BiblioVault - Books by Johnston, Carol

Cherokee Women In Crisis

Trail of Tears, Civil War, and Allotment, 1838-1907

Carolyn Johnston

University of Alabama Press, 2003

Explains how traditional Cherokee women’s roles were destabilized, modified, recovered, and in some ways strengthened during three periods of great turmoil

American Indian women have traditionally played vital roles in social hierarchies at the family, clan, and tribal levels. In the Cherokee Nation, specifically, women and men are considered equal contributors to the culture. With this study, however, we learn that three key historical events in the 19th and early 20th centuries—removal, the Civil War, and allotment of their lands—forced a radical renegotiation of gender roles and relations in Cherokee society.

Carolyn Johnston (who is related to John Ross, principal chief of the Nation) looks at how Cherokee women navigated these crises in ways that allowed them to retain their traditional assumptions, ceremonies, and beliefs and to thereby preserve their culture. In the process, they both lost and retained power. The author sees a poignant irony in the fact that Europeans who encountered Native societies in which women had significant power attempted to transform them into patriarchal ones and that American women struggled for hundreds of years to achieve the kind of equality that Cherokee women had enjoyed for more than a millennium.

Johnston examines the different aspects of Cherokee women’s power: authority in the family unit and the community, economic independence, personal autonomy, political clout, and spirituality. Weaving a great-grandmother theme throughout the narrative, she begins with the protest of Cherokee women against removal and concludes with the recovery of the mother town of Kituwah and the elections of Wilma Mankiller and Joyce Dugan as principal chiefs of the Cherokee Nation and the Eastern Band of Cherokees.

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House of Plenty

The Rise, Fall, and Revival of Luby's Cafeterias

By Carol Dawson and Carol Johnston

University of Texas Press, 2006

Violet Crown Award, Writers League of Texas, 2007
Citation, San Antonio Conservation Society, 2009

Scarred by the deaths of his mother and sisters and the failure of his father's business, a young man dreamed of making enough money to retire early and retreat into the secure world that his childhood tragedies had torn from him. But Harry Luby refused to be a robber baron. Turning totally against the tide of avaricious capitalism, he determined to make a fortune by doing good. Starting with that unlikely, even naive, ambition in 1911, Harry Luby founded a cafeteria empire that by the 1980s had revenues second only to McDonald's. So successfully did Luby and his heirs satisfy the tastes of America that Luby's became the country's largest cafeteria chain, creating more millionaires per capita among its employees than any other corporation of its size. Even more surprising, the company stayed true to Harry Luby's vision for eight decades, making money by treating its customers and employees exceptionally well.

Written with the sweep and drama of a novel, House of Plenty tells the engrossing story of Luby's founding and phenomenal growth, its long run as America's favorite family restaurant during the post-World War II decades, its financial failure during the greed-driven 1990s when non-family leadership jettisoned the company's proven business model, and its recent struggle back to solvency. Carol Dawson and Carol Johnston draw on insider stories and company records to recapture the forces that propelled the company to its greatest heights, including its unprecedented practices of allowing store managers to keep 40 percent of net profits and issuing stock to all employees, which allowed thousands of Luby's workers to achieve the American dream of honestly earned prosperity. The authors also plumb the depths of the Luby's drama, including a hushed-up theft that split the family for decades; the 1991 mass shooting at the Killeen Luby's, which splattered the company's good name across headlines nationwide; and the rapacious over-expansion that more than doubled the company's size in nine years (1987-1996), pushed it into bankruptcy, and drove president and CEO John Edward Curtis Jr. to violent suicide.

Disproving F. Scott Fitzgerald's adage that "there are no second acts in American lives," House of Plenty tells the epic story of an iconic American institution that has risen, fallen, and found redemption—with no curtain call in sight.

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My Father's War

Fighting with the Buffalo Soldiers in World War II

Carolyn Ross Johnston

University of Alabama Press, 2012

My Father’s War tells the compelling story of a unit of Buffalo Soldiers and their white commander fighting on the Italian front during World War II.

The 92nd Division of the Fifth Army was the only African American infantry division to see combat in Europe during 1944 and 1945, suffering more than 3,200 casualties. Members of this unit, known as Buffalo Soldiers, endured racial violence on the home front and experienced racism abroad. Engaged in combat for nine months, they were under the command of southern white infantry officers like their captain, Eugene E. Johnston.

Carolyn Ross Johnston draws on her father’s account of the war and her extensive interviews with other veterans of the 92nd Division to describe the experiences of a naïve southern white officer and his segregated unit on an intimate level. During the war, the protocol that required the assignment of southern white officers to command black units, both in Europe and in the Pacific theater, was often problematic, but Johnston seemed more successful than most, earning the trust and respect of his men at the same time that he learned to trust and respect them. Gene Johnston and the African American soldiers were transformed by the war and upon their return helped transform the nation.

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Sexual Power

Feminism and the Family in America

Carolyn Ross Johnston

University of Alabama Press, 1992

Offers an opportunity to view the history of feminism and the family from a fresh perspective

Since the early 1970s, scholars have argued, defined, and refined a wide range of interpretations of American women’s lives. Despite the richness of the recent literature, few interpretations sufficiently credit women’s family and sexual experiences for the emergence of feminism and the construction of pro-family agendas. Thus, Johnston’s approach offers an opportunity to view the history of feminism and the family from a fresh perspective.

Much of the literature on feminism has focused on women’s oppression and victimization, rather than on the power that women historically have exerted. Johnston’s interpretation of American feminism differs from previous works because she argues that the gradual growth of feminist consciousness lies not simply in oppression or feelings of victimization, but paradoxically in a growing sense of the empowerment of women as wives and mothers. She traces how reproduction, sexuality, domesticity, and motherhood have been socially constructed, and examines how feminists and anti-feminists have fought on the terrain of “family” issues.

Johnston explores critical questions concerning American women’s sexual lives. How have women’s empowering experiences in the family shaped feminist consciousness and action? How have feminists confronted family issues? How have women exerted sexual power? How was it contained within the limits of patriarchal society at times, while at other times it fueled the fires of feminist rebellion? How have gender and class issues affected domestic politics and feminism?

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