Oklahoma

The Wind Is My Mother

Bridging the worlds of the traditional Native American and modern culture, the authors offer an inspiring and moving autobiography of a native American medicine man, one of the last to be trained in the ancient ways, and one of the few to teach nontribal people.

Funny Money

From esteemed New Yorker writer Mark Singer comes this cautionary tale of the Penn Square Bank, the oil and gas broker in an Oklahoma City shopping mall whose collapse in 1982 staggered America's banking industry. Recounting the whole spectacular story and its colorful characters, Singer makes brilliantly (and hilariously) clear what actually happened and why it had to happen in boom-time Oklahoma. Nowhere else did money flow in quite the same spontaneous fashion. "[A] tale of wonderful verve" (New York Times), Funny Money comes to life through Singer's vivid prose and continues to resonate in today's culture of corporate corruption.

In Reckless Hands: Skinner v. Oklahoma and the Near-Triumph of American Eugenics

The disturbing, forgotten history of America's experiment with eugenics.

In the 1920s and 1930s, thousands of men and women were sterilized at asylums and prisons across America. Believing that criminality and mental illness were inherited, state legislatures passed laws calling for the sterilization of "habitual criminals" and the "feebleminded." But in 1936, inmates at Oklahoma's McAlester prison refused to cooperate; a man named Jack Skinner was the first to come to trial. A colorful and heroic cast of characters—from the inmates themselves to their devoted, self-taught lawyer—would fight the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Only after Americans learned the extent of another large-scale eugenics project—in Nazi Germany—would the inmates triumph.

Combining engrossing narrative with sharp legal analysis, Victoria F. Nourse explains the consequences of this landmark decision, still vital today—and reveals the stories of these forgotten men and women who fought for human dignity and the basic right to have a family. 11 photographs.

Bloodland: A Family Story of Oil, Greed and Murder on the Osage Reservation

In the 1920s, oil production on the Osage reservation transformed the tribe into the wealthiest population in the world. Strangers descended upon the region, courting and wedding young Osage women. Many of these new brides died mysteriously. In this searing memoir, journalist Dennis McAuliffe researches the death of his grandmother and realizes that his own grandfather may have engineered her death.

Part murder mystery, part family memoir, & part spiritual journey, this book reveals many layers of greed & deception. Skillfully written by a seasoned Washington Post journalist, the book unearths family secrets & ultimately exposes a systematic murder plot. In the 1920's, oil was found on the Osage reservation, transforming the tribe into the wealthiest population in the world. Tribe members attended the most exclusive finishing schools, owned expensive automobiles, & dressed in the finest fashions of the era. Strangers descended upon the region, marrying Osage women in an attempt to gain control over the newfound wealth. Many of the new brides died mysteriously shortly after their weddings. The author's young & beautiful grandmother, Sybil Bolton, was among the last of the murdered brides. Eventually, the author is forced to suspect that his own grandfather engineered her murder. The term bloodland describes one's place of origin or homeland. While investigating his grandmother's life & death, the author undergoes a personal & spiritual renewal, finding an integrated identity as a mixed-blood Native American.

Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie

Now a professor of ethnic studies in California, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz turns her eye back to her own roots as a "Dust Bowl Baby" in rural Oklahoma. In telling the story of her family and their hardships in the Depression, Dunbar-Ortiz introduces the reader to some fascinating characters who are certainly not the "white trash" caricatures of popular belief. Interspersed well with her own story are historical facts that give depth to the narrative and correct popular misconceptions about "Okies" (some of which were popularized by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath).

A classic in contemporary Oklahoma literature, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's Red Dirt unearths the joys and ordeals of growing up poor during the 1940s and 1950s. In this exquisite rendering of her childhood in rural Oklahoma, from the Dust Bowl days to the end of the Eisenhower era, the author bears witness to a family and community that still cling to the dream of America as a republic of landowners.

John Wesley Hardin: Dark Angel of Texas

Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma (OK) (Images of America)

Choctaw are the largest tribe belonging to the branch of the Muskogean family that includes the Chickasaw, Creek (Muscogee), and Seminole. According to oral history, the tribe originated from Nanih Waya, a sacred hill near present-day Noxapater, Mississippi. Nanih Waya means “productive or fruitful hill, or mountain.” During one of their migrations, they carried a tree that would lean, and every day the people would travel in the direction the tree was leaning. They traveled east and south for sometime until the tree quit leaning, and the people stopped to make their home at this location, in present-day Mississippi. The people have made difficult transitions throughout their history. In 1830, the Choctaw who were removed by the United States from their southeastern U.S. homeland to Indian Territory became known as the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

Echoes of Oklahoma Football: The Greatest Stories Ever Told

With a proud tradition dating back to 1895, a worldwide following of rabid and devoted fans, and an ever-growing collection of national championships, Oklahoma Sooners football is one of the truly elite programs in collegiate sports. Echoes of Oklahoma Sooners Football documents that history through some of the greatest sportswriting of the past century. Relive the excitement of the games and traditions and revisit the players and coaches that have made the Oklahoma Sooners synonymous with college football excellence.

Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Riot of 1921: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation

The 1921 Tulsa Race Riot was the country's bloodiest civil disturbance of the century. Thirty city blocks were burned to the ground, perhaps 150 died, and the prosperous black community of Greenwood, Oklahoma, was turned to rubble.
Brophy draws on his own extensive research into contemporary accounts and court documents to chronicle this devastating riot, showing how and why the rule of law quickly eroded. Brophy shines his lights on mob violence and racism run amok, both on the night of the riot and the following morning. Equally important, he shows how the city government and police not only permitted looting, shootings, and the burning of Greenwood, but actively participated in it by deputizing white citizens haphazardly, giving out guns and badges, or sending men to arm themselves. Likewise, the National Guard acted unconstitutionally, arresting every black resident they found, leaving property vulnerable to the white mob.
Brophy's stark narrative concludes with a discussion of reparations for victims of the riot through lawsuits and legislative action. That case has implications for other reparations movements, including reparations for slavery.
"Recovers a largely forgotten history of black activism in one of the grimmest periods of race relations.... Linking history with advocacy, Brophy also offers a reasoned defense of reparations for the riot's victims."--Washington Post Book World

African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens (John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture)

Forcibly removed from their homes in the late 1830s, Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw Indians brought their African-descended slaves with them along the Trail of Tears and resettled in Indian Territory, present-day Oklahoma. Celia E. Naylor vividly charts the experiences of enslaved and free African Cherokees from the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma's entry into the Union in 1907. Carefully extracting the voices of former slaves from interviews and mining a range of sources in Oklahoma, she creates an engaging narrative of the composite lives of African Cherokees. Naylor explores how slaves connected with Indian communities not only through Indian customs—language, clothing, and food—but also through bonds of kinship.

Examining this intricate and emotionally charged history, Naylor demonstrates that the "red over black" relationship was no more benign than "white over black." She presents new angles to traditional understandings of slave resistance and counters previous romanticized ideas of slavery in the Cherokee Nation. She also challenges contemporary racial and cultural conceptions of African-descended people in the United States. Naylor reveals how black Cherokee identities evolved reflecting complex notions about race, culture, "blood," kinship, and nationality. Indeed, Cherokee freedpeople's struggle for recognition and equal rights that began in the nineteenth century continues even today in Oklahoma.