American Studies Commons^™

Review Of Indian Voices: Listening To Native Americans By Alison Owings, Sally Thompson

Great Plains Quarterly

Have you ever noticed how often historians and anthropologists write about Indians in the past tense? This phenomenon is one of the most disempowering experiences for an Indian to encounter. Journalist Alison Owings's unique book helps to correct this misperception, while covering broad subjects of history and culture through the lives of sixteen Native Americans, most of whom are unknown outside of their own communities.

Owings's accounts entwine the contemporary with the past. The reader finds intelligent first-hand reflections on how treaties, allotments, reorganization, relocation, termination, federal recognition, NAGPRA, and other federal policies, alongside blood quantum controversies and gaming, have …

Review Of A New Heartland: Women, Modernity, And The Agrarian Ideal In America By Janet Galligani Casey, Pamela Riney-Kehrberg

Great Plains Quarterly

In A New Heartland, Janet Galligani Casey tackles the difficult issue of how to judge modernity in early twentieth-century America by focusing on a group often thought to embody traditional and anti modern America, its rural women. The book is not about the realities of rural life. Instead, it is about the depiction and idea of rural life, and women's place within these. Galligani Casey examines women's place in the periodicals, literature, and photography of the time, doing a particularly good job of analyzing the leading farm women's periodical of the day, The Farmer's Wife. The book connects agrarian …

Review Of Scenery, Curiosities, And Stupendous Rocks: William Quesenbury's Overland Sketches, 1850-51 By David Royce Murphy, With Contributions By Michael L. Tate And Michael Farrell, James Peck

Great Plains Quarterly

This handsome volume is a welcome addition to the growing literature detailing nineteenth- century overland migration, especially travel in and through the Great Plains. Its subject is the Omaha World-Herald's William Quesenbury sketchbook, published here in its entirety for the first time. Quesenbury, who traveled west from Arkansas to California seeking gold in 1850 and returned east with John Wesley Jones as part of his team of Pantoscope artists in 1851, produced more landscape drawings of the North Platte and Sweetwater Rivers High Plains regions than any other historical figure.

Review Of Always An Adventure: An Autobiography By Hugh A. Dempsey, Michael Payne

Great Plains Quarterly

Autobiography has been dismissed as the most self-indulgent of literary forms-biographer Humphrey Carter called it the "most respectable form of lying"-but Always an Adventure seems a little deficient in these respects. Instead, it offers a forthright account of the life of one of Canada's most eminent public historians.

After starting his working life in 1947 as a sign painter, Hugh Dempsey quickly moved on to become a newspaper reporter and publicist before taking up a career with the Glenbow Museum and Archives in Calgary. His book discusses the early, and sometimes contentious, history of the Glenbow, and Dempsey's stories of …

Review Of Goodlands: A Meditation And History On The Great Plains By Frances W. Kaye, Curtis Mcmanus

Great Plains Quarterly

Frances Kaye examines the different ways that Natives and Europeans perceived and interacted with the Great Plains during the age of nineteenth- and twentieth-century North American settlement. Commendably, she conceptualizes the Great Plains as a unity rather than two distinct regions bisected by the 49th parallel. Kaye uses the history of the region to "articulate a Great Plains consciousness" rooted in "Indigenous ideologies" to establish "what it means to make good use of the land."

Review Of Will Rogers: A Political Life By Richard D. White Jr., Paul F. Lambert

Great Plains Quarterly

A child of the Southern Plains, Will Rogers became an iconic national figure in the 1920s and '30s. Renowned as a vaudevillian, a comedic movie star, a syndicated newspaper columnist, a radio commentator, and an author, Rogers's significance as a political figure has largely been minimized or overlooked. Richard D. White Jr. demonstrates successfully that Rogers indeed was an influential political commentator whose support on behalf of various issues was sought and coveted by presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt.

Review Of Lone Stars Iii: A Legacy Of Texas Quilts, 1986- 2011 By Karoline Patterson Bresenhan And Nancy O'Bryant Puentes, Marcia Kaylakie

Great Plains Quarterly

Long awaited by the quilt world, Lone Stars III is the summation of a trilogy of Texas quilt history and quilt documentations. Following the tremendous success of the first two volumes (1986, 1990), book three is another visual wonder of quilt artistry in all its forms. The book is well constructed to create a unified flow of images and ideas. In their introductory "A Quarter Century of Change," Karoline Patterson Bresenhan and Nancy O'Bryant Puentes present a graphic account of the thoughts of modern quilt artists as they struggle to find meaning in modern events.

