Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Review Of The Fall Of A Black Army Officer: Racism And The Myth Of Henry O. Flipper By Charles M. Robinson Iii, Bruce A. Glasrud

Great Plains Quarterly

In 1881 Lieutenant Henry O. Flipper, the first black graduate of West Point, was accused of embezzlement and conduct unbecoming an officer. A court-martial subsequently found Flipper guilty of conduct unbecoming an officer, but not of the embezzlement charges, and dismissed him from the army. In his 1994 account, The Court-Martial of Lieutenant Henry Flipper, Charles Robinson III concluded that "racism affected the sentence. Dismissal was totally out of line with sentences given to white officers for more serious offences." With this 2008 revision of his earlier work, The Fall of a Black Army Officer, Robinson finds Flipper …

Review Of Listening To The Land: Native American Literary Responses To The Landscape By Lee Schweninger, Kelli Lyon Johnson

Great Plains Quarterly

In Listening to the Land, Lee Schweninger demonstrates a Native American connection to Mother Earth to be a prevailing stereotype in cultural representations of Indigenous peoples in literature, television, and film. While refusing to dismiss "an indigenous relationship to, appreciation for, awareness of, or understanding of the land that is significantly different from non-Indian relationships," Schweninger analyzes the complicated portrayal of the landscape in Native American literature in the context of this stereotype, which he calls the "Land Ethic Stereotype," the framework with which he begins his study of a wide range of twentieth-century Native writers from a number …

Review Of Heart Of The West: New Painting And Sculpture Of The American West Edited By Laura Caruso, With Essays By James H. Nottage, Ann Scarlett Daley, Gordon Mcconnell, And Mindy A. Besaw, Monica Kjellman-Chapin

Great Plains Quarterly

Since the valorization of abstraction beginning at midcentury, Western realist art has suffered from the sense that it is too regional, nostalgic, conventional, and populist to be considered a significant and relevant contribution to the contemporary American pictorial tradition. Richly illustrated and drawing upon the resources of the Denver Art Museum's Institute of Western American Art, as well as an exhibition of drawings and sculptures by George Carlson, Heart of the West attempts to reposition contemporary Western realist art and situate this work as an important and persistent contribution to American art. In addition to an introduction by the director …

Review Of Habits Of Empire: A History Of American Expansion By Walter Nugent, Jeffrey Ostler

Great Plains Quarterly

Two decades ago, "new western historians," led by Patricia Nelson Limerick in Legacy of Conquest, attempted to banish any mention of Frederick Jackson Turner and his frontier thesis. Although the Turner thesis was ethnocentric and its grounding of democracy in a frontier experience flawed in various ways, a nagging question remained: did the fact that America had a frontier matter at all?

In Habits of Empire, Walter Nugent, past president of the Western History Association, thinks the frontier mattered a great deal. This is not because it created democracy, but because it "taught Americans a twisted ideology: that …

Review Of Breathing In The Fullness Of Time By William Kloefkorn, David Pichaske

Great Plains Quarterly

The central metaphor in this final installment of Nebraska State Poet Bill Kloefkorn's four-part celebration of life in the Great Plains is air. Whereas his three previous memoirs- water, fire, and earth-explored childhood and adolescent memories, Kloefkorn here focuses mainly on adult experiences in college and the Marine Corps, teaching English at Nebraska Wesleyan, classroom adventures as a poet-in-residence, and his celebrated victory in the North Platte, Nebraska, hog-calling contest. Time and tradition are central concerns in this book, as is desire-in football and marriage, in writing poetry and being a good Marine or hog caller, in overcoming adversities like …

Review Of Race And The Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty In The Nineteenth Century By Fay A. Yarbrough, Julie Reed

