How can we learn more about Native women?s lives in North America in earlier centuries? This question is answered by this landmark anthology, an essential guide to the significance, experiences, and histories of Native women. Sixteen classic essays?plus new commentary?many by the original authors?describe a broad range of research methods and sources offering insight into the lives of Native American women. The authors explain the use of letters and diaries, memoirs and autobiographies, newspaper accounts and ethnographies, census data and legal documents. This collection offers guidelines for extracting valuable information from such diverse sources and assessing the significance of such variables as religious affiliation, changes in women?s power after colonization, connections between economics and gender, and representations (and misrepresentations) of Native women. ø Indispensable to anyone interested in exploring the role of gender in Native American history or in emphasizing Native women?s experiences within the context of women?s history, this anthology helps restore the historical reality of Native women and is essential to an understanding of North American history.

After 1855 the society's annual reports were included in its Proceedings.

Provincial Lives tells the story of the development of a regional middle class in the antebellum Middle West. It traces the efforts of waves of Americans to transmit their social structures, behavior, and values to the West and construct a distinctive regional middle-class culture on the urban frontier. Intertwining local, regional, and national history with social, immigration, gender and urban history, Mahoney examines how a succession of settlers from "good" society--farmers, entrepreneurs, professionals, and "genteel" men and women from the urban East--interacted with, accommodated, and compromised with those already there to construct a middle-class society.