American Studies Commons^™

Review Of Realigning America: Mckinley, Bryan, And The Remarkable Election Of 1896 By R. Hal Williams, Troy Murphy

Great Plains Quarterly

There is no universal agreement among historians regarding the number of presidential elections that should be defined as "critical" or "realigning." Yet the election of 1896 is almost always included in this small group. R. Hal Williams makes the reasons clear in Realigning America, a compelling account of the "Battle of the Standards" between William McKinley and William Jennirigs Bryan. The book is exhaustively researched and written with a storyteller's knack for moving the narrative forward and unearthing personal and colorful testimonies that buttress the history of the campaign.

Review Of Native America: A History By Michael Leroy Oberg, Roger L. Nichols

Great Plains Quarterly

In this solid text Michael Oberg presents his version of American Indian history. From the start he works to avoid presenting just another encyclopedic narrative likely to leave readers "awash in a sea of facts and data disconnected from any coherent narrative." To this end he focuses on how eleven Indigenous communities dealt with the European invasions of North America. His list includes groups as disparate as the Chumash and Pueblo peoples in the West, the Potawatomis and Dakota Sioux in the North, the Crows, Kiowas, and Caddos in the Plains, and Eastern peoples such as the Mohegans, Powhatans, Cherokees, …

Review Of Beyond The American Pale: The Irish In The West, 1845-1910 By David M. Emmons, William H. Mulligan Jr.

Great Plains Quarterly

David Emmons's book on the Butte Irish (1989) helped begin a scholarly reassessment and investigation of the Irish experience in America, expanding it well beyond East Coast Irish communities and a few others in the Midwest. It had a significant impact on other scholars, myself included. His new book, which deals with the Irish experience in the "West," therefore, has been much anticipated. Beyond the American Pale will not disappoint those who have waited for Emmons's take on the larger picture of the Irish in the "West," although it may not be what many expect.

Review By Hoboes: Bindlestiffs, Fruit Tramps, And The Harvesting Of The West By Mark Wyman, Mary Lyons-Barrett

Great Plains Quarterly

Mark Wyman presents the conflicting and often contradictory ways our government has dealt with immigration to satisfy the demands of western growers who have claimed since the late 1880s that there was a shortage of available labor to harvest crops. In the process of meeting the challenge of ripe crops going to waste, local entities used children from reform schools and Native Americans from boarding schools to perform agricultural labor cheaply. Congress, in banning Chinese immigration under the Exclusion Act of 1882, kept the door cracked open to admit Japanese and Hindu workers to do some of the more advanced …

Review Of Nikkei Farmer On The Nebraska Plains: A Memoir By Hisanori Kano, Ruth E. Lionberger

Great Plains Quarterly

In 1916, with William Jennings Bryan as sponsor, Hisanori Kano left a life of nobility in Japan to study at Nebraska's Ag College and live as a common farmer. Nikkei Farmer on the Nebraska Plains is his memoir, spanning from his birth in 1889 until 1976.

Actually, this memoir provides very little information about farming. (Reverend Kano's chosen title was Sixty Years of Life in America.) Kano did farm for several years in Litchfield, Nebraska. In 1925, however, he became a lay missionary for the Episcopal Church to serve the approximately seven hundred Japanese immigrants living across Nebraska. In …

Review Of In Trace Oftr: A Montana Hunter's Journey By Dan Aadland, Paul R. Krausman

Great Plains Quarterly

The title of Dan Aadland's latest book, In Trace of TR: A Montana Hunter's Journey, is intriguing. It implies a connection between Theodore Roosevelt (TR) and the author; less clear is what that connection is, based on the title. In his introduction, Aadland states that the connection between him and the twenty-sixth President of the United States was made with similar experiences in ranching, horsemanship, and hunting. The objective of the book is to invite the reader along for a good ride with TR and Dan. And quite a ride it is.

The book is divided into three parts. …

Review Of Cather Studies 8: Willa Cather: A Writer's Worlds Edited By John J. Murphy, Francoise Palleau-Papin, And Robert Thacker, Derek Driedger

Great Plains Quarterly

Cather Studies continues to assemble and inspire the most well-informed writing on Willa Cather's life and literature. The twenty-three essays in this volume further elevate Cather's reputation for meticulous attention to detail when presenting various cultures in her fiction. As the collection derives from the 2007 International Cather Seminar cohosted in Paris and Abbey St. Michel de Frigolet, essays regularly draw from French history, including the period spanning from Cather's first visit in 1902 through World War I. Consequently, the most analyzed novel is One of Ours (1922), yet The Professor's House (1925), Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), and …

Review Of Art Of West Texas Women: A Celebration By Kippra D. Hopper And Laurie J. Churchill, Michael R. Grauer

Great Plains Quarterly

Texas historians, acknowledging women as art pioneers in Texas, rely on the old saw that while men were settling the state, women led the charge for cultural pursuits. Groups of women-trained artists among them-began organizing art activities in all parts of the state in the early 1880s on the heels of settlement, recognizing the importance of an appreciation of aesthetics and beauty to the development of a significant culture. Since most public school teachers in Texas were female, teaching art and bringing art to students were natural developments; women also founded Texas's first public art museums.

