An account of the first year of the war that studies the transformation of a nation.

    In her perceptive introduction to this edition, Irene Diggs sets this classic autobiography against its broad historical context and critically analyzes its theoretical and methodological significance.

    After their earlier forced removal from traditional lands in the southeastern states--culminating in the devastating 'trail of tears' march of the Cherokees--these five so-called Civilized Tribes held federal land grants in perpetuity, or "as long as the waters run, as long as the grass grows." Yet after passage of the Dawes Act in 1887, the land was purchased back from the tribes, whose members were then systematically swindled out of their private parcels.The publication of Debo's book fundamentally changed the way historians viewed, and wrote about, American Indian history. Writers from Oliver LaFarge, who characterized it as "a work of art," to Vine Deloria, Jr., and Larry McMurtry acknowledge debts to Angie Debo. Fifty years after the book's publication, McMurtry praised Debo's work in the "New York Review of Books" "The reader," he wrote, "is pulled along by her strength of mind and power of sympathy." Because the book's findings implicated prominent state politicians and supporters of the University of Oklahoma, the university press there was forced to reject the book in .... for fear of libel suits and backlash against the university. Nonetheless, the director of the University of Oklahoma Press at the time, Joseph Brandt, invited Debo to publish her book with Princeton University Press, where he became director in 1938.

    The story is concerned with a young American girl of good Yankee stock, who marries an Englishman, loses him in the Great war, bears his son, and finds herself facing, with her indomitable mother-in-low, the new peril.The White Cliffs starts as a charming and even at times an amusing poem, gathering emotional power as it goes on till it comes to a moving and splendid end. A book for those whose beliefs are now lukewarm. "It is," wrote Mr. R. J. Cruikshank recently in 'The Star' "a promise that the literature which we English-speaking people share in common is beginning to give utterance to this grand theme of union."The poem has been widely popular in America. Lynn Fontanne, the famous American actress, twice read it in serial form on the radio, and it was one of the last books read by Lord Lothian, while Mr. William Lyon Phelps commented: "Not only a very beautiful poem, but a wonderful stody of the English." It has now been twice successfully broadcast by the B.B.C.