Reviews for The Oregon and Applegate Trail Diary of Welborn Beeson in 1853: The Unabridged Diary with Introduction and Contemporary Comments by Bert Webber

The average rating for The Oregon and Applegate Trail Diary of Welborn Beeson in 1853: The Unabridged Diary with Introduction and Contemporary Comments by Bert Webber based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-10-23 00:00:00 Jon Forsythe The presidential election of 1896. A time and its issues that is remote at first glance'who that is not a specialist in the period today knows from bimetallism and what the particulars of the tariff were? I think when I acquired this book many years ago, my reason was to learn what William Jennings Bryan's Cross of Gold speech was all about (which I learned of from a cartoon reproduced in the relevant volume of The Life History of the United States'the one with tan covers). But Glad's explanations of the state of wealthy, small business, working-class, and agrarian (white) and how the crash of 1893 and government policies, and two formative myths of self image (the self-made man and the yeoman farmer) shaped the dominant issue of the day (whether America should keep its currency based entirely on gold or should back it with both gold and silver, in some measure'there's your bimetallism) and the election make this time and people fascinating. Not to mention, in the campaign itself, the state of the parties, the role of Mark Hanna (another figure whose name keeps poppinig up whom I've long wanted to know more about'in this work, which stops short of McKinley's presidency, he is simply a very smart, effective campaign manager) The process of learning about the forces that defined the issues from 1892 to 1896 continue for me to answer the question of why to read history: in addtion to its being a collection of interlocking stories that are all so interesting in and of themselves, it tells us more about who we are today and how we got to where we are. Glad's writing is generally good, his explanations thorough. One odd assumption I have to mention. In describing the evolution from the Grange movement (farmers' regional attempts to organize and act in concert politically and economically) from regional organizations to two great Alliances (the Northern and the Southern) and thence to a merger with socialists [[jt check]] in the People's party, Glad tells us, sounding parochial of time as well as place: "The story of Alliance fireworks and personalities in the campaign of 1890 is an oft-told tale. Every schoolboy who has read his textbook knows something about the colorful eccentrics'"Whiskers" Peffer, "Sockless Jerry" Simpson, Ben Tillman, the "one-eyed ploughboy," Ignatius Donnelly, the brilliant and erratic sage of Nininger, Minnesota, and Tom Watson, the defender of underdogs'who emerged that year as leaders of agrarian radicals. Few students get through a course in American history without finding out what Mary Elizabeth Lease said to Kansas farmers." Either that tells us where Glad grew up, or he's talking about a college course of American history. Glad wrote this in the early 1960s (this was published in 1964), but by the time I had an American history class in 1970, those figures had vanished from schools' history books. I've never heard of Miss Lease, much less what she said to Kansas farmers. Glad's childhood that informed this perspective, must have been much earlier--say, the 1910s or 1920s.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-02-01 00:00:00 Roby John Standard college.