HIST 100 Stuff: Objects and Their (Hi)Stories (Spring 2023)

Rev. ed. of: The Reader's encyclopedia of the American West. 1st ed. c1977.
Access restricted to authorized users and institutions.
The American West is an evocative term that conjures up images of cowboys and Indians, covered wagons, sheriffs and outlaws, and endless prairies as well as contemporary images ranging from national parks to the oil, aerospace, and film industries. In addition, the West encompasses not only the past and present of the area west of the Mississippi but also the frontier as it moved across each of the fifty American states, offering the promise of freedom and a better life to pioneers and settlers in every era. This authoritative, comprehensive encyclopedia is a rich source of information about these many characteristics of the American West, real and imaginary, old and new, stretching from coast to coast and throughout the country's history and culture.
The encyclopedia, a thoroughly revised and expanded version of Howard Lamar's acclaimed twenty-year-old Reader's Encyclopedia of the American West, consists of entries in alphabetical order by more than 300 contributors.

Barbed wire cuts across more than just property, war and politics. This most vicious tool of control has played a critical role in the modern experience, be it territorial expansion or the settlement of local and international conflicts. However, it has other histories: those constructed through image and text in the arts, media and popular culture. These representations – in painting, photography, poetry, personal memoirs, cartoons, novels, advertisements and film – have never before been critically examined. In this book, Alan Krell investigates the place barbed wire holds in the social imagination. Invented in France in 1860, barbed wire was developed independently in the USA, where it was used to control livestock on the Great Plains, both to "keep out" and "keep in". Promoted as the Ideal Fence, barbed wire's menacing qualities were soon made manifest. The epithet, "The Devil's Rope", anticipated its transformation into a tool of war in the late 19th and early 20th century. Henceforth, it would become synonymous with repression. Barbed wire's conflicting character makes it an appropriate symbol of modernity, and Krell shows how the use of this symbolism in contemporary art has given barbed wire meanings beyond the historical and political realms.

A chapter in the larger book called Christianity, Social Justice, and the Japanese American Incarceration During World War II

Review of book, published in The Times Higher Education Supplement, 1989 (877), p.18

In the Weimar Republic, physicians joined the Nazi Party; in fact, nearly half of all German physicians joined, making physicians the largest group of professionals to become members. The German Medical Society became instrumental in the state medical program after 1933, commencing with the marginalization of Jewish doctors and culminating with the mass murder of over six million Jews in Europe. Since their Hippocratic Oath demanded, “primum, non nocere”, one might wonder why so many doctors abandoned their principles. Not all doctors in Europe abandoned their ethical codes and training. Jewish physicians held to sacred oaths and religious training with moral courage under the most challenging circumstances. Practicing medicine behind barbed wire, confronting catastrophic diseases and starvation, and offering some humanity where there was none, were everyday activities for Jewish physicians. Though the physicians suffered right along with their patients, these men and women summoned their value for life as well as their moral courage to preserve life whenever possible, and to accompany their dying patients to the “river.” The Nazi physicians stand as a prime example of the loss of ethical behavior and the extreme malpractice of medicine, but we can learn from the Jewish physicians about moral courage in preventing such abuse from occurring again and in confronting all of the technologies that challenge us in future science.