Columns of Vengeance

by Paul N. Beck

2014 · University of Oklahoma Press

In summer 1862, Minnesotans found themselves fighting interconnected wars—the first against the rebellious Southern states, and the second an internal war against the Sioux. While the Civil War was more important to the future of the United States, the Dakota War of 1862 proved far more destructive to the people of Minnesota—both whites and American Indians. It led to U.S. military action against the Sioux, divided the Dakotas over whether to fight or not, and left hundreds of white settlers dead. In Columns of Vengeance, historian Paul N. Beck offers a reappraisal of the Punitive Expeditions of 1863 and 1864, the U.S. Army’s response to the Dakota War of 1862. Whereas previous accounts have approached the Punitive Expeditions as a military campaign of the Indian Wars, Beck argues that the expeditions were also an extension of the Civil War. The strategy and tactics reflected those of the war in the East, and Civil War operations directly affected planning and logistics in the West. Beck also examines the devastating impact the expeditions had on the various bands and tribes of the Sioux. Whites viewed the expeditions as punishment—“columns of vengeance” sent against those Dakotas who had started the war in 1862—yet the majority of the Sioux the army encountered had little or nothing to do with the earlier uprising in Minnesota. Rather than relying only on the official records of the commanding officers involved, Beck presents a much fuller picture of the conflict by consulting the letters, diaries, and personal accounts of the common soldiers who took part in the expeditions, as well as rare personal narratives from the Dakotas. Drawing on a wealth of firsthand accounts and linking the Punitive Expeditions of 1863 and 1864 to the overall Civil War experience, Columns of Vengeance offers fresh insight into an important chapter in the development of U.S. military operations against the Sioux.

You Will Never Be One of Us

by Timothy Paul Bowman

2022 · University of Oklahoma Press

During the spring semester of 1975, Wayne Woodward, a popular young English teacher at La Plata Junior High School in Hereford, Texas, was unceremoniously fired. His offense? Founding a local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Believing he had been unjustly targeted, Woodward sued the school district. You Will Never Be One of Us chronicles the circumstances surrounding Woodward’s dismissal and the ensuing legal battle. Revealing a uniquely regional aspect of the cultural upheaval of the 1970s, the case offers rare insight into the beginnings of the rural-urban, local-national divide that continues to roil American politics. By 1975 Hereford, a quiet farming town in the Texas Panhandle, had become “majority minority,” and Woodward’s students were mostly the children of Mexican and Mexican American workers at local agribusinesses. Most townspeople viewed the ACLU as they did Woodward’s long hair and politics: as threatening a radical liberal takeover—and a reckoning for the town’s white power structure. Locals were presented with a choice: either support school officials who sought to rid themselves of a liberal troublemaker, or side with an idealistic young man whose constitutional rights might have been violated. In Timothy Bowman’s deft telling, Woodward’s story exposes the sources and depths of rural America's political culture during the latter half of the twentieth century and the lengths to which small-town conservatives would go to defend it. In defining a distinctive rural, middle-American “Panhandle conservatism,” You Will Never Be One of Us extends the study of the conservative movement beyond the suburbs of the Sunbelt and expands our understanding of a continuing, perhaps deepening, rift in American political culture.