Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: A Field of Their Own
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
New Book: A Field of Their Own: Women and American Indian History, 1830 – 1941
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | n 2016000203 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/n2016000203 |
| HEADING: | Rhea, John M., 1967- |
| 000 | 00452cz a2200121n 450 |
| 001 | 10047125 |
| 005 | 20160104153304.0 |
| 008 | 160104n| azannaabn |n aaa |
| 010 | __ |a n 2016000203 |
| 040 | __ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC |
| 046 | __ |f 19670227 |
| 100 | 1_ |a Rhea, John M., |d 1967- |
| 670 | __ |a A field of their own, 2016: |b eCIP t.p. (John M. Rhea) data view screen (b. 2/27/1967; Ph.D. in history from the University of Oklahoma, Norman; editor of the Great Plains Journal) |
PERSONAL
Born February 27, 1967; died December 16, 2016.
EDUCATION:University of Oklahoma, Ph.D., 2012.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
John M. Rhea was a writer of books on history. In 2012, he earned a Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma. Rhea died in 2016.
During that same year, his first book, A Field of Their Own: Women and American Indian History, 1830–1941, was published. In this volume, Rhea profiles nine women who were pioneers in the field of Native American history. Over time, that particular branch of history came to be dominated by women. Rhea explains that men were predominant in many other branches of history, and he tells of how women began gravitating toward Native American history. Among the earliest female historians in that field was Helen Hunt Jackson. Jackson was the author of A Century of Dishonor, a volume released in 1881. She studied the affects of the Indian Removal Act, which forced entire communities of Native Americans to move from their ancestral homes to other parts of the United States. Jackson also wrote about the policies relating to Native Americans that were enacted after the Civil War. Efforts were made to force them to assimilate into white culture.
Another early historian in the field of American Indian research was Alice Cunningham Fletcher. Fletcher wrote books that continue to be influential among historians working in that field. Rhea explains that Jackson and Fletcher helped to establish the practice of citing public records and other documents in their works. However, over time, other historians began suggesting that their writings were overly sentimental and dismissing them. Rhea notes that few women were allowed to pursue history as a career during the time period about which he writes. However, in addition to Jackson and Fletcher, a small number of women persisted in the field. Among the other women Rhea discusses are Louise Phelps Kellogg, Emma Helen Blair, Annie Heloise Abel, Muriel Hazel Wright, Angela Debo, Rachel Caroline Eaton, and Anna Lazola Lewis.
Sherry L. Smith, reviewer in the Journal of Southern History, commented: “This book will be of greatest interest to historians, particularly specialists in Native American and gender studies. I wish my former professor was still around to read it.” Smith added: “Happily, over the last forty years, things have changed considerably for the field of Native American history and for women historians. Rhea’s welcome work acknowledges those who paved the way.” A critic on the Western Association of Women Historians website suggested: “Rhea’s wide-ranging approach to his subject goes beyond existing compensatory histories to illuminate the national consequences of women’s century-long hegemony over American Indian scholarship.” The same critic described the volume as a “thoughtful study.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Journal of Southern History, August, 2017, Sherry L. Smith, review of A Field of Their Own: Women and American Indian History, 1830–1941, p. 676.
ONLINE
Western Association of Women Historians Website, http://www.wawh.org/ (November 2, 2015), review of A Field of Their Own.
OBITUARIES
Oklahoman Online, http://legacy.newsok.com/ (December 25, 2016).
Tulsa World Online, http://www.tulsaworld.com/ (January 5, 2018).
Feb. 27, 1967 - Dec. 16, 2016 SNYDER John Mark Rhea, 49, of Snyder, OK, died Friday, Dec. 16, 2016. Rhea was a 2012 PhD graduate of OU and author of "A Field of Their Own: Women and American Indian History, 1830-1941," (OU Press, 2016). A Memorial will be held at the Museum of the Great Plains, Lawton, on Dec. 29 at 2 p.m. In lieu of other tributes, donations may be made to the John M Rhea Memorial Scholarship fund (www.okmuseums.org/donations) www.okmuseums.org/donations
Published in The Oklahoman on Dec. 25, 2016
John Mark Rhea, 49, of Snyder OK, died Friday, December 16, 2016.
Rhea is a 2012 PhD graduate of OU, and author of "A Field of Their Own: Women and American Indian History, 1830-1941" (OU Press, 2016).
A memorial will be held at the Museum of the Great Plains, Lawton, on Dec 29 at 2:00 pm.
In lieu of other tributes, donations can be made to the John M Rhea Memorial Scholarship fund at www.okmuseums.org/donations.
QUOTED: "This book will be of greatest interest to historians, particularly specialists in Native American and gender studies. I wish my former professor was still around to read it."
"Happily, over the last forty years, things have changed considerably for the field of Native American history and for women historians. Rhea's welcome work acknowledges those who paved the way."
A Field of Their Own: Women and
American Indian History, 1830-1941
Sherry L. Smith
Journal of Southern History.
83.3 (Aug. 2017): p676+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Full Text:
A Field of Their Own: Women and American Indian History, 1830-1941. By John M. Rhea. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016. Pp. xviii, 293. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8061-5227-1.)
About forty years ago, an elderly member of the University of Washington history faculty asked students on the first day of their western history seminar to identify their research interests. One other woman and myself answered Native American history. The professor quickly dismissed the field as "sentimental" and of interest primarily to females. I was insulted and stunned. First, which women did he have in mind? I could think of only two (Angie Debo and Marilyn Young) in an arena otherwise dominated by men. Plus neither of them struck me as particularly "sentimental." Of course, I did not challenge him. But neither did I ever forget the patronizing attitude. Only now, after reading John M. Rhea's book on women and American Indian history, do I have some understanding of the source of this professor's narrow-minded and antiquated point of view.