Great Plains Quarterly

Fay Yarbrough's Race and the Cherokee Nation adds to recent literature, including Tiya Miles's Ties That Bind (2005) and Celia Naylor's African Cherokees in Indian Territory (2008), that reexamines racial ideology among slave-holding American Indians. Through the use of Cherokee statutory law, marriage licenses, newspaper articles, court records, and WPA interviews, Yarbrough argues that nineteenth-century Cherokee politicians adopted racial laws to serve "as a demonstration of sovereignty" and reconfigured Cherokee identity by intermingling "blood, race, and legal citizenship." Matrilineal clan descent no longer provided the principal claim to Cherokee identity; race increasingly replaced clan identification to determine those who could …

Review Of Sentimental Journey: The Art Of Alfred Jacob Miller By Lisa Strong, Martha A. Sandweiss

Great Plains Quarterly

Alfred Jacob Miller (181O-1874) spent six months in the Rocky Mountain West in 1837, capturing a visual record of the fur trader's world for his patron, the Scottish nobleman William Drummond Stewart. He created only about a hundred works in the West, but over the next thirty-five years he painted close to one thousand western scenes in his studio in Baltimore, benefiting not just from Stewart's patronage, but from the sustained patronage of Baltimore's leading merchant princes, many of whom had commercial interests in the West. As Strong argues here in this beautifully illustrated book, published to accompany an exhibition …

Review Of Passion And Preferences: William Jennings Bryan And The 1896 Democratic National Convention By Richard Franklin Bensel, Raymond D. Screws

Great Plains Quarterly

Richard Franklin Bensel offers a masterful inspection of William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech and the 1896 Democratic National Convention. As Bensel demonstrates, this convention, held in the newly finished Coliseum in Chicago, was a watershed in American political history. Southern and western Democratic leaders, including those from the Great Plains, wrested the power of the party from "the patricians of the East"; the soft money men, or silver supporters, defeated the gold or hard money Democrats. Bryan did not alter this course, but his "Cross of Gold" speech, one of the most famous orations in American political history, …

Great Plains Quarterly, Volume 30, Number 1, Winter 2010--Editorial Matter

Great Plains Quarterly

Masthead

Contents

Book Reviews

News and Notes: CALLS FOR PAPERS; INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CZECH AND SLOVAK AMERICANS; BEST ARTICLE PRIZE IN WOMEN'S HISTORY; VISITING SCHOLARS PROGRAM GRANTS FREDERICK C. LUEBKE AWARD

Review Of Cherokee Thoughts: Honest And Uncensored By Robert J. Conley, Kirby Brown

Great Plains Quarterly

It is often said that if you present fifty Cherokees with a given proposition, you'll get fifty-one opinions about how best to proceed. Cherokee Thoughts captures the humor, complexity, and contention embedded in such aphorisms. Careful to emphasize that the volume speaks neither for all Cherokees nor for any Cherokee government, Robert J. Conley engages a variety of contemporary tribally specific conversations, ranging-in no particular order-from the highly contentious issues of Cherokee citizenship, identity, and the freedman debates, to thoughts on tribal specific historical fiction and intellectual production ("Cherokee Literature," "Tribally Specific Historical Fiction," "John Oskison and Me"), to Cherokee …

Review Of For All We Have And Are: Regina And The Experience Of The Great War By James M. Pitsula, Brandon Dimmel

Great Plains Quarterly

The Great War touched many places in Canada, but James M. Pistula's book is the first to examine closely its impact on a distinctly agrarian and western community. Regina, Saskatchewan, was, like many towns in the Canadian prairies after the turn of the century, dependent on agriculture, ethnically diverse, and led by an Anglophile majority that viewed the war as an ideological clash between the democratic British Empire and the despotic German autocracy. That way of thinking made the city of 30,000 a veritable battleground between "Germantown," the "alien" immigrant district, and its English-speaking majority, who through assimilative social reform …

Review Of African Cherokees In Indian Territory: From Chattel To Citizens By Celia E. Naylor, Sharlotte Neely

