyd Cothran demonstrates, the conflict's close marked the beginning of a new struggle over the memory of the war. Examining representations of the Modoc War in the context of rapidly expanding cultural and commercial marketplaces, Cothran shows how settlers created and sold narratives of the conflict that blamed the Modocs. These stories portrayed Indigenous people as the instigators of violence and white Americans as innocent victims.
Cothran examines the production and circulation of these narratives, from sensationalized published histories and staged lectures featuring Modoc survivors of the war to commemorations and promotional efforts to sell newly opened Indian lands to settlers. As Cothran argues, these narratives of American innocence justified not only violence against Indians in the settlement of the West but also the broader process of U.S. territorial and imperial expansion.
Journal Articles by Boyd Cothran
Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 2019
“History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
Or so Mark Twain is supposed to have said.... more “History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
Or so Mark Twain is supposed to have said. And although there is no evidence that the great American humorist ever uttered these words, their truth is undeniable. Even a cursory glance at the newspaper today would reveal that we are awash in claims that history is rhyming, if not in fact repeating itself. The most prominent and, to the readers of this journal, the most relevant example of this temporal doggerel is that our current era is some kind of “Second Gilded Age.” These historical odes tend to be rooted in analyses of economic inequality or political corruption. But how apt is this prosaic and historic analogy? Does it reveal more than it obscures, or are pundits and journalists leading Americans astray with their beguiling paeans to a begone era? This special issue features a series of essays from leading scholars of the “First” Gilded Age to explore, as special guest editors Daniel Wortel-London and Boyd Cothran say, “The promises and perils of an analogy.”
This special issue began its life as a conference in April 2019 at The Gotham Center for New York City History. Organized by Cothran; Wortel-London; and the director of the Gotham Center, Peter-Christian Aigner, the full-day conference featured interdisciplinary panels of experts mostly from the New York City area debating the historical parallels, differences, and lessons to be drawn from comparing these two eras. While that conference focused on the economic and political parallels between the two eras, as well as efforts at reform and resistance, we wanted to expand the conversation for this special issue to bring in voices and perspectives that could not be included in the conference.
The results are the fourteen essays presented here. As is often the case when discussing such complex and thorny issues, there are many points of agreement, but the moments of disjuncture and disagreement are perhaps more revealing. And while there are few definitive conclusions or concrete policy proscriptions contained within these pages, we hope that the perspective these authors bring to the topic will spark many more conversations down the road as we all struggle to understand the very real challenges American society, and the world, face today.
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 2015
Why do " they " continue to ignore " us " ? This was a question raised during a series of convers... more Why do " they " continue to ignore " us " ? This was a question raised during a series of conversations we had with colleagues working in the fields of Indigenous studies and nineteenth-and twentieth-century American history about the place of Indigenous history in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era's historiography. We whined. We kvetched. It was neither very pretty nor articulate at first. We had a sense that much of the most innovative and transformative works in the interdisciplinary field of Indigenous studies were coming out of the postbellum period, but also that few historians were paying attention. Despite the significance that Indigenous studies scholars place on the period between the Civil War and the 1920s—a period of tremendous violence perpetrated on Indigenous communities, of systematic land theft and other assaults on sovereignty , of boarding schools, illegal usurpations, and damaging cultural representations that advanced and ossified racialized ideologies—Native history has remained peripheral to academic journals such as the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and to survey textbooks, whose coverage of the period typically focus on non-Indigenous political and social history. 1 Of course, we were asking the wrong question. One shouldn't complain about being ignored by a conversation that one is not actively participating in. Tokenism, moreover, was not our goal. Nor was our goal to claim a larger slice of pertinent textbook chapters. Instead, we wanted to show how Native history allows us to ask new and exciting questions about many of the central issues and themes of the era, and offers the possibly of posing new questions about the continuing relevance of the era today. We also wanted to show how the major themes that historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era have been wrestling with for decades should inform the work of critical Indigenous studies. We didn't want a dressing down but a conversation starter. We needed to ask better questions—both to ourselves and to other historians of the period. We began by organizing
Book Reviews by Boyd Cothran
Pacific Historical Review, 2009
... And my conversations with Dolores Arlington, Gloria and Eddie Erosa, Clara Chin, Jerry Paular... more ... And my conversations with Dolores Arlington, Gloria and Eddie Erosa, Clara Chin, Jerry Paular,Sugar Pie De Santo, Vangie Buell, Danny Kim, Jim ... compo-sition of the American West, going beyond black and white or brown and white or even yellow and white to consider ...
