American Studies Commons^™

Review Of A Marvelous Hundred Square Miles: Black Hills Tourism, 1880-1941 By Suzanne Barta Julin, Robert Wellman Campbell

Great Plains Quarterly

"Tourists," said Doane Robinson, the father of Mount Rushmore, "soon get fed up on scenery." As car-based tourism exploded after World War I, South Dakotans believed the Black Hills needed not just pretty pines and streams, but a new layer of roadside attractions to bring in more tourists and keep them spending longer. This book is about the making of that tourist landscape-not so much the landscape itself, or the tourists looking at it, but the makers and movers behind the scenes who drove the transformation.

This is, in other words, a book about economic planning. It is a left-wing …

Review Of The Lipan Apaches: People Of The Wind And Lightning By Thomas A. Britten, Deborah Bernsten

Great Plains Quarterly

The Lipan Apaches is the first comprehensive study of a people who were important, integral actors in the history of the Southern Plains, most especially the history of Texas. Rather than casting the Lipans as the victims of Spanish or later American conquest, this meticulously researched work brings to life Lipan history, one steeped in a "tradition of adaptation and cultural reinvention" that of necessity was constantly responding to new and often painful shifting social realities. Britten poses these questions: Who were the Lipan Apaches and under what circumstances did a tribal identity emerge ? To what extent did they …

Review Of The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story By Elliott West, Dennis Baird

Great Plains Quarterly

The Nez Perce people (who call themselves Nimiipuu) are ancient inhabitants of Idaho's Clearwater Valley and of the Wallowa Mountains of eastern Oregon. Driven by both curiosity and economics, they have a rich history of travels to distant places, including California, the Rio Grande Valley, and across the Plains to Missouri. Buffalo drew large segments of the tribe to the Great Plains, where many leaders where born. They have an equally rich history of generosity to visitors, a category that included Lewis and Clark, fur traders and missionaries, and eventually the miners and settlers who helped various federal officials …

Review Of Reopening The Frontier: Homesteading In The Modern West By Brian Q. Cannon, Benjamin T. Arrington

Great Plains Quarterly

Brian Q. Cannon has established himself as one of America's preeminent historians of agriculture and the modern West. Reopening the Frontier will only add to this well-deserved reputation. In it, he examines the rejuvenation of western homesteading- the idea of the federal government providing cost-free land to settlers willing to live on and cultivate it-after World War II. As Cannon demonstrates, the challenges of homesteading in 1950s Washington or Oregon were often just as severe as those of trying to "prove up" a claim in 1870s Nebraska or Kansas.

Did A Woman Write “The Great American Novel”? Judging Women’S Fiction In The Nineteenth Century And Today, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In the fall of 2009, as I was preparing to teach a senior capstone course for English majors on the nineteenth-century American novel and questions of literary value and the canon, I went trolling for suggestions of recent secondary readings about canonicity. The response came back loud and clear: “The canon wars are over. We all teach whatever we want to teach, and everything is fine.” My experiences with students suggest that, at least in American literary studies before 1900, the canon wars are not over, or, perhaps, they have entered a new stage. Most of my students had heard …

Review Of Calvin Littlejohn: Portrait Of A Community In Black And White By Bob Ray Sanders, Carla Williams

Great Plains Quarterly

Calvin Littlejohn: Portrait of a Community in Black and White came about through the confluence of two significant events around 1994: the enthusiastic reception surrounding the publication of a similarly themed title, Behold the People: R. C. Hickman's Photographs of Black Dallas, 1949-1961; and Littlejohn's family contacting the director of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin about possibly donating his prints and negatives there. These are significant because they point to the need for an archive to preserve and organize material of this scope-some 70,000 negatives and 55,000 prints made over …

Review Of Native Liberty: Natural Reason And Cultural Survivance By Gerald Vizenor, Michael Snyder

Great Plains Quarterly

Poet, novelist, and critic Gerald Vizenor is arguably the most accomplished and prolific intellectual in the field of Native American studies. His new collection of cultural criticism includes four original essays and nine expanded revisions of uncollected published pieces. "Ontic Images," perhaps the finest selection, applies his concept of Native transmotion to representations of Natives in photography. Two perceptive pieces of art criticism discuss the aesthetics and contributions of Anishinaabe artists George Morrison and David Bradley. On the whole, this work serves as a useful introduction to the theory and criticism of this brilliant Anishinaabe (aka Ojibwe, Chippewa) writer.