Review Of Portraits Of The Prairie: The Land That Inspired Willa Cather By Richard Schilling, Richard Jussel

Great Plains Quarterly

Ultimately, it seems, most Nebraskans seek to return to their roots: to the "home place," a tree-shaded glen, a favorite swimming hole, or a hilltop view of the old town. Essentially, this is what Richard Schilling returns us to in Portraits of the Prairie: The Land that Inspired Willa Cather. Strolling through Cather's works, he weds her words to his own sketches and watercolors, although quickly pointing out that his paintings "are not illustrations of Cather's stories," but images of the land that an artist sees today. As a result, Schilling creates a work of art that explores the sensitivity …

Review Of The Dream Of A Broken Field By Diane Glancy

Great Plains Quarterly

In her latest book, Diane Glancy, professor emerita at Macalester College, Minnesota, and author of numerous novels, short story collections, and essay collections, returns to the topics that have always been the focus of her work: the importance of space, of landscape, and of travel; reflections on (nonfiction) writing and what she calls "geographies of language" in The Dream of a Broken Field; the difficulties of bridging Native American and European heritages (Glancy has Cherokee, English, and German ancestry); the uneasy combination of Christianity and Indigeneity; and her personal emotional and family history. Like her previous work, especially Claiming …

Review Of Women On The North American Plains Edited By Renee M. Laegreid And Sandra K. Mathews, Rebecca A. Buller

Great Plains Quarterly

Despite over thirty years having elapsed since Joan Jensen and Darlis Miller, in "The Gentle Tamers Revisited," called for new approaches to western women's history, popular stereotypes of what constitutes a Great Plains woman remain deeply ingrained in the general public's imagination. Although three decades of scholarship have slowly chipped away at the typecast, until recently no one piece has consolidated the diversity of women's experiences within the Canadian and American Great Plains.

We should herald, therefore, the arrival of Women on the North American Plains. This long-needed collection delivers a powerful corrective to scholarship's and popular imagery's shortcomings. …

Review Of This Is Not The Ivy League: A Memoir Y Mary Clearman Blew, Julene Bair

Great Plains Quarterly

Mary Clearman Blew reports that her "gorge still rises" recalling "the dearth of expectations" held out for her during her remote Montana childhood. In passages reminiscent of Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women, we see a smart girl who, to realize her potential, must bring her own volition ruthlessly to bear.

Of course, she is not forgiven for overstepping her bounds. Most critical of her are her husband's parents. When, after marrying at age eighteen, she becomes pregnant within the year, her mother-in-law is triumphant: "I guess this is finally the end of college for you!" Instead, Blew …

Indians And Empires Cultural Change Among The Omaha And Pawnee, From Contact To 1808, Kurt E. Kinbacher

Great Plains Quarterly

The Great Plains is in the middle of everywhere. It has been crossed and recrossed for tens of thousands of years. Because of its central location, the region served as a historical laboratory where people were "forever imagining new environments and trying to muscle them into being."l In what is now the state of Nebraska-the very center of the middle-divergent groups of Native Americans claimed vast territories and created dynamic cultures. Among these peoples were the Omaha, who settled on the Missouri River, and the Pawnee, who lived in the Platte Valley. Four empires-Spain, France, Great Britain, and the United …

The 2012 Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize, Andrew Jewell

Great Plains Quarterly

Selecting a single book to win a prize is a tremendous challenge. There can be something unsatisfying about ranking creative scholarly works knowing there is no such thing as a sole "best" book in a group of quality titles. And yet, each year that I've been a part of the Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize committee, it has happened relatively easily: a book is chosen as the prize winner. The ease does not emerge from a casual attitude toward the selection. On the contrary, the many people involved with choosing the Book Prize winner take it very seriously. I also …

Great Plains Quarterly Volume 32 / Number 3 / Summer 2012

Great Plains Quarterly

Contents

Book Reviews

Notes and News

Review Of Westward Bound: Sex, Violence, The Law, And The Making Of A Settler Society By Lesley Erickson, William Katerberg

Great Plains Quarterly

Westward Bound is a detailed study of sex and violence in Canada's prairie provinces and British Columbia-the circumstances and causes of that violence, its policing and prosecution, and the role of both in the shaping of class, race, and gender relations during the settlement era. Lesley Erickson's study can be read profitably along with studies of the us. West, such as David Peterson del Mar's Beaten Down: A History of Interpersonal Violence in the West (2002). Erickson makes few comparisons to the US., framing her analysis instead mostly in relation to historiography on other parts of Canada and Britain. But …

Review Of Imprisoned Art, Complex Patronage: Plains Drawings By Howling Wolf And Zotom At The Autry National Center By Joyce M. Szabo, Phillip Earenfight

