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The sixth volume in the Montana Mainstreet series, A Guide to Historic Missoula points readers to the buildings, historic sites, and parks that act as monuments to Missoula's--and Montana's--history.
Bozeman has been home to many pasts. Founded in the 1860s, the town has grown from a frontier farming settlement to a bustling city and center of academic excellence. This guide tells the stories of the places and people that built Bozeman and the efforts to preserve the town's colorful history.
Among Montana’s most enduring legacies are the names assigned to its geographic features and places found on the state map. As long as humans have inhabited Montana they have named places. While the past two centuries have changed the way people live in Montana, the names given to some rivers, mountain ranges, cities, and towns have persisted, while others have changed with time. Naming Montana explores the origins of more than 1,000 Montana place names, drawing upon the knowledge of Montana Historical Society historians and the expertise of local historians from across the state. This new publication includes both geographic features, selected historic sites listed on the National Register of Historic Places, historic photographs, and maps. The authors’ extensive research illuminates the stories behind the names of places that we call home.
This is the story of the Rankins, a family that embodied the risk and ambition that transformed America. John Rankin arrived in the West chasing the adventure of gold mining but soon turned to ranching and building in the new town of Missoula. There he met Olive Pickering, who had left New Hampshire in 1878 to become a teacher and seek a husband on the American frontier. John and Olive's children continued to demonstrate their parent's ambition and nerve. Their son became one of the biggest landowners in the country, one of the first personal injury lawyers, and a crusader against railroads and mining. Jeannette became the first woman in a national legislature, voted against two world wars and led marches protesting the Vietnam War. As a dean, Harriet helped develop the modern co-educational university. Edna traveled the world advocating for birth control. The Rankins faced both national adulation and condemnation for the choices they made. Their family story concerns independence and education, activism, the boundaries created by gender, religious choices, and the changing meaning of the West.
Three voices. Three acts of defiance. One mass injustice. The story of camp as you’ve never seen it before. Japanese Americans complied when evicted from their homes in World War II -- but many refused to submit to imprisonment in American concentration camps without a fight. In this groundbreaking graphic novel, meet JIM AKUTSU, the inspiration for John Okada’s No-No Boy, who refuses to be drafted from the camp at Minidoka when classified as a non-citizen, an enemy alien; HIROSHI KASHIWAGI, who resists government pressure to sign a loyalty oath at Tule Lake, but yields to family pressure to renounce his U.S. citizenship; and MITSUYE ENDO, a reluctant recruit to a lawsuit contesting her imprisonment, who refuses a chance to leave the camp at Topaz so that her case could reach the U.S. Supreme Court. Based upon painstaking research, We Hereby Refuse presents an original vision of America’s past with disturbing links to the American present.
First published in 1939, this nostalgic guide includes chapters on Montana's natural setting, history, economy, and cultural life as of half a century ago, plus separate entries for Billings, Butte, Great Falls, Helena, and Missoula--which at the time boasted four hotels and five-cent bus fares. There then follow, in the WPA Guide tradition, 18 tours that crisscross the state and point out not only natural splendors along the way but also such noteworthy historic sites as Custer Battlefield, the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, Boothill Cemetery in Virginia City, and the site of the "holing-up" shanty of Calamity Jane. Fourteen additional tours--four for roads, ten for trails--guide readers through Glacier National Park.
Explore the hayloft, stalls, and hardware of a Montana barn and you will learn much about the state’s farm and ranch traditions. Crib barns, with walls of timber stacked like Lincoln logs, show the influence of French-Canadian and Scandinavian immigrants. Gambrel-roofed barns, which shed heavy snowfall and provide roomy haylofts, tell of the long Montana winters that necessitated ample hay storage. Tack rooms, once filled with harnesses and gear, tell of workhorses given shelter in heavy-duty stalls nearby. Beyond their utilitarian functions, barns are simply beautiful. Some stand proudly, their freshly painted red lines contrasting sharply with the golden wheat in surrounding fields. But some, less fortunate, are falling into disrepair. Marked by rotting timbers and broken windowpanes, these crumbling buildings still have much to teach us. Historic Barns of Montana presents the best, most unique, most significant, and most beautiful of these barns. Photographer Tom Ferris explored barns inside and out across Montana, snapping the hundreds of photographs in the book. Authors and architectural historians Chere Jiusto and Christine Brown help readers understand the significance of what they are looking at and tell the stories of individual barns. Historic Barns of Montana recognizes these buildings as both useful and beautiful, encourages their preservation, and honors the ranch and farm families that built them.
When Montana became the 41st state in 1889, an old pinoeer lamented, “Now she's gone to hell,” but most Montanans embraced statehood as the inevitable culmination of one of the most rapid and dramatic transformations in United States history. Only twenty-five years after becoming a territory, Montana was profoundly different: the buffalo slaughtered and gone, the Indian wars fought and ended, the tribal nations confined to reservations, cattle and sheep raised by the tens of thousands, Butte exploded into a rich, wide-open town, and railroads built to link the once remote land with the world. Montana 1889 tells the many stories of this overwhelming transformation by entering into the lives, emotions, and decisions of diverse peoples cooperating and competing on this contested ground. As in Ken Egan’s highly acclaimed Montana 1864, these stories are told month by month, deftly showing the flow and friction of events and the unfolding destinies of individuals and nations.
'A modern society has grown out of what it was yesterday. So understanding history is essential to understanding ourselves. Helena: An Illustrated History is a priceless historical collection of faces and stories about our special state's capital and the lives and events that have shaped it-and us.' --Mark Racicot, Governor, State of Montana
Exploring the significance of places that built our cultural past, this guide is a lens into historical sites spanning the entire history of the United States, from Acoma Pueblo to Ground Zero. Historic Sites and Landmarks That Shaped America: From Acoma Pueblo to Ground Zero encompasses more than 200 sites from the earliest settlements to the present, covering a wide variety of locations. It includes concise yet detailed entries on each landmark that explain its importance to the nation. With entries arranged alphabetically according to the name of the site and the state in which it resides, this work covers both obscure and famous landmarks to demonstrate how a nation can grow and change with the creation or discovery of important places. The volume explores the ways different cultures viewed, revered, or even vilified these sites. It also examines why people remember such places more than others. Accessible to both novice and expert readers, this well-researched guide will appeal to anyone from high school students to general adult readers.