Review Of Uprising! Woody Crumbo's Indian Art By Robert Perry, Robert B. Pickering

Great Plains Quarterly

In any discussion of important Indian artists of the twentieth century, Woody Crumbo (1912-1989) is a pivotal player. His dynamic figures, brilliant colors, and traditional themes were combined to create a new kind of art. He used traditional art forms and themes from his Potawatomi background as well as themes and incidents from other tribal traditions to inspire his work. Not satisfied with just creating art, Crumbo mentored other artists, and for much of his life he was personally involved in the business of art-creating new opportunities for himself and other Indian artists.

Review Of African Americans On The Great Plains: An Anthology Edited And With An Introduction By Bruce A. Glasrud And Charles A. Braithwaite, David J. Peavler

Great Plains Quarterly

In the last decade, Great Plains Quarterly has taken the lead in soliciting and publishing articles about the African American experience in the Central Plains. Editors Bruce A. Glasrud and Charles A. Braithwaite have incorporated these articles into a single anthology that should become required reading in college history courses throughout the region. Unfortunately for readers of this journal, however, the book offers little in the way of new information about this important topic.

The editors provide a brief historiographical introduction that details the important scholarly contributions to Great Plains African American history. Although the editors' definition of the region …

Review Of A Nation In Transition: Douglas Henry Johnston And The Chickasaws, 1898-1939 By Michael W. Lovegrove, Lisa K. Neuman

Great Plains Quarterly

What happens when a Native American nation is gradually and purposefully dismantled in order to make way for a new state government? How do tribal leaders meet the challenges of an impending dissolution of their own government and simultaneously fight against the erosion of their tribal sovereignty? These compelling questions inform A Nation in Transition: Douglas Henry Johnston and the Chickasaws, 1898-1939, a new history of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma and its leadership under Governor Douglas Henry Johnston (1898-1902; 1904-1939), whose tenure, according to author Michael W. Lovegrove, was longer than that of any other American Indian executive. …

Review Of Meriwether Lewis By Thomas C. Danisi And John C. Jackson, J. I. Merritt

Great Plains Quarterly

With the possible exception of Aaron Burr, perhaps no figure from the early history of the Republic remains more enigmatic than Meriwether Lewis, who with fellow Army officer William Clark led one of the most celebrated expeditions in the history of exploration. Lewis and Clark's twenty-eight-month "tour," which took them to the Pacific Ocean and back via the Missouri and Columbia drainages, gave the young nation a wealth of knowledge about the Louisiana Territory and Pacific Northwest. Lewis was just thirty-two years old when the Corps of Discovery banked its canoes in St. Louis in September 1806. Yet the young …

Review Of Wallace Stegner And The American West By Philip L. Fradkin, Bonney Macdonald

Great Plains Quarterly

Philip L. Fradkin's biography constitutes a balanced and well-researched addition to the biographical scholarship currently available on a treasured and enduring American and western American author, environmentalist, and teacher. Adding to previous work by Forrest and Margaret Robinson (1977), as well as by Jackson Benson (1996), Fradkin supplements these portraits of Wallace Stegner with his own emphases-in particular Stegner's continuing commitment to thinking about the American West, about water and aridity, and about public intellectuals' obligations to conservation and environmental responsibility.

