Tanis C. Thorne

Bio: Tanis C. Thorne is an academic researcher from University of California, Irvine. The author has contributed to research in topics: Gold rush & Indian country. The author has an hindex of 2, co-authored 4 publications receiving 8 citations.

Review: Pueblo, Hardscrabble, Greenhorn: The Upper Arkansas, 1832-1856. By JANET LECOMPTE. (Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1978. xii + 354 pp. $14.95)

Abstract: Author(s): Thorne, Tanis | Abstract: In this carefully researched book, Janet Lecompte has made a significant contribution to.western history; specialists in the history of Colorado and the fur trade will find it indispensable. Granddaughter of the founder of the Francis W. Cragin Collection in Colorado Springs, Lecompte has shown herself worthy of her legacy, writing with care, insight, and precision about a little-known period in Colorado's history: the years following the halcyon days of Rocky Mountain beaver trapping and before the Pike's Peak gold rush and permanent settlement.

Forces of nature: An environmental history of Inkpaduta's 1857 attack on Spirit Lake

Abstract: The world in which Inkpaduta grew up in the northern Iowa borderlands rapidly changed during the nineteenth century. As Americans entered Dakota occupied lands, alterations to the environment undercut the ability of the Wahpekute to continue vital sustenance patterns. Decimation of animal species, destruction of plant resources, and the introduction of diseases resulted as eager Americans plowed under the tall-grass prairies. Inkpaduta sought to maintain sovereignty and autonomy for the Wahpekute bands living in Iowa as American encroachment underwrote acculturative efforts. Through quantification of acres surveyed, acres improved, acres unimproved, shifting animal populations, and dendrochronological research a clear picture emerges of the pressures building around Inkpaduta prior to the attack on Spirit Lake. That data, when paired with qualification from Dakota sources and the records of the developing American communities, creates a nuanced account of how the Wahpekute sought to maintain sovereignty and autonomy in the face of American acculturation

Constitutions and Empires

Abstract: The answer to the question, "What comes after the linguistic turn?" appears to be, at least in part, "the imperial turn." As scholars across a range of disciplines begin to agree that the nation-state is a single distorted lens through which to view modern history, "empire," in all its political, economic, and cultural dimensions, commands new critical attention. Within sociolegal history, the turn to empire is especially promising. Building both on a wellestablished preoccupation with legal administration in older imperial history and on sophisticated new studies of legal culture in colonial settings, historians of law and empire can hope to move beyond the limitations of either tradition. The administration of empire, long a topic of imperial histories, becomes a subject of cultural analysis; colonial studies, for some time focused on cultural hybridity, subaltern movements, and the origins of national culture, broadens to include the constellation of legal processes spanning imperial formations.

Les Pays d’en haut, un espace en mal d’histoire ?

Abstract: L’historiographie des Pays d’en haut, comme objet en soi, peut paraitre relativement balbutiante. Il se peut que l’appellation « Pays d’en haut » ait ete percue comme trop molle ou trop floue, geographiquement comme conceptuellement, et que les historiens aient prefere, pour investir l’histoire de l’Ontario, du Michigan ou du Manitoba, l’usage d’autres categories geographiques (Nouvelle-France, Canada, Grands Lacs, Prairie) ou de grilles plus clairement analytiques (frontiere, hinterland, peripherie). L’expression merite pourtant d’etre valorisee dans la mesure ou elle a servi de cadre mental et geographique de longue duree. Comme tel, elle constitue un objet de recherche en soi qui peut favoriser une etude renouvelee des processus historiques a l’oeuvre dans les espaces concernes, du xviie au xixe siecle. Cette definition des Pays d’en haut comme objet d’histoire ne va certes pas de soi : elle passe d’abord par une reflexion sur l’objet « Pays d’en haut » dans l’histoire, autrement dit sur la facon dont ce cadre s’est construit historiquement, a travers les pratiques, les representations et les imaginaires des acteurs sociaux. La pleine legitimation de cette approche passe ensuite par l’analyse de la facon dont l’historiographie a tour a tour ignore, delaisse ou, au contraire, mis en relief ladite appellation comme l’espace qu’elle designe.

To the Indian Removal Act, 1814-1830

Abstract: This dissertation offers a history of Indian removal as a political issue from the War of 1812 to the signing of the Indian Removal Act in 1830. Its central argument is that federal removal policy emerged and evolved due to a precise and largely unforeseen sequence of events. Drawing on Indian treaties, journals of negotiations, minutes of cabinet meetings, Congressional debates, personal memoirs, and a variety of other sources, the dissertation charts and elucidates the evolution of United States Indian policy from a diplomatic to a domestic concern. One of the central themes of the dissertation is how most white statesmen gradually, once Anglo-American dominion was established east of the Mississippi River after the War of 1812, abandoned long-held notions of “assimilation” and instead viewed the American Indian communities as the quintessential “other.” Chapter 1 examines American-Indian relations at the outbreak of the War of 1812. It argues that the federal government’s policy toward the Native Americans was both contradictory and incompatible with the nation’s desire for western expansion. Chapter 2 describes the establishment of American hegemony in eastern North America during and immediately after the War of 1812. Chapter 3 considers the efforts of the James Monroe administration to reform the contradictory modes of interacting with the Indians. It argues that these efforts were stymied by the determination of Georgia to remove all Indians from their state, which led to clashes between the federal government and the state over Indian affairs. Chapters 4 and 5 discuss the fraudulent Treaty of Indian Springs, conducted with the Creeks in 1825, and its aftermath. They argue that the controversy over the treaty and its subsequent annulment created a political environment in which removal came to be viewed by the majority of politicians as the only solution to the tensions both in the American government and in the southern borderlands. Chapter 6 argues that Andrew Jackson inherited an unofficial policy of Indian removal in 1829 and describes the efforts of his administration to codify removal as official policy. Chapter 7 delineates the debate over the removal bill in Congress and the subsequent vote.