Great Plains Quarterly

In African Cherokees in Indian Territory, Celia E. Naylor tackles the controversial issue of slave-owning by Cherokee Indians and cuts through wishful myths to the truth that slavery is not somehow better when one's master is also nonwhite. In her remarkable book, Naylor traces the lives of African slaves and freedmen from 1839 when the forced removal over the Trail of Tears dumped the Cherokees of the southern Appalachians and their black slaves on the Great Plains to 1907 when Indian Territory became the state of Oklahoma. Naylor is thorough in searching out all the primary source material, and …

Review Of Fire Light: The Life Of Angel De Cora, Winnebago Artist By Linda M. Waggoner, Nancy Parezo

Great Plains Quarterly

In my research on Native Americans artists there have been people I have been fascinated with yet knew little about. One of these was Angel De Cora (1869-1919), a Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) artist I would catch glimpses of in an exhibit at the Heard Museum or find in records on the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, her art the cornerstone of the Indian Service exhibit in the government building. Fortunately for me and for others interested in the lives of individuals who made a difference in the early twentieth century, as well as for scholars in American history, American Indian studies, and …

Review Of Back In Time: Echoes Of A Vanished America In The Heart Of France By Kent Cowgill, Juliette Parnell

Great Plains Quarterly

Who would have thought Nebraska and France share so many similarities? Kent Cowgill's title gives out an important clue. In the winter of 2005, Cowgill travels to France for a dual purpose: to discover the French people's "real" views towards America, after Bush's reelection, and also to find out if rural France still brings back memories from past days in America's heartland.

Cowgill's original plan was to revisit six areas: first Normandy at Arromanches, then the southwest region, the Languedoc province, and finally Burgundy. He actually ends up exploring tinier communities than originally planned. His various encounters and discussions with …

Review Of Looking Close And Seeing Far: Samuel Seymour, Titian Ramsay Peale, And The Art Of The Long Expedition, 1818-1823 By Kenneth Haltman, Robert Slifkin

Great Plains Quarterly

While the inescapable subjectivism of historical writing has become something of a given in the age of postmodern theory, the objectivity of visual documents, especially in scientific and technical realms such as topography and natural history, has remained less examined and analyzed. In his challenging and imaginative study of the numerous sketches produced by Samuel Seymour and Titian Ramsey Peale during the survey expedition following the Platte River led by Major Stephen Long (considered to be the first western expedition to include professional artists), Kenneth Haltman skillfully demonstrates not only the complexity of these ostensibly slight and impartial images, but …

Review Of Wild Bill Hickok And Calamity Jane: Deadwood Legends By James D. Mclaird, Joesph A. Stout, Jr.

Great Plains Quarterly

For decades after the Civil War, people trekked west across the United States to find new homes, make quick fortunes in gold or silver mining, or as soldiers of the Indianfighting army. No area attracted more attention during this era than the northern Great Plains. When gold was discovered near Deadwood, South Dakota, in the middle 1870s, the region drew characters of dubious reputation. Among these were Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane, two vagabonds from the Midwest whose alleged exploits made them famous in the Northern Plains and across the country.

James McLaird peers into the lives of these …

Self-Advocacy Of Women In Sexualized Labor, 1880-1980s, Kim Marie Matthews

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The purpose of this study is to centralize, into women's history, the marginalized historical voices of women activists working in sexualized labor (and/or those using sexualized economic strategies). This thesis situates the work of Josie Washburn, a former madam who turned self advocate in 1907, squarely within the Progressive Era debate on prostitution, By centralizing women's voices of sexualized lahor, it provides a means to track the long-term evolution of the intersections between women's sexualized labor choices, traditional labor choices, self-advocacy, popular media, and social/political movements on behalf of women. This study asserts that a majority Progressive Era working women …

Australian Families, Cultures, And Environments: An Annotated Bibliography, Judi Geggie, John Defrain, Nikki Defrain, Greg Blyton, Leanne Holt

Department of Child, Youth, and Family Studies: Faculty Publications

This annotated bibliography of books and other cultural resources is offered to readers interested in developing a broad and inclusive understanding of Australian families and the cultural, social, political, economic, historical, and geographic environment in which they live. The contributions of Indigenous Australians, which date back 40,000 to 60,000 years are especially emphasized here.