History: Reviews of New Books, 2011
The Journal of the Civil War Era, 2016
Papers by Boyd Cothran
The Journal of American History, Dec 1, 2019
Native American and Indigenous Studies, 2018
Global Nineteenth-Century Studies
This article explains how the melding of microhistory and maritime history through the career of ... more This article explains how the melding of microhistory and maritime history through the career of the Edwin Fox, an unexceptional British sailing ship that was active between 1853 and 1905, provides an innovative approach to understanding some of the myriad complexities that characterized the globalization of the period 1850 to 1914, and thus the complex and contradictory inner workings of staggering and unprecedented change on a global scale. Such an approach makes it possible to write a history of globalization on a human scale, highlighting local conditions and human agency at work, as well as decentring the Atlantic world. The article uses the story of the pianos that the ship carried from Great Britain to New Zealand in 1881 as an example of the intimate, unexpected, and otherwise invisible interconnections of globalization that this approach can reveal.
American Studies, 2015
munities. Universal yet also deeply personal, soldiers’ music could be confrontational, pragmatic... more munities. Universal yet also deeply personal, soldiers’ music could be confrontational, pragmatic, or used to negotiate between identities, such as when it functioned as a substitute for domestic values. Davis suggests that while music mostly served as a creolized leveler and centripetal force of identity formation, it also disclosed social hierarchies and class barriers, in the form of officers’ balls, and racial boundaries, evidenced by the exclusion of African Americans. More than other groups, the all-purpose brass band proved the most successful at performing the many social functions assigned to Civil War musicians, providing an “intersection” of musical communities. Ultimately, Davis maintains that the Civil War changed soldiers, and music both influenced and was influenced by that change. Although his evidence is more than ample, Davis’s work suffers at times from repetition. From the perspective of a historian, Music Along the Rapidan also appears thin at times on historical context, particularly on themes such as ethnicity and nationalism (although his analysis of “community” is meticulous). Other blemishes seem inherent to case studies. For example, while Davis’s subjects are overwhelmingly from the Northeast and Virginia, greater regional variation and analysis might reveal differences in music and community between eastern and western armies. Furthermore, while recognizing that it was not the aim of his study, it would have been fascinating to see the function of music not only in repose, but also on campaign and in the heat of battle. Incisive, well-researched, and convincing, Music Along the Rapidan will no doubt serve as a foundation for later such works. Matthew E. Stanley Albany State University
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Books by Boyd Cothran
Exploring issues of violence, gender fluidity, memory and nation-building, the authors discuss how these real or imagined female figures were constructed and deployed in different national and transnational contexts.
Divided into four parts, they explore how women warriors and their stories were created, consider the issue of the violent woman, discuss how these female figures were gendered, and highlight the fate of women warriors who live on. The chapters illustrate the ways in which female fighters have figured in nation-building stories and in the ordering or re-ordering of gender politics, and give the history of women fighters a critical edge. Exploring women as military actors, women after war, and the strategic use of women's stories in national narratives, this intellectually innovative volume provides the first global treatment of women warriors and their histories.
Cothran examines the production and circulation of these narratives, from sensationalized published histories and staged lectures featuring Modoc survivors of the war to commemorations and promotional efforts to sell newly opened Indian lands to settlers. As Cothran argues, these narratives of American innocence justified not only violence against Indians in the settlement of the West but also the broader process of U.S. territorial and imperial expansion.