While scholars have acknowledged …

Review Of Prairie Republic: The Political Culture Of Dakota Territory, 1879-1889 By Jon K. Lauck, Mark S. Joy

Great Plains Quarterly

The Dakotas are often an overlooked and underexamined part of the United States. No one seems to know whether the region is part of the Midwest or the "Real West," and so it often falls between the historiographical cracks. In this excellent study, Jon Lauck examines the political culture of the eastern region of South Dakota in the last decade before statehood. This period has been neglected by recent scholars, in part because it was often assumed that the standard work, Howard Lamar's Dakota Territory, 1861-1889: A Study of Frontier Politics, published in 1956, had said the last word …

Joining The Great Plains In Space, Place, And Time Questioning A Time Zone Boundary, Rob Kuper

Great Plains Quarterly

Standard time zone boundaries are invisible in the landscape, yet they abruptly delineate a temporal difference of one hour between two large areas located relative to one another on Earth. In most cases, standard time zone boundaries follow political ones and define areas within which daylight saving time (DST)-the seasonal advancement of standard time by one hour-is observed. Moving time zone boundaries and the decision to observe daylight saving time occurs throughout the world for various reasons that result in the synchronization of socioeconomic and political activities within and between communities and the simultaneous separation from others.

The zone boundary …

Review Of Experiments In A Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia, And The Austin Project Edited By Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, Lisa L. Moore, And Sharon Bridgforth, Harvey Young

Great Plains Quarterly

The Austin Project (tAP) is a performing arts initiative that began at the University of Texas at Austin in 2002. Consisting almost exclusively of women of color and produced by Omi Osun Joni Jones, tAP created opportunities for artists, amateur and professional, to collaborate, improvise with one another, and develop a variety of spoken word performances reflecting their subjectivity and experiences. Experiments in Jazz Aesthetic functions as both a sourcebook, containing representative fragments of writings developed by tAP between 2002 and 2006, and as an anthology of new works by prominent performance artists Sharon Bridgforth, Robbie McCauley, and Laurie Carlos, …

Review Of The Nebraska Dispatches By Christopher Cartmill, Kyle Carsten Wyatt

Great Plains Quarterly

The quest for home is an admirable one with seemingly universal appeal. That a New York City playwright would chronicle his experiences reconnecting with his Nebraska roots is something that, normally, we might applaud. Before buying this book, however, ask yourself if you care to read a comparatively privileged writer wax poetic as he parallels what amounts to be a modern existential crisis with the forced removal, military arrest, and government exploitation of a nineteenth-century Ponca father.

Review Of Fur, Fortune, And Empire: The Epic History Of The Fur Trade In America By Eric Jay Dolin, Brad Tennant

Great Plains Quarterly

Although many individuals who reside in the Great Plains tend to think of furs in connection with the early nineteenth-century trade conducted along the upper Missouri River valley and in the Rocky Mountains, Eric Jay Dolin takes a broader view of the fur trade's role in history. Dolin explains that the role of furs can easily be traced throughout ancient civilizations. To make his point, he briefly mentions that early Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans engaged in the fur trade and that, during the Middle Ages, furs became a major part of commerce. The focus of his book, however, is on …

Review Of The Lakotas And The Black Hills: The Struggle For Sacred Ground By Jeffrey Ostler, Akim D. Reinhardt

Great Plains Quarterly

Until now, the only book-length treatment of the Lakota nation's effort to reclaim the stolen He Sapa (Black Hills) has been Edward Lazarus's Black Hills/ White Justice (1991), which is as much an apologia for his father Arthur Lazarus as it is a history of events: Arthur Lazarus was the attorney instrumental in eventually winning the Supreme Court case United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, which awarded substantial damages for the United States' theft of the Black Hills.

Review Of Art Quantum: The Eiteljorg Fellowship For Native American Fine Art, 2009 Edited By James H. Nottage With Jennifer Complo Mcnutt And Ashley Holland, Jo Ortel

Great Plains Quarterly

This catalogue, published on the occasion of the sixth biennial exhibition honoring the 2009 winners of the prestigious Eiteljorg Fellowship, follows the format established in earlier iterations: a lead essay by a noted critic or scholar of contemporary Native American art (who also served as a jurist on the Fellowship's independent selection panel), accompanied by five interpretive essays on each of the award recipients written by different artists or scholars and amply illustrated with high-quality reproductions of the artists' work.

