Enduring Legacies: Ethnic Histories and Cultures of Colorado

Foreword

xi Foreword Enduring Legacies: Ethnic Histories and Cultures of Colorado is a welcome addition to the University Press of Colorado’s Timberline series, which features meritorious books relating to Colorado. Since its inception in 1965, the University Press of Colorado, a cooperative effort sponsored by most of the state’s public universities and colleges, has given special attention to books focusing on Colorado and the West. During the past two decades it has published more works relating to people of African, Asian, Hispanic, and Native American heritage. Many have been used as texts or supplementary reading in ethnic studies and regional history courses. Among the press’s titles covering African Americans are Robert B. Betts’s In Search of York: The Slave Who Went to the Pacific with Lewis and Clark (revised edition, 2002), Monroe Lee Billington and Roger D. Hardaway’s edited volume African Americans on the Western Frontier (2001), Monroe Lee Billington’s New Mexico’s Buffalo Soldiers, 1866–1900 (1994), Angel David Nieves and Leslie M. Alexander’s edited volume “We Shall Independent Be”: African American PlaceMaking and the Struggle to Claim Space in the United States (2008), and Nicholas Patler’s Jim Crow and the Wilson Administration: Protesting Federal Segregation in the Early Twentieth Century (2004). Chinese Americans provide the focus for two press books: Benson Tong’s The Chinese Americans, Revised Edition (2003) and Liping Zhu’s A Chinaman’s xii Foreword Chance: The Chinese on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier (2000). The late Bill Hosokawa graced the press with three books: Out of the Frying Pan: Reflections of a Japanese American (1998), Nisei: The Quiet Americans, Revised Edition (2002), and Colorado’s Japanese Americans: From 1886 to the Present (2005). In addition to its titles on Central America, Mexico, and New Mexico, the press has published several books on Hispanos, including Vincent C. de Baca’s edited collection La Gente: Hispano History and Life in Colorado (1998), which offers contributions from José Aguayo, Ramon Del Castillo, Aileen Lucero, Deborah Mora-Espinosa, George Rivera Jr., M. Edmund Vallejo, Ernesto Vigil, and others on topics such as migrant workers and Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, founder of Denver’s Crusade for Justice. Richard Gould’s The Life and Times of Richard Castro: Bridging a Cultural Divide (2007) treats another major Colorado leader. Virginia McConnell Simmons’s The San Luis Valley: Land of the SixArmed Cross, Second Edition (1999) includes material on early Hispano settlements in southern Colorado. More than a dozen press books on Native Americans remain in print. The Arapaho Language (2008) by Andrew Cowell and Alonzo Moss Sr. provides a much-needed dictionary of an endangered tongue. Arapaho heritage is also preserved in Tell Me, Grandmother: Traditions, Stories, and Cultures of Arapaho People (2004) by Virginia Sutter. John H. Monnett’s The Battle of Beecher Island and the Indian War of 1867– 1869 (1992) chronicles the Cheyenne’s waning years in Colorado. One of the press’s most lavishly illustrated books, Cheyenne Dog Soldiers: A Ledgerbook History of Coups and Combat (1997) by Jean Afton, David Fridtjof Halaas, Andrew E. Masich, and Richard N. Ellis, also treats the Cheyenne. Virginia McConnell Simmons tells of the Utes, the state’s most deeply rooted people, in The Ute Indians of Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico (2001). Other press books on Native Americans include Donald Fixico’s The Invasion of Indian Country in the Twentieth Century: American Capitalism and Tribal Natural Resources (1998), Andrew Gulliford’s Sacred Objects and Sacred Places: Preserving Tribal Traditions (2000), Stan Hoig’s White Man’s Paper Trail: Grand Councils and Treaty-Making on the Central Plains (2008), and Brian Hosmer and Colleen O’Neill’s edited volume Native Pathways: American Indian Culture and Economic Development in the Twentieth Century (2004). Broader works that include chapters and other material on Colorado’s ethnic groups include Carl Abbott, Stephen J. Leonard, and Thomas J. Noel’s Colorado: A History of the Centennial State, Fourth Edition (2005), particularly chapters 3, 11, and 19; Stephen J. Leonard and Thomas J. Noel’s Denver: Mining Foreword xiii Camp to Metropolis (1991), chapters 16, 26, and 27; and Stephen J. Leonard’s Lynching in Colorado, 1859–1919 (2002), chapter 6. Obviously, thanks in part to the University Press of Colorado and its authors, Colorado history has become far more inclusive than it was thirty years ago, when even the best textbooks were just beginning to pay adequate...