Rhea's analysis of women who wrote about Native Americans offers a century-long overview of the literature and scholarship that tracks the power relations not only between Native Americans and white people but also between men and women and pre-professional and professional historians. He casts a wide net in identifying women in the field, beginning with nineteenth- century evangelicals and women's rights advocates who turned to Indian affairs as a place where they could exercise social and political influence. Advocacy in the antiremoval campaign and, after the Civil War, in education, assimilation, and allotment policies led to Helen Hunt Jackson's A Century of Dishonor (Boston, 1881) and Alice Cunningham Fletcher's various works--books that remain well known, admittedly only among historians and primarily for their impact on public policy. Jackson and Fletcher grounded their books in documents and public records, a
1 of 2 12/24/17, 1:32 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
practice eventually embraced by male scholars. Yet their commitment to racial theories about culture and their association with forced acculturation policies, which gradually lost favor, led to their eventual dismissal "as biased or 'sentimental' by professional historians" (p. 50).
The academic professionalization of history further eroded women's scholarly and political status. Men controlled universities, and although some accepted women graduate students, they ensured that all doors to university academic employment remained closed to women upon graduation. Women's colleges, high schools, state historical societies, or museums, they argued, were the only suitable places for women. Further, Frederick Jackson Turner's impact on the field focused scholarly attention on the supposedly inevitable progress of the Euro-American frontier. Indians were a relatively inconsequential topic. Women, then, opportunistically turned to Native American history precisely because "it was the only subject not claimed by their male colleagues" (p. 106).
Rhea provides a meaty discussion of the handful of women professionally trained in the first decades of the twentieth century, including Emma Helen Blair, Louise Phelps Kellogg, and Annie Heloise Abel. He also highlights several indigenous scholars--Rachel Caroline Eaton, Anna Lazola Lewis, and Muriel Hazel Wright--who urged others to incorporate indigenous perspectives into their work. The volume concludes with the indomitable Angie Debo, the best known of them all. These women, he argues, embraced the field as a way to participate in the profession, to strive for scholarly visibility, and to challenge gender prejudice in the academy. They did not share the preprofessional women's goal of national prestige and political power. Nor did they always agree with, or get along with, one another.
Historiography is, unfortunately, something of a hard sell to the general reader. This book will be of greatest interest to historians, particularly specialists in Native American and gender studies. I wish my former professor was still around to read it. Perhaps he would recognize his own implication in a system that restricted people's access to scholarly endeavors based on gender and then undermined their efforts to carve out a place for themselves within the profession. Happily, over the last forty years, things have changed considerably for the field of Native American history and for women historians. Rhea's welcome work acknowledges those who paved the way.
Sherry L. Smith
Southern Methodist University
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Smith, Sherry L. "A Field of Their Own: Women and American Indian History, 1830-1941."
Journal of Southern History, vol. 83, no. 3, 2017, p. 676+. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501078133/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=f3a49097. Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A501078133
2 of 2 12/24/17, 1:32 PM
QUOTED: "Rhea’s wide-ranging approach to his subject goes beyond existing compensatory histories to illuminate the national consequences of women’s century-long hegemony over American Indian scholarship."
"thoughtful study."
New Book: A Field of Their Own: Women and American Indian History, 1830 – 1941
November 2, 2015
FieldofTheirOwnOne hundred and forty years before Gerda Lerner established women’s history as a specialized field in 1972, a small group of women began to claim American Indian history as their own domain. A Field of Their Own, published by University of Oklahoma Press, examines nine key figures in American Indian scholarship to reveal how women came to be identified with Indian history and why they eventually claimed it as their own field. From Helen Hunt Jackson to Angie Debo, the magnitude of their research, the reach of their scholarship, the popularity of their publications, and their close identification with Indian scholarship makes their invisibility as pioneering founders of this specialized field all the more intriguing.
Reclaiming this lost history, John M. Rhea looks at the cultural processes through which women were connected to Indian history and traces the genesis of their interest to the nineteenth-century push for women’s rights. In the early 1830s evangelical preachers and women’s rights proponents linked American Indians to white women’s religious and social interests. Later, pre-professional women ethnologists would claim Indians as a special political cause. Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1881 publication, A Century of Dishonor, and Alice Fletcher’s 1887 report, Indian Education and Civilization, foreshadowed the emerging history profession’s objective methodology and established a document-driven standard for later Indian histories.
By the twentieth century historians Emma Helen Blair, Louise Phelps Kellogg, and Annie Heloise Abel, in a bid to boost their professional status, established Indian history as a formal specialized field. However, enduring barriers continued to discourage American Indians from pursuing their own document-driven Indian histories. Cultural and academic walls crumbled in 1919 when Cherokee scholar Rachel Caroline Eaton earned a Ph.D. in American history. Eaton and later indigenous historians Anna L. Lewis and Muriel H. Wright would each play a crucial role in shaping Angie Debo’s 1940 indictment of European Settler colonialism, And Still the Waters Run.
Rhea’s wide-ranging approach to his subject goes beyond existing compensatory histories to illuminate the national consequences of women’s century-long hegemony over American Indian scholarship. In the process, his thoughtful study also chronicles indigenous women’s long and ultimately successful struggle to transform the way that historians portray American Indian peoples and their pasts.
John M. Rhea holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Oklahoma, Norman. He is the editor of the Great Plains Journal.