Great Plains Quarterly

Imprisoned Art adds to its author's growing list of impressive publications that consider the so-called ledger drawings created by Plains Indian warriors incarcerated, as prisoners of the Southern Plains wars, at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida, between 1875 and 1879. It focuses on what were once two fully intact books of drawings, one by Zotom (Kiowa), the other by Howling Wolf (Cheyenne). Treated earlier in Dorothy Dunn's 1877: Plains Indian Sketch Books of Zo-Tom and Howling Wolf (1969), and, with respect to Howling Wolf, in Szabo's Howling Wolf and the History of Ledger Art (1994), the books receive here …

Review Of Prairie Fire: A Great Plains History By Julie Courtwright, Ted Binnema

Great Plains Quarterly

The scholarly literature on the history of fire has proliferated over the last generation or so, but until now we have lacked a general history of prairie fire. Julie Courtwright fills this gap. She explains that she hopes "to open a wider discussion of prairie fire and to foster recognition of its environmental and social influence on the Great Plains, thereby broadening the larger history of fire and of the American West." That statement of purpose hints at the intended contributions of the book; Courtwright does not offer many interpretations and arguments that will surprise those familiar with the scholarly …

Review Of After Custer: Loss And Transformation In Sioux Country By Paul L. Hedren, Rani-Henrik Andersson

Great Plains Quarterly

Paul Hedren is well known for excellent studies focusing on the Sioux wars and the Northern Plains. In After Custer: Loss and Transformation in Sioux Country, Hedren returns to his favorite topics, but this time telling a story no longer focused on Northern Plains conflicts between Indians and whites, but on the changes that took place in the years following the Plains Indian Wars. His approach is admirable, since for most people-scholars and general readers alike-interest often ends with the conclusion of open combat. The years between Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee are seldom treated so thoroughly as in …

Review Of Masculine Style: The American West And Literary Modernism By Daniel Worden, Blake Allmendinger

Great Plains Quarterly

Daniel Worden argues that masculinity isn't a biological identity or a fixed construct, but a type of performance that allows for fluidity, enabling individuals "the freedom to refashion the self and live as an equal among others." The men and women who assume such a style challenge a hierarchical system in which men are equated with power and dominance. They reveal a complex subjectivity, sometimes engaging in sentimental relationships and forming unorthodox friendships and unions-unlike the traditional cowboy, who is portrayed in literature as a rugged and isolate, though presumably heterosexual, male. Worden examines the subversion of stereotypical western masculinity …

Christopher Lasch And Prairie Populism, Jon K. Lauck

Great Plains Quarterly

Christopher Lasch was born in Omaha in 1932. By the end of his life, cut short at age sixty-one, he had become one of the most famous intellectuals in the world.l During his life of active writing from the time of the early Cold War until the fall of the Soviet Union, Lasch's distinctive voice pierced through the din of the nation's noisy political and cultural debates. The historian Jackson Lears recalled, in particular, the "spell that Lasch cast over a generation of historians and cultural critics who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s."2 A product and one-time …

"I Fear The Consequences To Our Animals" Emigrants And Their Livestock On The Overland Trails, Diana L. Ahmad

Great Plains Quarterly

"You cannot be too careful of your teams; on their condition depends entirely your success in getting through" to the Pacific coast, warned Philip L. Platt and N. Slater in their 1852 Travelers' Guide across the Plains upon the Overland Route to California.¹ The diaries, letters, and guidebooks written by the emigrants who crossed North America on the overland trails during the mid-nineteenth century reveal a new awareness of the animals that journeyed with them. Often written as advice to those who might follow them, the travelers worried about their animals in ways beyond what theologians and philosophers …

Farm Women, Solidarity, And The Suffrage Messenger Nebraska Suffrage Activism On The Plains, 1915-1917, Carmen Heider

Great Plains Quarterly

In the weeks and months following the November 3, 1914, vote on the Nebraska suffrage amendment, activists picked up the pieces after male voters for the third time defeated the proposition in their state. Thomas Coulter explains that in the days leading up to the vote, ''A feeling of impending victory suffused the hearts of pro-suffrage workers," but in the days after, "a sense of shock was widespread."¹ The vote had been close: 90,738 for the Nebraska amendment and 100,842 against it.² In fact, Attorney General Willis Reed later stated that had there been a recount, the amendment …

Not Your Family Farm Apiculture In South,Central Montana, Miles Lewis

Great Plains Quarterly

The rolling prairies and sheltering mountain ranges of the Upper Musselshell Valley in Montana are nearly perfect for cattle and sheep grazing. Some areas, more topographically similar to the Great Plains than to the mountainous West, are (at least in wet years) highly conducive to growing alfalfa or wheat. Overall, the pastoral setting calls to mind images of weathered cowboys, grizzled sheepherders, and stoic farmers. However, closer inquiry into the region's agriculture reveals that cattle and wheat are by no means the only product being harvested from the land. Found buzzing around flowering foliage or swarming the rearing hindquarters of …