“A Small Revolution”: The Role Of A Black Power Revolt In Creating And Sustaining A Black Studies Department At The University Of Minnesota, Jared E. Leighton

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis examines the Morrill Hall Takeover of January, 1969, and the creation of the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Further, it follows the process of sustaining a black studies department including acquiring qualified professors, maintaining student interest, negotiating the relationship to the black community and overcoming funding shortages, as well as other bureaucratic difficulties. The events at the University of Minnesota are placed in the larger context of the long-term development of black studies, the rise of the Black Power Movement and Minnesota’s tradition of liberalism. This work draws on reports from the University of …

Redeeming The Time: Protestant Missionaries And The Social And Cultural Development Of Territorial Nebraska, Robert J. Voss

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in May of 1854 formally opened a new region of the United States to settlers. Hundreds came with news of the creation of Nebraska Territory, but not in comparable numbers to the major western migrations that would follow after the Civil War. Instead, the initial small waves of Nebraska settlers would cling to the Missouri River and its settlements establishing communities on the eastern edges in the newly opened territory. These first settlers set the foundations for culture and society in Nebraska.

From 1854 until 1860, pioneers claimed lands near the Missouri, with few …

Fishing Booths And Fishing Strategies In Medieval Iceland: An Archaeofauna From The [Site] Of Akurvík, North-West Iceland, Colin Amundsen, Sophia Perdikaris, Thomas H. Mcgovern, Yekaterina Krivogorskaya, Matthew Brown, Konrad Smiarowski, Shaye Storm, Salena Modugno, Malgorzata Frik, Monica Koczela

School of Global Integrative Studies: Faculty Publications

Excavations in 1990 in North-West Iceland documented a stratified series of small turf structures and associated midden deposits at the eroding beach at Akurvík which date from the 11th–13th to the 15th–16th centuries AD. The site reflects a long series of small discontinuous occupations, probably associated with seasonal fishing. The shell sand matrix had allowed excellent organic preservation, and an archaeofauna of more than 100,000 identifiable fragments was recovered. The collections are dominated by fish, mainly Atlantic cod, but substantial amounts of whale bone suggest extensive exploitation of strandings or active whaling. This paper briefly summarizes the excavation results, presents …

"Ersatz Comedy In The Third Reich", William Grange Prof. Dr.

Johnny Carson School of Theatre and Film: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

The idea performing comedy, and performing a lot of comedy, during one the most systematic reigns of terror the world has ever known may at first blush seem somewhat degraded. The perception of most people, especially in the English-speaking world, is that “German comedy” in the first place is an oxymoron. The fact is, however, that 42,000 productions were staged between 1933 and 1944 in the Third Reich, and the majority of them were comedies. The most frequently performed were plays by the now forgotten likes of August Hinrichs, Maximilian Böttcher, and Fritz Peter Buch, Jochen Huth, and Charlotte Rissmann. …

Acculturation Among Swedish Immigrants In Kansas And Nebraska, 1870-1900, Terrence Jon Lindell

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Contemporary observers and many historians have maintained that Swedish immigrants rapidly assimilated into American society. This dissertation examines this conclusion by focusing on rural Swedish settlements in the Great Plains--the Lindsborg community in McPherson and Saline counties in Kansas and Burt, Phelps, Polk, and Saunders counties In Nebraska.