Paul Chaat Smith (Associate Curator, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian) contributes the lead essay, a characteristically highly stylized …

Tucked In: American Quilts And The Beds They Cover, 1790-1939, Madeleine Roberg

College of Education and Human Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This study examines the size of quilts to determine if changes in quilt size are a reflection of changes in bedstead size. To conduct this study 118 quilt publications and 304 furniture publications (including Sears, Roebuck and Co. retail catalogues). were examined for data on quilts and bedsteads. Using these sources the dimensions of 3299 surviving quilts and 1651 bedsteads were examined to determine whether or not changes in quilts sizes correlate with changes in bedstead dimensions. The study found that quilt size (mean area) steadily declined between 1800 and 1910 and increased in the 1920s and 1930s. The most …

Review Of "Collecting Stamps Would Have Been More Fun": Canadian Publishing And The Correspondence Of Sinclair Ross, 1933-1986 Selected And With An Introduction By Jordan Stouck; Annotations By David Stouck, Andrew Lesk

Great Plains Quarterly

A book not just for completists, the Stoucks' effort succeeds in illuminating the publishing record of one of Canada's most secretive authors. For those who have not read much criticism on Ross, this book will aid in understanding one very representative mid-twentieth-century Canadian author's publishing and artistic struggles.

Most striking is Jordan Stouck's note-perfect introduction, one that is academically rigorous yet free of jargon and platitudes. Stouck begins at, well, the beginning, in noting that Ross's As For Me and My House is "an originary text in western Canadian literature," although Ross himself "perceived his literary career as a failure." …

Review Of Red Land, Red Power: Grounding Knowledge In The American Indian Novel By Sean Kicummah Teuton, Penelope Kelsey

Great Plains Quarterly

In Red Land, Red Power, Cherokee scholar Sean Kicummah Teuton considers three Red Power novels by N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, and Leslie Marmon Silko with a methodology he terms tribal realism. Teuton defines tribal realism as a "'postpositivist realist' view, which allows for genuine debate and exchange across cultures, while still respecting how social location may grant special access to knowledge." Teuton finds the novels of the Red Power era especially significant for investigation in his forging of tribal realism because of "a new intellectual rigor that ... characterize[d] the Red Power movement," citing the proclamation by Indians …

Review Of Painting Indians And Building Empires In North America, 1710-1840 By William H. Truettner, John Hausdoerffer

Great Plains Quarterly

Just when the problematic relationship between Indian portraits and the cultural politics of nineteenth- century America seemed thoroughly explored, William Truettner's new book adds vital detail to our understanding of "portrait diplomacy" and "artistic imperialism." Truettner opens with an insightful distinction between the "Noble Savage" of eighteenth-century British artists and the "Republican Indian" of artists in nineteenth-century America. British "Noble Savage" imagery depicted Mohawks as a "sovereign people" and as "visiting royalty." Truettner shows how artists such as William Hodges, Thomas Hardy, and Benjamin West portrayed Indian leaders as both active in the future of colonial politics and comfortable with …

Review Of The West And Beyond: New Perspectives On An Imagined Region Edited By Alvin Finkel, Sarah Carter, And Peter Fortna, Ryan C. Eyford

Great Plains Quarterly

From 1969 to 1990 the Western Canadian Studies conferences brought together researchers interested in the history of a region defined as "the Prairie West" or simply "the West," often at the University of Calgary. In large measure the conference was an outgrowth of the fractious regional politics of the late 1960s. The range of topics participants explored, however, ultimately went well beyond the limited theme of "western alienation" and made an important contribution to the regional historiography; fourteen volumes of conference papers, usually edited by University of Calgary scholars, were published between 1970 and 1993.

In June 2008 a group …

Review Of Proving Up: Domesticating Land In Us. History By Lisi Krall, Richard Edwards

Great Plains Quarterly

Lisi Krall seeks to place homesteading and later public-land policies in the larger context of American efforts to digest the huge western land mass that the United States came to control through purchase and conquest. She employs an evolutionary economics framework to explain why things turned out the way they did.

Krall begins her book with a startling personal anecdote: in 1920 her grandfather, a young Wyoming homesteader, was shot and killed by a neighbor in a dispute over water rights. The dire consequences of his murder for the family's subsequent generations connect Krall intimately to the struggles of homesteaders.