Review Of State Of Minds: Texas Culture And Its Discontents By Don Graham, Ken Baake

Great Plains Quarterly

Don Graham sets out in State of Minds to address two threats he sees to the literary landscape of Texas: one, the perception that Texas culture, if it exists at all, is inconsequential and "lowbrow"; and, two, that college students even within Texas are becoming illiterate in regards to their state's rich heritage of creative fiction and nonfiction writing and film. The book succeeds on both counts, reminding readers familiar with the canon of how much fun it is to enter the world of Texas's written and film literature and how much one can learn from it about the timeless …

Review Of Principle Over Party: The Farmers' Alliance And Populism In South Dakota, 1880-1900 By R. Alton Lee, Francis Moul

Great Plains Quarterly

"During this era, farmers and workers watched as forces of wealth captured control of both major political parties, promoting the formation of monopolies. . . . In the process, the small capitalist class gained control of the great bulk of the nation's wealth. This monetary disparity exacerbated class divisions in the country, and many worried that it would lead to violence and upheaval." That sounds like contemporary headlines about the Occupy Wall Street movement. It isn't. Those words in this book's introduction describe the era from 1865 to 1894, taking in the conditions that spawned one of the most successful, …

Review Of The Art Of John Snow By Elizabeth Herbert, Robert Steven

Great Plains Quarterly

Elizabeth Herbert's aim in The Art of John Snow is to restore John Snow (1911-2004) to the register of the most significant artists in Calgary's recent art history. She does this by documenting the recognition he received in his lifetime, the close working relationship he had with other significant artists of his day, the reasons she sees for his neglect by historians, and, more than anything else, the sophistication she sees in his work.

The book is the ninth in a series titled Art in Profile that aims to provide "insight into the life and work of an artist or …

Review Of Texas Through Women's Eyes: The Twentieth-Century Experience By Judith N. Mcarthur And Harold L. Smith, Jean A. Stuntz

Great Plains Quarterly

Texas Through Women's Eyes tells the story of twentieth-century Texans who are mostly left out of Texas history texts. Including women of all races and social classes, the book is arranged to make it especially useful for college classes, but is written in a manner non-academics can enjoy. Each of its four chronological parts (1900-1920, 1920-1945, 1945-1965, and 1965-2000) begins with a lively narrative broken down into several topics, accompanied by a suggested reading list, and ends with a selection of documents pertaining closely to the narrative.

Part 1, "Social Reform and Suffrage in the Progressive Era, 1900-1920," effectively links …

Review Of Empire Of The Summer Moon: Quanah Parker And The Rise And Fall Of The Comanches, The Most Powerful Indian Tribe In American History By S. C. Gwynne, Joseph A. Stout Jr.

Great Plains Quarterly

By 1836, white settlement had moved steadily westward into the Southern Plains, confronting nomadic Indians and leading to increasing violence between the two. When Nokoni Comanches that year attacked Fort Parker-a stockaded fort in east central Texas-they killed or captured white settlers, nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker numbered among them. Parker survived to become the wife of Peta Nocona, a Comanche warrior known for his hatred of whites and ferocity in battle. She bore him children, including Quanah Parker.

Review Of Working The Land: The Stories Of Ranch And Farm Women In The Modern American West By Sandra K. Schackel, Mary Zeiss Stange

Great Plains Quarterly

In 1995 Sandra Schackel, then professor of history at Boise State University, was asked to contribute a chapter about rural women's experiences to an anthology on the post World War II American West. The research Schackel accumulated for that chapter, largely in the form of interviews of farm- and ranchwives, provided the foundation for this slender volume. It is a foundation upon which she did relatively little to build. While her oral historical approach suggests some tantalizing avenues for further exploration, they remain for the most part rural roads not taken.

Review Of The Notorious Dr. Flippin: Abortion And Consequence In The Early Twentieth Century By Jamie Q. Tallman, Sarah B. Rodriguez

Great Plains Quarterly

Born into slavery, the child of Hugh Flippin and one of his slaves, Vera Denipplf, the teenage Charles Flippin joined the 14th United States Colored Troops Company A in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1864. While enlisted, he learned to read. Following the war, he married, had two children, and, following his wife's death, moved to Kansas to start a farm. In the 1880s, Flippin apprenticed with an eclectic physician in Kansas and traveled to the Bennett College of Medicine in Chicago for further study. The local newspaper announced his return as "the only colored medical graduate in the state of Kansas."