Profiles a Montana high-school girls' basketball team--made up of Crow Indian and white girls from a rural town--that carries on its shoulders the dreams and hopes of a Native American tribe during their winning season.

Originally published: Evergreen, Colo.: Cordillera Press, c1990.

Recounting the author's childhood growing up as a Crow Indian, and includes many of the traditions of the Crow tribe.

How coups happen and why half of them fail. While coups drive a majority of regime changes and are responsible for the overthrow of many democratic governments, there has been very little empirical work on the subject. Seizing Power develops a new theory of coup dynamics and outcomes, drawing on 300 hours of interviews with coup participants and an original dataset of 471 coup attempts worldwide from 1950 to 2000. Naunihal Singh delivers a concise and empirical evaluation, arguing that understanding the dynamics of military factions is essential to predicting the success or failure of coups. Singh draws on an aspect of game theory known as a coordination game to explain coup dynamics. He finds a strong correlation between successful coups and the ability of military actors to project control and the inevitability of success. Examining Ghana’s multiple coups and the 1991 coup attempt in the USSR, Singh shows how military actors project an image of impending victory that is often more powerful than the reality on the ground. In addition, Singh also identifies three distinct types of coup dynamics, each with a different probability of success, based on where within the organization each coup originated: coups from top military officers, coups from the middle ranks, and mutinous coups from low-level soldiers.

Presents the story of Plenty Coups, the last great Chief of the Crow Nation. This title contains a philosophical and ethical inquiry into a people faced with the end of their way of life.

Happily consumed with her academic career, Professor Avery Wainwright never planned on becoming sole guardian of her octogenarian Aunt Birdie. Forced to move Birdie-and her failing memory-into her tiny apartment, Avery's precariously balanced life loses its footing.Unearthed in the chaos is a stack of sixty-year-old letters. Written in 1951, the letters tell of a year Avery's grandmother, Alma Jean, spent teaching in the Indian school system, in the high desert town of Winslow, Arizona. The letters are addressed to Birdie, who was teaching at the Phoenix Indian School. The ghostly yet familiar voices in the letters tell of a dark time in her grandmother's life, a time no one has ever spoken of.Torn between caring for the old woman who cannot remember, and her very different memories of a grandmother no longer alive to explain, Avery searches for answers. But the scandal and loss she finds, the revelations about abuses, atrocities, and cover-ups at the Indian schools, threaten far more than she's bargained for.

On April 23, 1943, the seventy-man crew of the USS Grenadier scrambled to save their submarine—and themselves—after a Japanese aerial torpedo sent it crashing to the ocean floor. Miraculously, the men were able to bring the sub back to the surface, only to be captured by the Japanese. No Ordinary Joes tells the harrowing story of four of the Grenadier’s crew: Bob Palmer of Medford, Oregon; Chuck Vervalin of Dundee, New York; Tim McCoy of Dallas, Texas; and Gordy Cox of Yakima, Washington. All were enlistees from families that struggled through the Great Depression. The lure of service and duty to country were not their primary motivations—they were more compelled by the promise of a job that provided “three hots and a cot” and a steady paycheck. On the day they were captured, all four were still teenagers. Together, the men faced unimaginable brutality at the hands of their captors in a prisoner of war camp. With no training in how to respond in the face of relentless interrogations and with less than a cup of rice per day for sustenance, each man created his own strategy for survival. When the liberation finally came, all four anticipated a triumphant homecoming to waiting families, loved ones, and wives, but instead were forced to find a new kind of strength as they struggled to resume their lives in a world that had given them up for dead, and with the aftershocks of an experience that haunted and colored the rest of their days. Author Larry Colton brings the lives of these four “ordinary” heroes into brilliant focus. Theirs is a story of tragedy and courage, romance and war, loss and endurance, failure and redemption. With a scope both panoramic and disarmingly intimate, No Ordinary Joes is a powerful look at the atrocities of war, the reality of its aftermath, and the restorative power of love.

In his old age, Plenty-Coups (1848-1932), the last hereditary chief of the Crow Indians, told the moving story of his life to Frank B. Linderman, a well-known western writer who had befriended him. First published in 1930, Plenty-Coups is a classic account of the nomadic, spiritual, and warring life of Plains Indians before they were forced onto reservations. Plenty-Coups tells of the great triumphs and struggles of his own life: his powerful medicine dreams, marriage, raiding and counting coups against the Lakotas, fighting alongside the U.S. Army, and the death of General Custer.

Despite evidence of warfare and violent conflict in pre-Columbian North America, scholars argue that the scale and scope of Native American violence is exaggerated. They contend that scholarly misrepresentation has denigrated indigenous peoples when in fact they lived together in peace and harmony. In rebutting that contention, this groundbreaking book presents clear evidence—from multiple academic disciplines—that indigenous populations engaged in warfare and ritual violence long before European contact. In ten well-documented and thoroughly researched chapters, fourteen leading scholars dispassionately describe sources and consequences of Amerindian warfare and violence, including ritual violence. Originally presented at an American Anthropological Association symposium, their findings construct a convincing case that bloodshed and killing have been woven into the fabric of indigenous life in North America for many centuries. The editors argue that a failure to acknowledge the roles of warfare and violence in the lives of indigenous North Americans is itself a vestige of colonial repression—depriving native warriors of their history of armed resistance. These essays document specific acts of Native American violence across the North American continent. Including contributions from anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, and ethnographers, they argue not only that violence existed but also that it was an important and frequently celebrated component of Amerindian life. CONTENTS Acknowledgments Introduction Richard J. Chacon and Rubén G. Mendoza 1. Traditional Native Warfare in Western Alaska Ernest S. Burch Jr. 2. Barbarism and Ardour of War from the Tenderest Years”: Cree-Inuit Warfare in the Hudson Bay Region Charles A. Bishop and Victor P. Lytwyn 3. Aboriginal Warfare on the Northwest Coast: Did the Potlatch Replace Warfare? Joan A. Lovisek 4. Ethnohistoric Descriptions of Chumash Warfare John R. Johnson 5. Documenting Conflict in the Prehistoric Pueblo Southwest Polly Schaafsma 6. Cahokia and the Evidence for Late Pre-Columbian War in the North American Midcontinent Thomas E. Emerson 7. Iroquois-Huron Warfare Dean R. Snow 8. Desecrating the Sacred Ancestor Temples: Chiefly Conflict and Violence in the American Southeast David H. Dye and Adam King 9. Warfare, Population, and Food Production in Prehistoric Eastern North America George R. Milner 10. The Osteological Evidence for Indigenous Warfare in North America Patricia M. Lambert 11. Ethical Considerations and Conclusions Regarding Indigenous Warfare and Violence in North America Richard J. Chacon and Rubén G. Mendoza References About the Contributors Index

Americans revere their Constitution. However, most of us are unaware how tumultuous and improbable the drafting and ratification processes were. As Benjamin Franklin keenly observed, any assembly of men bring with them "all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests and their selfish views." One need not deny that the Framers had good intentions in order to believe that they also had interests. Based on prodigious research and told largely through the voices of the participants, Michael Klarman's The Framers' Coup narrates how the Framers' clashing interests shaped the Constitution--and American history itself. The Philadelphia convention could easily have been a failure, and the risk of collapse was always present. Had the convention dissolved, any number of adverse outcomes could have resulted, including civil war or a reversion to monarchy. Not only does Klarman capture the knife's-edge atmosphere of the convention, he populates his narrative with riveting and colorful stories: the rebellion of debtor farmers in Massachusetts; George Washington's uncertainty about whether to attend; Gunning Bedford's threat to turn to a European prince if the small states were denied equal representation in the Senate; slave staters' threats to take their marbles and go home if denied representation for their slaves; Hamilton's quasi-monarchist speech to the convention; and Patrick Henry's herculean efforts to defeat the Constitution in Virginia through demagoguery and conspiracy theories. The Framers' Coup is more than a compendium of great stories, however, and the powerful arguments that feature throughout will reshape our understanding of the nation's founding. Simply put, the Constitutional Convention almost didn't happen, and once it happened, it almost failed. And, even after the convention succeeded, the Constitution it produced almost failed to be ratified. Just as importantly, the Constitution was hardly the product of philosophical reflections by brilliant, disinterested statesmen, but rather ordinary interest group politics. Multiple conflicting interests had a say, from creditors and debtors to city dwellers and backwoodsmen. The upper class overwhelmingly supported the Constitution; many working class colonists were more dubious. Slave states and nonslave states had different perspectives on how well the Constitution served their interests. Ultimately, both the Constitution's content and its ratification process raise troubling questions about democratic legitimacy. The Federalists were eager to avoid full-fledged democratic deliberation over the Constitution, and the document that was ratified was stacked in favor of their preferences. And in terms of substance, the Constitution was a significant departure from the more democratic state constitutions of the 1770s. Definitive and authoritative, The Framers' Coup explains why the Framers preferred such a constitution and how they managed to persuade the country to adopt it. We have lived with the consequences, both positive and negative, ever since.