Review Of Conquests & Consequences: The American West From Frontier To Region By Carol L. Higham And William H. Katerberg, Aubrey Streit Krug

Great Plains Quarterly

The textbook Conquests & Consequences provides a cohesive narrative framed by the question: How does a historical perspective of cultures, empires, and environments in the American West inform and influence understandings of the West as a frontier, colony, region, borderland, or "center of power in its own right"? To engage undergraduate history students, Carol L. Higham and William H. Katerberg employ a folksy, conversational style (Native pit houses are "roughly the length of an average single dormitory room"). The text also contains an impressive number of photographs and illustrations. Most importantly, Higham and Katerberg introduce terms and content in the …

Review Of Between Languages And Cultures: Colonial And Postcolonial Readings Of Gabrielle Roy By Rosemary Chapman, Carol J. Harvey

Great Plains Quarterly

Canadian author Gabrielle Roy (1909-1983) is usually recognized as one of Quebec's foremost writers. Although Bonheur d'occasion, the novel that launched her career in 1946, is set in Montreal, much of her subsequent work is set in the Prairies of her youth. Born in the small francophone town of Saint-Boniface, Manitoba, she spoke French at home but was educated in English, since French had lost its status as an official language of the province. This linguistic and cultural duality is fraught with many tensions, as Rosemary Chapman demonstrates in her recent book.

Review Of Sapphira And The Slave Girl By Willa Cather, Robin Hackett

Great Plains Quarterly

Willa Cather's last novel, set in Virginia where she spent her early childhood, is often a mystery to readers who know Cather by her loving evocation of Great Plains landscapes and cultures. This scholarly edition clarifies the seeming anomaly of Sapphira and the Slave Girl by placing it in its historical and biographical contexts, and by building from it an analysis of Cather's accomplishments and aesthetic concerns over the length of her career. The most significant achievement of this edition is that it will help scholars at every level understand the novel as evidence of Cather's involvement in public intellectual …

On The Road Again Consumptives Traveling For Health In The American West, 1840-1925, Jeanne Abrams

Great Plains Quarterly

From the mid-nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of health seekers, on the advice of their physicians, family members, or popular advertisements, took to the road to "chase the cure" for tuberculosis, the most dreaded disease of the era. Indeed, tuberculosis, also commonly known as consumption or "the White Plague," held the dubious distinction of being the leading cause of death in nineteenth century America. In the first years of the twentieth century 150,000 Americans died of it yearly, and more than ten times that number were afflicted with the disease.¹ Whether …

Moving Through Fear: A Conversation With Susan Campbell Bartoletti, Jennifer L. Fabbi, Amy L. Johnson

Library Faculty Publications

Prior to its release in August 2010, Susan Campbell Bartoletti's newest book, They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group (2010), received an incredibly positive response in the form of starred reviews from School Library Journal, Booklist, Publisher's Weekly, Horn Book, and Kirkus Reviews. Through her impeccable research and ability to weave a compelling story out of the place "where darkness and light smack up against each other" (Bartoletti & Zusak, 2008), she has made it possible for children and young adults to access and understand the horror of the Third Reich …

Nahm, Max Brunswick, 1864-1958 (Mss 329), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 329. Correspondence of Max B. Nahm relating mainly to his involvement with the Mammoth Cave National Park Association and the Kentucky National Park Commission in the establishment of Mammoth Cave National Park, Edmonson County, Kentucky. Includes some Association and Commission minutes. Also includes some of Nahm's speeches, writings, personal photographs, and material relating to the Nahm family.

Settle-Dewitt Family Papers (Mss 332), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid and scans of Folders 2 and 3 relating to genealogy (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Collection 332. Includes correspondence, genealogical materials; wills, deeds and other legal documents of the Settle and DeWitt families; and the memoir of Marcus Bearden DeWitt, a minister in the Cumberland Presbyterian Church and a Civil War chaplain (Click on "Additional Files" below). Also of interest is information related to the Settle rifle makers of Barren County, Kentucky.

Lg Ms 018 Maine Won’T Discriminate Archives Finding Aid, Karin A. France

Search the Manuscript Collection (Finding Aids)

Description:

Maine Won't Discriminate (MWD) was an organization created to work toward passing LGBT civil rights legislation in Maine and to advocate against/for citizens referenda that would have overturned/sustained such legislation. The Archives contains organizational records as well as print and audiovisual material created and used by the organization. The majority of the materials relate to MWD’s ultimately successful efforts to oppose referendum Question 1 in 2005, which read: “Do you want to reject the new law that would protect people from discrimination in employment, housing, education, public accommodations and credit based on their sexual orientation?” The materials include polling …

Interview With Opal Cline Crabb Regarding Her Life (Fa 154), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

FA Oral Histories

Transcription of an interview with Opal Cline Crabb conducted by Joe Adams for an oral history project titled "A Generation Remembers, 1900-1949." Crabb discusses her life and times, including information about growing up in McLean County, Kentucky, education, her teaching experience in a one-room school, food preservation at home including hog butchering and meat processing, the introduction of radios and televisions, the Green River and steamboats.

