Brianna's US History Blog

In the first part of Chapter 16, we learned that nearly 90% of Native American deaths were disease-related deaths caused by the Europeans. Similar to their lack of resistance to disease during the Westward Expansion, Native Americans were very unfamiliar with alcohol.  Pacific Standard  put out an article, "What's Behind the Myth of Native American Alcoholism?" which brings the reader's attention to the real truth about the consumption of alcohol with regards to Native Americans. Authors, Dunbar-Ortiz and Gilio-Whitaker discuss that Native Americans were first introduced to alcohol by the Europeans who would use it as an "instrument of trade and diplomacy." Both authors explain that Europeans typically always used alcohol as a bargaining chip. They briefly touch on the new emerging research that suggests that genetics is the answer to the unexplained alcoholism among Native Americans. Whiteclay, NE: men from Pine Ridge Reservation where drinking is banne...

For homework, I was tasked to find a primary source which gave insight into the lives of those who settled in the West. I came across a collection of letters exchanged between the Oblinger family on the Library of Congress's American Memory page. In the summary of the collection, I was able to learn the main topics about this specific family's letters. They were mostly about land, work, neighbors and financial problems as well as the Easter Blizzard of 1873. Uriah, a Civil War veteran, is seen expressing his personal insight into the hardship and struggles of moving to the prairie while also highlighting the joy, despair, and determination that came along with starting fresh. In a letter to his wife, Mattie Oblinger , Uriah opens by giving her an update on how the journey is going. He writes that he is currently in Forest Livingston County, Illinois and he's headed toward Fillmore County, Nebraska. He continues by informing her of the weather there, how it rained for a wh...

An article from the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum titled Letters of Westward Expansion talked about the progression and commencement of letter writing in the West. The article opens with a paragraph about people who began to move to the West after the American Revolution. As a result of people moving around the country, letters were the one thing that kept them connected, it "helped to build an interconnecting network of people" who now lived in different parts of the country. News from around the world travelled by post, news from home, the frontier, and the city. The West was highly regarded as a place to begin again and start fresh. This article references several instances where letters helped to connect people with their close family around the world. Joseph Bentley and his wife Anna Briggs and how she was able to stay very connected with her mother during her journey to to their family's newly purchased land in Ohio. The author explains that Anna's ...

As part of our Western research, I browsed through several newspapers on the Library of Congress Website. The one I found the most interesting was the Salt Lake Herald. It is a daily paper that discusses both national and local politics as well as crime and scandals. Before actually reading the paper, I quickly did some background research on Salt Lake City. Salt Lake City was founded by Mormon pioneers on July 24, 1847 and is home to the Mormon Church headquarters, (the picture below is of the Mormon Endowment House which  served as a temporary place of worship until it was destroyed in 1889 after the completion of the Salt Lake Temple) . In 1889, the population of Salt Lake City was about 44,000 people. Mormon Endowment House I read parts of the February 10, 1889 publication of the paper. The paper first discusses politics, both local and national, like the upcoming election in Ogden and a former Florida senator classified as a "phenomenal liar." The paper also bring...