Review Of In The Footsteps Of Lewis And Clark: Early Commemorations And The Origins Of The National Historic Trail By Wallace G. Lewis, Jay H. Buckley

Great Plains Quarterly

This informative and thought-provoking work analyzes the early commemorations of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the origins of the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail. Neither a guidebook nor an administrative or institutional history of the agencies or organizations involved, this work is concerned with the interpretation and historical meanings of the expedition within the national ethos and how these have changed over time.

Wallace Lewis identifies the factors that contributed to the reinterpretation, resurgence of popularity, and amplification of the importance of the expedition. These included the erection of monuments and statues, the publication of various editions of …

Great Plains Quarterly Volume 31/Number 3/ Summer 2011

Great Plains Quarterly

Contents

Book Reviews

Book Notes

Notes and News

Great Plains Quarterly Volume 31 / Number 2 / Spring 2011

Great Plains Quarterly

Contents

Book Reviews

Book Notes

Notes and News

Review Of Historic Photos Of Nebraska Text And Captions By Ted Stryker, Charles A. Braithwaite

Great Plains Quarterly

One of the salient features of Great Plains Quarterly is its inclusion of an extensive array of illustrations, maps, and photographs along with most articles. These images are meant to enhance their essays and enrich the reader's understanding of their contexts. Occasionally, pictures say so much that one wishes for more photographs and less text. That's not a weakness of Historic Photos of Nebraska, which contains 192 photographs in its 216 pages.

This is Turner Publishing's second book focused on the region's photographs; the first was Jeffrey Spencer's Historic Photos of Omaha (2007). Using images selected from the Boys …

Review Of Spirit Matters: Ron [Gyo-Zo] Spickett, Artist, Poet, Lay-Priest By Geoffrey Simmins, Leslie Dawn

Great Plains Quarterly

Most surveys of modernist art in the Canadian prairie provinces in the 1960s focus on the annual Emma Lake Workshops. These gatherings brought prominent avant-garde artists such as Barnett Newman and Kenneth Noland to Saskatchewan and introduced the controversial American critic Clement Greenberg and his ideas on the development of purity, abstraction, and flatness in painting. Yet not all prairie artists who thought of themselves as modernist followed this path. Many of them have been excluded from published histories.

One such artist is Ron Spickett, the subject of a recent retrospective exhibition curated by Geoffrey Simmins. Simmins's complementary book covers …

Review Of Clearing A Path: New Ways Of Seeing Traditional Indigenous Art Edited By Carmen Robertson And Sherry Farrell Racette, Mary Longman

Great Plains Quarterly

This exhibition catalogue celebrates the rich and diverse traditional art works made by Aboriginal and Metis artists living in Saskatchewan. These works reveal the seamless historical continuum of art practice on the Plains, from antler and bone carvings and porcupine quill work to beadwork in both oldstyle geometric and abstracted symbolism and to Metis floral designs.

Review Of Patrick Connor's War: The 1865 Powder River Indian Expedition By David E. Wagner, John H. Monnett

Great Plains Quarterly

Patrick Connor's War is the late David E. Wagner's second book in the past year dealing with the military operations against Lakotas and Cheyennes in the Powder River country of today's Wyoming and environs in 1865. Like his previous work, Powder River Odyssey, dealing with Nelson Cole's wing of an expensive army offensive operation against the Plains tribes in the wake, some contend, of raids on the Overland Trail avenging the Sand Creek Massacre, the current book relies heavily on campaign records, personal recollections, and diaries of the officers, civilian contractors, and enlisted men involved in the campaign. The …

Review Of In The Remington Moment By Stephen Tatum, Brian Rusted

Great Plains Quarterly

Stephen Tatum's study is motivated by two objectives. One is to read Remington's painterly gestures in the light of their production. His second takes up a question Brian Dippie posed a decade ago when reflecting on the lack of critical and academic respect that dogs western art. Can the work of an artist like Remington-nostalgic even in his time-be considered as more than a relic in ours? Might it still have an affecting presence a century after Remington's passing? Tatum's book is a palpable affirmation.

Review Of The Frontier Newspapers And The Coverage Of The Plains Indian Wars By Hugh J. Reilly, Kyle Carsten Wyatt

Great Plains Quarterly

As a community of scholars, we need to ask more from books like this. Despite a topic ripe with fruitful and compelling potential, Reilly's approach to newspaper coverage of the Plains Indian Wars lacks rigor, nuance, and engagement with contemporary critical conversations.

Reilly, a communications professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, discusses eight "watershed events," from the Great Sioux Uprising in 1862 to the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1891. Newspapers throughout the United States, indeed the world, reported on these conflicts. The coverage that appeared in national publications, such as the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune …