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Book Review
| Red Earth: Race and Agriculture in Oklahoma Territory. By Bonnie Lynn-Sherow. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. ix + 186 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95.)
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Bonnie Lynn-Sherow has written a pioneering study of the complex interplay between human cultures and their physical environment. Red Earth convincingly demonstrates that the battle between whites, Native Americans, and African Americans to control access to the land in Oklahoma Territory had a profound effect on the ecology of the region. The massive influx of white settlers into the area dramatically altered the physical landscape. Forests and grasslands were quickly destroyed by the insatiable desire of white settlers for agricultural fields and grazing lands. The human geography changed as well. Native Americans were marginalized in lands that only two generations earlier, had been promised to them "as long as grass grows and rivers flow." African Americans who had anxiously looked at Oklahoma as a promised land in which to escape the poverty and degradation of the Jim Crow south, soon found themselves relegated to the fringes of society. |
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