These immigrant communities, all founded in the two decades following the Civil War, typically were estabIished by Swedes who had spent some time in states east of the Great Plains and had thus already begun to assimilate. All of the settlements developed congregations of various denominations--either through religious schism or immigration by …

Germans In Brazil: A Comparative History Of Cultural Conflict During World War I, Frederick C. Luebke

Department of History: Faculty Publications

The first three chapters establish the historical context for understanding what happened to the Germans in Brazil during the period of the war in Europe and its immediate aftermath, 1914 to 1920. The large pattern of German settlement in Brazil, offered in Chapter I, is followed by a study of German ethnic institutions--churches, schools, societies--and the German-language press to reveal literacy levels, religious and linguistic characteristics, and the measure of assimilation (or lack thereof) into Brazilian society. Ethnic group relations, perceptions, and images, along with attendant concerns and fears, are analyzed next to show how and why the Brazilian majority …

The Visual Arts In The Civilization Classroom, Thomas M. Carr Jr.

French Language and Literature Papers

Although the visual arts have long been a feature of civilization courses, instructors do not always exploit their full potential. This paper presents a checklist to help teachers identify the relevant aspects of the arts for study. Its goal is to facilitate comprehensive treatment of works of art by focusing on three areas: the aesthetic dimension, the social context, and the artist’s own experience. The checklist is followed by a series of activities which encourage students to integrate the various aspects of the arts while practicing their language skills.

The Wpa Federal Writers' Project In Nebraska, Richard C. Witt

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Economic conditions during the 1930s caused unprecedented problems for the American people. The most obvious feature of the Depression--high unemployment--was particularly discouraging since no group of workers was spared from the realities of hard times. After experiencing relatively prosperous and comfortable lives during the Twenties, thousands of professionals and service personnel joined blue-collar workers in soup lines and charity programs.

This study concerns itself with one response the federal government made to deal with jobless white-collar personnel during the depression decade. As part of the Works Progress Administration's program to hire unemployed persons in the fields of art, music, theater, …

Homosexuals And The Death Penalty In Colonial America, Louis Crompton

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This article traces the legislative history of statutes prescribing the death penalty for sodomy in 17th-century New England and in the other American colonies. New England and some middle colonies broke with English legal tradition by adopting explicitly biblical language. After the Revolution, Pennsylvania took the lead, in 1786, in dropping the death penalty.

As the nation prepares to celebrate the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence, the question of the status of the homosexual in pre-Revolutionary America comes to mind. The Body of Liberties approved by the Colony of Massachusetts Bay in 1641 welcomed refugees seeking to escape "the …

The Society For The Propagation Of The Gospel In Foreign Parts And The Assimilation Of Foreign Protestants In British North America, Anne Polk Diffendal

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts from its foundation in 1701 to the beginning of the American Revolution attempted to minister to non-English white settlers in the North American colonies. The Society sent clergymen to Dutch, to Germans, to Swedes, and to French Huguenots in various provinces, gave financial help to foreign ministers, and distributed books to foreign churches. Anglican religious services were open to foreigners living near the Society's missions. These activities have been chronicled in 1952 in a dissertation by William A. Bultmann, who published two articles from that paper. One is a …

The Czechs Of Butler County, 1870-1940, Clarence John Kubicek

Department of History: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The Czechs and their descendents make up one of the large groups that settled and developed the State of Nebraska. While every county of Nebraska may have a few Czechs within its confines, the largest numbers are found in Douglas, Saline, Colfax, Saunders, and Butler Counties.

It is the purpose of this thesis to deal with the Czechs of Butler County. A racial group, Slavic in origination and since the first World War, properly called the "Czechs." The term "Czech" is to be applied, not only to those whose ancestry goes back to Bohemia, but also to those who originally …

A History Of The Czechs In Knox County, Nebraska, Joseph John Van Hoff

Open Access Master's Theses (through 2010)

When the average person thinks of the Czech settlements of Nebraska, he is apt to have in mind the large numbers of this national group who are located in the comparatively centralized area of Douglas, Saunders, Butler, Saline, and Colfax Counties. Few seem to realize that one of the larger of the Czech settlements of the state is to be found in Knox County, a section considerably removed, and having relatively few contacts with the Czechs in the above-mentioned counties.

It is the purpose of this thesis to tell the story of these Knox County Czechs. In it effort will …