Journal Articles by Boyd Cothran
Or so Mark Twain is supposed to have said. And although there is no evidence that the great American humorist ever uttered these words, their truth is undeniable. Even a cursory glance at the newspaper today would reveal that we are awash in claims that history is rhyming, if not in fact repeating itself. The most prominent and, to the readers of this journal, the most relevant example of this temporal doggerel is that our current era is some kind of “Second Gilded Age.” These historical odes tend to be rooted in analyses of economic inequality or political corruption. But how apt is this prosaic and historic analogy? Does it reveal more than it obscures, or are pundits and journalists leading Americans astray with their beguiling paeans to a begone era? This special issue features a series of essays from leading scholars of the “First” Gilded Age to explore, as special guest editors Daniel Wortel-London and Boyd Cothran say, “The promises and perils of an analogy.”
This special issue began its life as a conference in April 2019 at The Gotham Center for New York City History. Organized by Cothran; Wortel-London; and the director of the Gotham Center, Peter-Christian Aigner, the full-day conference featured interdisciplinary panels of experts mostly from the New York City area debating the historical parallels, differences, and lessons to be drawn from comparing these two eras. While that conference focused on the economic and political parallels between the two eras, as well as efforts at reform and resistance, we wanted to expand the conversation for this special issue to bring in voices and perspectives that could not be included in the conference.
The results are the fourteen essays presented here. As is often the case when discussing such complex and thorny issues, there are many points of agreement, but the moments of disjuncture and disagreement are perhaps more revealing. And while there are few definitive conclusions or concrete policy proscriptions contained within these pages, we hope that the perspective these authors bring to the topic will spark many more conversations down the road as we all struggle to understand the very real challenges American society, and the world, face today.
Book Reviews by Boyd Cothran
Papers by Boyd Cothran
Exploring issues of violence, gender fluidity, memory and nation-building, the authors discuss how these real or imagined female figures were constructed and deployed in different national and transnational contexts.
Divided into four parts, they explore how women warriors and their stories were created, consider the issue of the violent woman, discuss how these female figures were gendered, and highlight the fate of women warriors who live on. The chapters illustrate the ways in which female fighters have figured in nation-building stories and in the ordering or re-ordering of gender politics, and give the history of women fighters a critical edge. Exploring women as military actors, women after war, and the strategic use of women's stories in national narratives, this intellectually innovative volume provides the first global treatment of women warriors and their histories.
Cothran examines the production and circulation of these narratives, from sensationalized published histories and staged lectures featuring Modoc survivors of the war to commemorations and promotional efforts to sell newly opened Indian lands to settlers. As Cothran argues, these narratives of American innocence justified not only violence against Indians in the settlement of the West but also the broader process of U.S. territorial and imperial expansion.
Or so Mark Twain is supposed to have said. And although there is no evidence that the great American humorist ever uttered these words, their truth is undeniable. Even a cursory glance at the newspaper today would reveal that we are awash in claims that history is rhyming, if not in fact repeating itself. The most prominent and, to the readers of this journal, the most relevant example of this temporal doggerel is that our current era is some kind of “Second Gilded Age.” These historical odes tend to be rooted in analyses of economic inequality or political corruption. But how apt is this prosaic and historic analogy? Does it reveal more than it obscures, or are pundits and journalists leading Americans astray with their beguiling paeans to a begone era? This special issue features a series of essays from leading scholars of the “First” Gilded Age to explore, as special guest editors Daniel Wortel-London and Boyd Cothran say, “The promises and perils of an analogy.”
This special issue began its life as a conference in April 2019 at The Gotham Center for New York City History. Organized by Cothran; Wortel-London; and the director of the Gotham Center, Peter-Christian Aigner, the full-day conference featured interdisciplinary panels of experts mostly from the New York City area debating the historical parallels, differences, and lessons to be drawn from comparing these two eras. While that conference focused on the economic and political parallels between the two eras, as well as efforts at reform and resistance, we wanted to expand the conversation for this special issue to bring in voices and perspectives that could not be included in the conference.
The results are the fourteen essays presented here. As is often the case when discussing such complex and thorny issues, there are many points of agreement, but the moments of disjuncture and disagreement are perhaps more revealing. And while there are few definitive conclusions or concrete policy proscriptions contained within these pages, we hope that the perspective these authors bring to the topic will spark many more conversations down the road as we all struggle to understand the very real challenges American society, and the world, face today.