The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832-1929 - Softcover

Chang, David A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807833657 ISBN 13: 9780807833650

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010

Synopsis

The Color of the Land brings the histories of Creek Indians, African Americans, and whites in Oklahoma together into one story that explores the way races and nations were made and remade in conflicts over who would own land, who would farm it, and who would rule it. This story disrupts expected narratives of the American past, revealing how identities--race, nation, and class--took new forms in struggles over the creation of different systems of property.

Conflicts were unleashed by a series of sweeping changes: the forced "removal" of the Creeks from their homeland to Oklahoma in the 1830s, the transformation of the Creeks' enslaved black population into landed black Creek citizens after the Civil War, the imposition of statehood and private landownership at the turn of the twentieth century, and the entrenchment of a sharecropping economy and white supremacy in the following decades. In struggles over land, wealth, and power, Oklahomans actively defined and redefined what it meant to be Native American, African American, or white. By telling this story, David Chang contributes to the history of racial construction and nationalism as well as to southern, western, and Native American history.

About this title

Book Description

"There are few scholars capable of addressing all the potential axes of investigation as fully and thoroughly as Chang does. To weave Indians, African Americans, and Euro-Americans together into one story that also encompasses race, class, nation, and land is to account for the variables historians have been discussing in a piecemeal fashion for a generation or more. At once explicitly comparative and exquisitely sensitive to the connections between the units under comparison, this is the kind of work that we need more of."--Joshua A. Piker, University of Oklahoma

From the Inside Flap

Chang brings the histories of Creek Indians, African Americans, and whites in Oklahoma together into one story that explores the way races and nations were made and remade in conflicts over who would own land, who would farm it, and who would rule it. He argues that in struggles over land, wealth, and power, Oklahomans actively defined and redefined what it meant to be Native American, African American, or white.

About this edition

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0807833657
• ISBN 13: 9780807833650
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 308