While reading Paul Hedren’s, “Great Sioux War Orders of Battle”, we have to ask why no one has produced such a reference before. We find bits and pieces of Mr. Hedren’s material in a small number of other works, but never have we seen this data comprised into one volume. Besides data, the author provides a reasonable and innovative analysis for why the frontier army was ably led and equipped to win the Sioux/Cheyenne War of 1876.
No matter one’s opinion on the subject of the U.S. Army during the Centennial Campaign, Mr. Hedren’s arguments are well made and supported from primary research. His check list of primary material includes but is not limited to 185 monthly Regimental Returns, official reports, and diaries. The war was made up of a complex maze of many columns of infantry and cavalry moving across a wide landscape over a period of almost two years. Making sense of it all is a huge challenge, but Mr. Hedren accomplishes it through a novel approach.
The book is divided into three parts. Part one “explores the doctrine, training, culture, and materiel” of the army that entered the campaign. Part two is exemplary in that the author has divided the entire campaign into 28 separate deployments starting with the relief of Fort Pease in February 1876, and ending with the establishment of Fort Custer in July 1877. Part three encompasses a well thought-out analysis for why a well trained army could lose on some of the campaigns’ battlefields. It also affirms why the war was not won because of luck; the army went into the field confident and rightfully so.
October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, an opportunity to raise awareness about the importance of early detection. Screening exams such as mammograms are encouraged and the goal is to find cancers before they start to spread. Breast cancers that are found because they can be felt tend to be larger and are more likely to have spread beyond the breast. The size of a breast cancer and how far it has spread are important factors in predicting the prognosis for this disease.
The following is a guest post by Jack Willis, author of Saving Jack: A Man’s Struggle with Breast Cancer, who discovered that breast cancer is not just a woman’s disease. Here Willis, a retired adjunct journalism professor at the University of Oklahoma, shares his thoughts on inspirational people he has met during his cancer experience and the lessons he has learned along the way.
I’m a retired journalism instructor and a five-year breast cancer survivor. I know. Guys aren’t supposed to get breast cancer, but about one percent do.
You may have read the novel The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom. The book made me think of inspirational people I met during my cancer experience and the lessons they taught me.
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OU Press author David M. Emmons recently sat down with Montana Public Radio reporter Edward O’Brien to discuss his new book Beyond the American Pale: The Irish in the West, 1845-1910.
Beyond the American Pale explores America’s love-hate relationship with one of its most prominent immigrant groups. Convention has it that Irish immigrants in the nineteenth century confined themselves mainly to industrial cities of the East and Midwest. The truth is that Irish Catholics went everywhere in America and often had as much of a presence in the West as in the East. In Beyond the American Pale, Emmons examines this multifaceted experience of westering Irish and, in doing so, offers a fresh and discerning account of America’s westward expansion.
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Droppers: America’s First Hippie Commune, Drop City by Mark Matthews, which recounts the rise and fall of this famous 1960s community, was reviewed by ForeWord magazine. They also have an interview with the author.
Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. In popular imagination, these words seem to capture the atmosphere of 1960s hippie communes. Yet when the first hippie commune was founded in 1965 outside Trinidad, Colorado, the goal wasn’t one long party but rather a new society that integrated life and art. In Droppers, Mark Matthews chronicles the rise and fall of this utopian community, exploring the goals behind its creation and the factors that eventually led to its dissolution.
In a rollicking, fast-paced style, Matthews vividly describes the early enthusiasm of Drop City’s founders, as Bernofsky and his friends constructed a town in the desert literally using the “detritus of society.” Over time, Drop City suffered from media attention, the distraction of visitors, and the arrival of new residents who didn’t share the founders’ ideals.
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Will Bagley, the award-winning author of Blood of the Prophets, was recently interviewed by KEUR 90.1 radio and the Salt Lake Tribune about his new book, So Rugged and Mountainous: Blazing the Trails to Oregon and California, 1812-1848.
Dear Jay, Love Dad: Bud Wilkinson’s Letters to His Son
By Jay Wilkinson
Winter Sun: Poems
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Kit Carson: The Life of an American Border Man
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Calamity Jane: The Woman and the Legend
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Historical Atlas of Oklahoma: Fourth Edition
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Iroquois Art, Power, and History
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American Windmills: An Album of Historic Photographs
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Lincoln’s Cavalrymen: A History of the Mounted Forces of the Army of the Potomac, 1861–1865
By Edward G. Longacre
Lee’s Cavalrymen: A History of the Mounted Forces of the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861–1865
By Edward G. Longacre
Cave Life of Oklahoma and Arkansas: Exploration and Conservation of Subterranean Biodiversity
By G. O. Graening, Dante B. Fenolio, Michael E. Slay
Military Register of Custer’s Last Command
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Bones in the Well: The Haun’s Mill Massacre, 1838
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The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale: A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, Volume II, Parts 5A and 5B
By Geoffrey Chaucer
The Quiche Mayas of Utatlán: The Evolution of a Highland Guatemala Kingdom
By Robert M. Carmack
