Books in the Race and Culture in the American West Series series

Born a slave in eastern Tennessee, Sarah Blair Bickford made her way to Montana Territory, where she settled in the mining boomtown of Virginia City. This is the first full-length biography of this remarkable woman, whose life story affords new insight into race and belonging in the American West around the turn of the twentieth century.

By considering social justice efforts in western cities and states, this book integrates the West into the historical narrative of black Americans' struggle for civil rights. From Iowa to the Pacific Northwest, and from Texas to the Dakotas, black westerners initiated a wide array of civil rights activities in the early to late twentieth century.

When Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Bilingual Education Act of 1968, language learning became a touchstone in the emerging culture wars. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Los Angeles. The city is the ideal locus for Zevi Gutfreund's study of how language instruction informed the social construction of American citizenship.