American Studies Commons^™

Review Of Notes From Texas: On Writing In The Lone Star State Edited By W. C. Jameson, Karl Germeck

Great Plains Quarterly

For Notes from Texas, W. C. Jameson compiles essay responses from esteemed veterans of the Texas writing community in an effort to understand how each came to choose a career in writing and succeeded in doing so, as well as the role Texas (its myths and lore, geography, history, and culture) has played in that process. The result is a collection of fourteen personal essays from eleven native, and three transplant, Texans, including such notables as former and co-founding director of the University of North Texas Press, Frances Brannen Vick, novelists Elmer Kelton, Paulette Jiles, James Reasoner, and poet/songwriter …

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 …

At The Head Of The Aboriginal Remnant: Cherokee Construction Of A "Civilized" Indian Identity During The Lakota Crisis Of 1876, Paul Kelton

Great Plains Quarterly

In 1876 the bilingual Cherokee diplomat and lawyer William Penn Adair expressed great pride in the level of "civilization" that his nation had achieved. Defining civilization as commercial agriculture, literacy, Christianity, and republican government, Adair believed that his society had reached a sophistication that equaled and in certain areas surpassed that of the United States. Speaking before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Territories, the diplomat claimed that his people produced surpluses of "every agricultural product that is raised in the neighboring States of Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, and Texas." Schools in the Indian Territory, he added, produced a vast …