The Promise Of Gangster Glamour: Sinatra, Vegas, And Alluring, Ethnicized, Excess, Laura Cook Kenna

Occasional Papers

Las Vegas has been linked with Frank Sinatra since the 1950s. The highly‐publicized performances of the Rat Pack (consisting of Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., Joey Bishop, and Peter Lawford) at the Sands crystallized the image of Las Vegas as a place that mingled economic mobility with excess. This excess was often associated with ethnicity and frequently linked to crime. It was, however, the excess that made Las Vegas and Sinatra glamorous to many audiences.

Preservation Ethics In The Case Of Nebraska’S Nationally Registered Historic Properties, Darren Michael Adams

Department of Geography: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation focuses on the National Register of Historic Places and considers the geographical implications of valuing particular historic sites over others. Certain historical sites will either gain or lose desirability from one era to the next, this dissertation identifies and explains three unique preservation ethical eras, and it maps the sites which were selected during those eras. These eras are the Settlement Era (1966 – 1975), the Commercial Architecture Era (1976 – 1991), and the Progressive Planning Era (1992 – 2010). The findings show that transformations in the program included an early phase when state authorities listed historical resources …

Burt, John D., B. 1955 (Mss 325), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 325. Proof copy of a book titled "Democracy and Poetry: Robert Penn Warren and the Fate of Inwardness." (365 p.) This manuscript was adapted and later published as "Robert Penn Warren and American Idealism."

Plemmons, Florence Williams, B. 1936 (Sc 2286), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 2286. Thesis: "Janice Holt Giles: A Bio-Bibliography with Evaluations of the Kentucky Frontier Books as Historical Fiction," written by Florence Williams Plemmons in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a Master of Science degree from the University of Tennessee.

Philips, Emanie Louise (Nahm) Sachs Arling, 1893-1981 (Mss 317), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 317. Professional correspondence, short stories, book and story manuscripts, author's notes, reviews, and primary and secondary research materials relating to the literary career of Emanie Louise Nahm Philips, a Bowling Green native. Includes some photographs, notices and reviews relating to her work as an artist, family biographical material, and personal correspondence.

Lg Ms 011 Northern Lambda Nord Archives Finding Aid, Michelle E. Smith, Kristin Morris

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Description:

One of the earliest gay and lesbian groups in the state, NLN began in 1979 as a support network for the rural LGBT community, located in Aroostook County, with members in Maine and New Brunswick. By the mid-1980s, NLN had added an outreach component, working to educate the local community on LGBT identity and acceptance and health and HIV/AIDS issues. They also started a Gay-Lesbian Phoneline which grew into the Maine HIV/AIDS Hotline. The group disbanded in 2000, but re-formed in 2006. The Archives contains an extensive collection of organizational records, promotional materials, photo albums and artifacts.

Date Range: …

Hart County, Kentucky - Prescriptions (Sc 2279), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid and scans (Click on "Additional Files" below) for Manuscripts Small Collection 2279. Prescriptions written primarily by physicians practicing in Hart County, Kentucky and surrounding counties. Some are written on the physician's own form while others are written on the form of a local druggist or drugstore.

Belcher, Scott Minor (Fa 195), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

FA Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 195. Interview done by Scott Belcher with Bill Thompson,BreckinridgeCounty, Kentucky, in which Thompson reminisces about his youth. Includes transcription and cassette tape.

Hatfield-Gaines Family, 1834-1981 (Mss 2275), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 2275. Chiefy receipts, deeds, wills, and other legal and financial documents of the Hatfield and Gaines families of Simpson County, Kentucky. Includes some Civil War-era correspondence of the Hatfield family.